Departments in the natural sciences are struggling to keep up with University initiatives that aim to increase the number of tenured female faculty members.

Between 2002 and 2004, the number of senior female faculty in the natural sciences remained a constant 14 while the total number of tenured faculty grew from 151 to 158. The number of women will fall to 13 while the total number of tenured professors in the sciences will grow to 162 by Jan. 1, 2005, according to gender statistics from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Many professors say that specific departments’ hiring processes, misperceptions about the culture at Harvard, and the difficulties of uprooting women with families has led to a dearth of female senior faculty in the sciences.

WANTED: WOMEN

Department heads in the natural sciences say that the absence of women is not universal across all fields.

Harvard’s computer science and physics departments have an unusually high percentage of women on faculty, according to Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti. In fact, the chair of the chemistry department is a woman.

But Harvard’s mathematics department currently has no women at the senior professor level, Narayanmurti says.

Harvard’s peer institutions face a similar situation in which men far outnumber the women at the highest levels in the sciences, he adds.

And the problem doesn’t involve convincing women to study the natural sciences.

“Many more women are getting graduate and undergraduate degrees in science but aren’t coming out the other end as professors,” he says.

EXPLAINING THE TREND

Professors offer various explanations for why women in the sciences aren’t keeping pace with their male counterparts at the highest levels of teaching.

Some argue that women are more difficult to relocate upon receiving a job offer in a different city than men are.

“A lot of families will relocate if a man gets the job,” says Higgins Professor of Mathematics and Department Chair Joseph D. Harris, “but not if the woman does.”

Peirce Assistant Professor of Mathematics Andreea C. Nicoara agrees that “there is a perception that it is easier to displace men than it is to displace women.”