The pattern is unmistakable. "Many people come and leave. And they leave earlier. We lose a lot of very good people. They don't even apply," says newly tenured professor of Romance languages and literatures Bradley S. Epps.

Romancing Feminism

And though women continue to enter the humanities at Harvard, the degree to which they are accepted remains in question.

In its March 1999 report on the humanities, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women "heard concerns about...the sense of overwork experienced by many women...as a result of their small numbers and the fact that many are engaged in interdisciplinary work and have ties to more than one department or program."

Women in hard sciences are universally strangers in a strange land, attempting to penetrate a traditionally male world, but women in the humanities often say their specialties are demeaned as "women's work."

"Traditionally," says Professor of Romance languages and literatures Alice A. Jardine, "the quantitative has been male and the qualitative has been female...These forms of knowledge become genderized...[sex and subject] become linked in every way possible."

Harvard experts on cultural studies say women cluster in either established feminine areas of study or new disciplines which are theirs for the taking.

Jardine says the Romance department, whose senior faculty is evenly split between men and women, has gained notoriety among the faculty.