Hopkins, the MIT biology professor, says she has noticed this intensity.

“It’s a system where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive,” Hopkins says of the contemporary culture of the natural sciences community in the academy. “Harvard is well known as the worst—their record is a disgrace.”

While universities may not be able to regulate the friendliness of professors, some academics say action must be taken to change the culture of sciences if they truly want to create an environment that is welcoming to a more diverse body of scientists.

A GROUP EFFORT

Once the challenges facing women in the natural sciences made their way onto the radar screens of the Faculty, multiple concrete policies and programs were instituted to both recruit more female scientists, at the professor and student levels, to come to Harvard—and to make their experience more pleasant once they arrive.

Today, there is no dearth of services to help guide female science undergraduates and professors alike.

Many faculty members say that Georgi was one of the first to push for change in the way Harvard deals with women in science.

Under his tenure as dean of the Faculty, Jeremy R. Knowles instituted several policies aimed at improving the status of women scientists.

In 1999, Knowles formed an ad hoc committee of senior faculty members—headed up by Georgi—in the natural sciences to encourage departments to identify outstanding women scientists, both junior and senior, who might be recruited to Harvard.

“A group of people complained so much about these issues to Jeremy Knowles that he thought it would be a better use of his time to listen to us all together,” Georgi says.

The committee, which still exists, has focused on prodding department chairs in the natural sciences to recruit women for faculty positions.

But some have also taken the issue of directly helping fellow female science students into their own hands.

On a Tuesday night in October, 29 undergraduates and graduates gathered in the mostly dark Lyman Hall to throw out questions to a female science professor from Spain over a dinner of Middle Eastern food from Skewers.

The group, which was there for the third Women in Physics dinner of the year, asked the professor about balancing work and family and the perception of female physicists in Spain.

Michelle C. Cyrier, a second-year graduate student in physics who helps organize the dinners, says she is not sure whether women face obstacles in science that men do not—but she says it doesn’t hurt to talk about it.