When University President Lawrence H. Summers locked horns with members of the Afro-American studies department earlier this year, Harvard’s commitment to diversity was called into question by members of the University community and the national press.

Though Summers issued several statements over the course of the controversy affirming his support both for the department and for the affirmative action policies that have been in place at Harvard since the 1970s, many students, professors and alumni have been left wondering just how substantial that support is.

Though Harvard excels in many areas, it has never been known for the diversity of its Faculty.

“The culture in the academy and at Harvard in the extreme is a white male culture,” says Cathy A. Trower, a senior researcher for the Project on Faculty Appointments at the Graduate School of Education (GSE).

But in recent years, a great deal of attention has been focused on turning around this centuries-old trend, particularly with respect to the promotion of gender equality at Harvard.

Today, women make up a mere 17.2 percent of professors in FAS, according to the University’s 2002 Affirmative Action Planbook, the annual statistical report on the diversity of the University. But that 17.2 percent is significantly higher than the 10.8 percent they constitued in 1993. And this year 13 of the 28 new senior appointments in the Faculty were women.

And Harvard’s problems with the recruitment and retention of female professors are not much more dire than those of its peer institutions.

Nationwide, only a quarter of the full-time faculty at research universities are female professors, according to an article published in Harvard Magazine by Trower and Richard P. Chait, professor of higher education at GSE.

And at Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, female professors also constitute less than 20 percent of total faculty.

The numbers don’t lie—Harvard and its peers have not traditionally tenured a large number of female professors. Scholars who have studied the subject say that subtle institutional obstacles have been keeping women out of the academy. And, despite recent successes here and at other Ivies, Harvard still has many barriers to overcome.

Leading the Gender Revolution

Harvard recognizes its lack of women professors as a problem—and so far, it has dealt with the issue through standard bureaucratic means: identify problem, appoint committee, study problem, issue report, solve problem.

During his 11-year term, outgoing Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles has created several administrative bodies to facilitate the recruitment and retention of female and minority professors.

These bodies include the Office for Faculty Development, which, led by Associate Dean for Faculty Development Laura Gordon Fisher, works with departments to identify qualified female and minority candidates for tenure; the Task Force on Faculty Diversity, which was designed to focus on addressing the lack of female faculty in the natural and engineering sciences; and a twin task force created this year to address the same problems in the humanities and social sciences.

The Faculty’s approach to recruiting more females is more organic than that of some of its peer institutions. For example, while the Office of Faculty Development and the task forces work with departments to recruit women professors, Princeton created a committee earlier this year that, though composed of faculty members, works independently to recommend candidates who would “further diversify the faculty in all fields in which minorities or women are underrepresented.”

Some professors say that despite the endless committees and task forces assigned to look into making Harvard and the academy a more friendly environment for women, the climate just doesn’t seem to change.

“You can have all sorts of policies, but if no one feels they can take advantage of these policies, they do no good,” Trower says.

Though Harvard has taken concrete steps towards recognizing its lack of female faculty, it is not at the forefront of this academic movement. There are notable steps that other institutions have taken that Harvard has not.

Other schools, such as MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, have taken the initiative to do faculty-wide surveys which have provided data that are shaping the current nationwide discussion on women in higher education. MIT has garnered national accolades for its frank and public examination of gender bias in its own halls.

In the 1980s, Harvard’s Faculty commissioned an outside analysis of professors’ salaries that, according to the Office for Academic Affairs, revealed no significant discrepencies between the salaries of women and men—though that data has not been made public.

Also, following the release of MIT’s data, Knowles requested an assessment of whether there were similar inequities in the distribution of internal awards, committee assignments, office and lab space or endowed chairs—but no major discrepencies were found. This data was also never made public.

Some feel Harvard should join other schools in taking a more public approach to the treatment of its lack of gender equity.

“What could help is what [MIT President] Chuck Vest did—to say, ‘We have a problem, and we’re going to be very open about our problem,’” says Trower, who is currently beginning a research project on obstacles that are discouraging today’s young scholars from entering the academy.

At Princeton, its dynamic duo of new administrators—President Shirley M. Tilghman and Provost Amy Gutmann ’71—have already highly publicized their plans to bring diversity to Princeton, a university that has traditionally had a rather homogenous faculty and student body.

Tilghman has long been vocal in her belief in the need for institutions of higher learning to recognize the particular challenges facing female professors.

In a 1993 New York Times editorial, she argued that the tenure process conflicts with women’s biological clock since most professors spend their 20s—the prime child-bearing years—working to earn tenure at a given institution. Thus, the culture forces young women faculty seeking tenure to often choose between family and career.

In an interview earlier this year, Tilghman said Princeton would likely review its tenure process in the next few years, possibly to lengthen the period before tenure review to better incorporate the varied needs of professors who want families.

“Princeton has a very short tenure clock—we review people for tenure after five years,” she said. “That raises the question ‘Does it disadvantage women more than men?’”

While Princeton has recently taken the lead on tackling gender bias, Harvard has not stood completely on the sidelines of the debate.

Former Provost Harvey V. Fineberg ’67 represented the University at a conference held at MIT in February 2001, where he joined with the leaders of eight of the nation’s other top research universities in issuing a statement acknowledging the significant barriers still facing female professors in the natural sciences and engineering fields.

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.

Tilghman’s suggestion of a longer tenure clock—one that would give professors more time to both raise a family and complete the amount of research and scholarship necessary to earn tenure—is one potential solution.

Trower and Chait offer some others, including the creation of tenure for part-time professors and the development of a certification system whereby professors are certified along the tenure track as they complete certain requirements—for example, certification for teaching quality and certification for the completion of a certain amount of research.

Another characteristic that researchers such as Trower and Chait have identified with women that may hurt their chances at tenure is a tendency toward collaborative work.

“The new generation of scholars [male and female] is saying, ‘Shouldn’t tenure and the academy be centered more about solving problems?’” Trower says.

Unfortunately, teamwork rarely guarantees tenure, as individual publications are typically more respected than group works.

Another quality of the new generation of scholars, Trower says, is their tendency toward interdisciplinary fields.

“It’s when we cross disciplinary lines that things get interesting,” Trower explains.

It is difficult enough to gain distinction in one department within Harvard’s Faculty—or any equivalent institution—much less two.

Similarly, for young scholars doing groundbreaking work in emerging fields, it can be difficult to earn tenure in institutions where more traditional fields tend to dominate.

For example, the Harvard chemistry department’s strength is in organic chemistry, which is one of the oldest subdivisions of the field, says Linda H. Doerrer, an assistant professor of chemistry at Barnard College who speaks on the issue of gender bias in the sciences.

The department’s traditional focus might explain why it has only one female tenured professor.

Furthermore, some professors say that the process by which candidates are reviewed for tenure can in itself be biased. When a candidate is reviewed, his or her colleagues are solicited for comment about the quality of his or her work. But because of the lack of diversity within the academy, those colleagues are often white males.

“Such a system also tends to ask other white males who the ‘best’ scholars are out there, and all they can think of is people like themselves—the ‘reflecting pool’ phenomenon,” Trower writes in an e-mail.

Some strides have been made in recent years within Harvard’s FAS to improve the benefits provided to junior faculty members.

Kenan Professor of English Marjorie Garber, chair of the Faculty’s Standing Committee on the Status of Women, meets regularly with female faculty members to discuss the quality of their personal and academic lives—and to see if there’s anything Harvard can do to better accommodate their professional needs.

And in spring 2000, the standard starting salary for assistant and associate professors was increased by more than 10 percent—with similar adjustments for continuing untenured professors. Also, junior faculty have been awarded better leave policies as well as salary support to supplement outside fellowships.

Summers has said promoting more junior faculty from within is on his agenda.

“I’m certainly hopeful that our increased emphasis on appointing scholars at an early career stage will contribute to the diversity of our Faculty given that the younger cohort of scholars are more diverse than more senior cohorts,” Summers said at a recent interview.

And Geisinger Professor of History William C. Kirby, who will take over from Knowles as FAS dean at the end of June, says increasing the frequency of internal promotions is also on his map.

Kirby said in an interview last week that increasing the number of internal promotions can start with the junior Faculty appointments process—by “hiring the absolute best person to be an associate professor.”

In addition to these efforts to bring in younger, more diverse faculty, there are natural trends at work that should help along the process of faculty diversification.

As more female and minority members of the new generation of scholars trickle into the Faculty, the many white male members of the older generation are retiring.

More than three-quarters of the professors who retired from FAS last year were males.

However, the people replacing the retiring white men are of a different breed altogether. Trower says that the next generation of academics—both male and female—places a higher value on quality of life than its predecessors. This new emphasis might be chasing young scholars away from the rigid demands of the academy and towards the more flexible benefits of the business world.

“New scholars are saying, ‘We want a quality of life. We’d like to have that in the academy, but we’re not sure we can,’” according to Trower.

The business world has been more adept at meeting the needs of two-career families and working mothers since their widespread entrance into the workplace in the 1970s—including job shares, family leave, subsidized daycare and flex time.

While few say that the academy is openly hostile to women, the subtle aspects of the way a university is run can significantly stifle professors’ personal needs—for both males and females—professors and administrators say.

University meetings are often scheduled in the late afternoon and early evenings to allow time for teaching during the day. At Harvard, for instance, its monthly Faculty meetings are conducted at 4 p.m. on Tuesdays. Additionally, dinner engagements, evening lectures and symposia are a critical part of the academic social network.

Tilghman suggests that scheduling meetings during daytime hours would better accommodate faculty members who have night-time engagements, such as baseball games and children’s homework.

Another suggestion is improving day-care opportunities for faculty members.

“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.