In October, growing out of discussions at that meeting, Tilghman created a task force to focus on attracting and retaining women faculty in the natural sciences and engineering departments at Princeton.

Though Harvard has not yet formed any such University-wide committees, University Provost Steven E. Hyman said in a recent interview that the central administration is carrying on regular discussions with the deans of Harvard’s schools about the recruitment and retention of female professors.

Hyman said Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Drew Gilpin Faust, Acting GSE Dean Judith Singer and Associate Vice President A. Clayton Spencer have been leading those discussions, from which a number of concrete initiatives would soon emerge.

The Pipeline Problem

An argument frequently used to explain the paucity of female professors at Harvard and other top research universities across the country is a lack of available female candidates for tenure—commonly referred to as the “pipeline problem.” The University, after all, can’t tenure women where they don’t exist.

Recent research, however, contradicts this idea.

According to an article published by Trower and Chait in Harvard Magazine this spring, women earned more than half of the bachelor’s and master’s degrees and 44 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded nationwide in the year 2000.

Thus, the fundamental problem is not the pipeline. Female professors are slipping through the cracks somewhere between receiving their degrees and receiving the stamp of tenure approval.

It appears from their data that Harvard and its peer institutions are not fully taking advantage of the qualified women in the candidate pools. In both the humanities and the natural sciences, FAS hires a smaller proportion of women than are available in their fields.

There are two explanations for why women seem to be falling out of the tenure stream:

• either the tenure system does not favorably promote female candidates from within a given institution; or

• administrators are failing to recognize qualified female professors from the candidate pool outside the institution.

Since both are likely to be factors in the equation, professors and administrators at Harvard and around the academy are working to address each simultaneously.

Trower says that one reason why institutions like Harvard do so poorly at tenuring professors from within is that the tenure system was “designed by white males for white males.”

In other words, what worked for a middle-aged academic white male in the 1950s, whose apron-clad wife ran his household, raised 2.5 children and had a martini waiting when he arrived home, does not necessarily work for the modern-day intellectual—male or female.