“When Radcliffe day care was started, it was an issue of creating conditions that would allow women to work,” explains Ruth Sacks, director of the Radcliffe child care center. “Now it’s not a question of that. It’s a given—parents work. They need a healthy place for their children to be. The child care center plays a very central role in the lives of families.”

The Radcliffe Factor

Administrators also hope that the recently created Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study will help Harvard in luring top female scholars to Cambridge.

In his annual letter to the Faculty this year, Dean of the Faculty Knowles recognized the role that Radcliffe can play in making Harvard a more attractive place for women to work.

Affiliation with the Institute, Knowles wrote, is an incentive that will aid in recruiting professors—both male and female—by “enriching the intellectual environment in Cambridge.”

“Radcliffe was basically ineffective in trying to aid the position of women at Harvard. Now [Harvard] has no recourse. It is responsible for the women on the campus,” says Acey Welch, co-chair of the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard.

The committee, composed of Radcliffe alums, was founded in 1988 to study the status of women at Harvard and to propose solutions for gender inequality. Currently, the committee is working towards endowing a joint chair between Radcliffe and Harvard.

Welch credits the creation of the Institute with giving Radcliffe more focus.

“We hope it will bridge the gap between the disaffected and the enthusiastic,” she says.

The Token Woman’s Burden

The relatively small number of female senior faculty often leaves women undergraduates, graduate students and junior faculty without many role models—and those few are often overworked.

As a result of universities’ attempts to represent their views better, women in higher education often find themselves called upon to perform extra tasks and responsibilities.

They are asked to sit on committees and task forces, serves as mentors to younger faculty, advise graduate students and run meetings—all in an attempt to increase diversity and ensure all views are heard and younger women are encouraged to stick with academia.

This phenomenon will continue until women reach what Trower calls a “critical mass” within their department or field. She says a critical mass is usually considered to be roughly 15 percent of the members of a department.

Ultimately, many professors say, increasing the ranks of tenured female faculty is the surest way of changing Harvard’s culture.

“You can’t build a leadership cadre if you don’t have a tenured cadre,” says Radcliffe Dean of Social Science Katherine Newman.

—Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Kate L. Rakoczy can be reached at rakoczy@fas.harvard.edu.