"When I have students coming to ask me about final clubs for women [for networking purposes]...the answer is we have that at Radcliffe. They're not about power and influence, they're about mentoring," March said.

Some undergraduates who have taken part in the programs take a similar stand.

"The program would be destroyed" if it were integrated, said Gisela I. Mohring '00. "I don't think [men] would get as much out of it as we would... Women don't have these old-boy networks as men do--programs like these bridge the gap."

These women say the programs' all-female environment is a vital counterpart to the male-dominated atmosphere at Harvard, giving undergraduates role models that are unavailable elsewhere.

"I really like the fact that my mentor was a woman," said Aziza J. Johnson '00. "I felt like if I wanted to work with a man, I could have done it through the Harvard career internship program. I really like being able to talk about what it's like to be a woman, to ask if she thinks her gender has helped or hurt her."

On the other hand, though, March and others acknowledge that Radcliffe's programs offer advantages that even Harvard's programs sometimes can't--like intimate size and personal contact with administrators--and from which male students might also benefit.

"Programs in mentoring are expensive," March said. "They're something a large institution like Harvard couldn't do, but we can."