Finding a mate and starting a family is difficult while trying to fulfill departmental duties and publish the scholarship necessary to achieve tenure.

Committee member Irene J. Winter, Boardman professor of fine arts and professor of the history of art and architecture, recalls one encounter with a particularly insensitive male colleague at the University of Chicago. When he learned of her academic aspirations, he said, `"So you want to be an archaeologist--well, you will never marry."

Although few would be so blunt today, women in the humanities still face a conflict between family and tenure.

"As they say, the tenure clock and the biological clock are running at the same time," said Elizabeth M. Doherty, committee member and assistant dean for academic planning in FAS.

"It is an issue that affects women differentially, but it is increasingly affecting men as well," Doherty said.

But Buckler said departments are now trying to help their junior Faculty members give the tenure promotion their best shot.

Garber said women do have a chance to lead personal as well as professional lives, even with the current pre-tenure period.

"What is impressive to me is that there are many women who are making families and getting tenure," she said.

"Things are shifting; they're just not shifting fast enough," Buckler said. "Department culture plays a major role in setting juniors to do well at Harvard. I've had a very good experience here."

The `Token' Woman

Even after achieving tenure--the academic equivalent of the Holy Grail--women in the humanities say they still face challenges to full parity.

Winter said Harvard's failure to create a Faculty-wide gender balance has often left tenured women feeling like the "token woman" in a department.

When she was beginning her career, she said, one of the ways women made their voices heard in academia was by obtaining the status of what she called the "honorary male."

Garber, the first woman to receive tenure in the Department of English and American Literature and Language, was the only senior woman scholar in her department for several years.

"Being the only [woman] is really very stressful," she says. There are currently six senior women in that department, none whom were promoted internally.