On an October afternoon in 1997, hundreds of students, alums and faculty gathered to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the opening of Yard dorms to women. Near Canaday Hall, a gate was dedicated to the contributions that women have made to the College.

On one side of the new Anne Dudley Bradstreet gate, a plaque was unveiled to immortalize the words of the female, Puritan poet: “I came into this Country, where I found a new World and new manners at which my heart rose.”

At a reception that day, then-Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles offered a toast.

“Today we celebrate women at Harvard,” Knowles said. “The era of the incompletely opened gate is over.”

A year-and-a-half ago, we set out to investigate just how open Harvard’s gates are to women. With the backing of the Christopher J. Georges Fellowship and the Nieman Foundation, we embarked on a project, ambitiously titled “Are The Barriers Broken?: Investigating The Status of Women at Harvard.”

We found that indeed, the University has made room for women—today’s Harvard is one where women have held nearly every post short of president.

But some problems persist for women here. Harvard is a 367-year-old institution, founded by men, for men, where the disciplinary boards and the tenure system were created without women in mind.

The College’s Administrative Board, which deals with disciplinary and academic infraction, was created in 1890, 53 years before Harvard classes went coed. Now, it renders decisions the most complicated type of case involving men and women: sexual assault.

On the grounds that many “he said, she said” cases of sexual assault are too murky to be fully investigated by the Ad Board, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 pushed through a change to Ad Board policy last year, requiring that alleged victims present more evidence before the Board would hear a case. The change ignited a wave of protest from activists on campus and turned a spotlight on the difficulty the University has in adjudicating rape cases and providing the right resources for victims of sexual assault (See “Burden of Proof,” page 10).

And while Harvard made great strides in the 1990s towards increasing the number of tenured women on the Faculty, many say the barriers keeping women from getting tenure here are as strong as ever. Thirty out of 42 women professors who responded to a Crimson survey last fall said they felt the tenure system should be changed (See “Crashing the Club,” page 26).

These issues, of course, are not limited to this university. When we looked outside Harvard’s gates and organized a discussion among higher education’s top female leaders, we learned of similar struggles at other schools like Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania (See “Women at the Helm,” page 22).

At Harvard, in myriad other ways—from physical details like the University’s portraits (See “Men Rule These Walls,” page 5) to chronic, national problems like the paucity of women in the sciences (See “See No Evil,” page 16)—the culture of the University is often old, male and slow to change.

And Radcliffe—the one part of Harvard that was once geared solely towards women—now grapples with a coeducational mission mandating broad academic scholarship and a “commitment to women, gender and society” (See “Is This Mission Impossible?” page 7).

At the end of the 1997 gate dedication ceremony, the crowd rose and sang an old University standard, “Fair Harvard.”

But the version the audience read in their programs was not the original, written in 1811. A reference to the University’s “sons” in the first line of the song had been subtly replaced by the gender-neutral “we.”