The recent track record of the math department seems to substantiate this claim. Harris describes a process over the past 10 years in which the math department has “been trying to actively look for women.” During that time, the department has made about four offers at the senior faculty level to females, all of which were rejected.

The math department’s unique and hierarchical process of awarding tenure may contribute to the lack of senior females in the department.

Unlike other departments that promote assistant professors to senior faculty, the math department has no tenure track. As a general rule, it only “poaches” established senior faculty members from other institutions, Harris says.

This system may bias the tenure process in favor of men, Nicoara says. As part of the hiring process, the current all-male senior faculty evaluate the work of leading researchers at other universities and discuss whether or not to offer them tenure. In this situation, “men are favored because those kinds of networks are traditionally composed of men,” Nicoara says.

MIND THE GAP

Internal appointments in the other sciences are occurring more often as departments aim to tenure more women.

“When making senior appointments it is clear that we look at a number of junior faculty,” says Physics Department Chair John Huth.

Huth says that this new practice has made the tenure process seem significantly less daunting to assistant professors.

In addition to promoting more faculty along the tenure track, departments are conducting increasingly broad searches for professors. “We try to construct searches to be as broadly defined as possible,” Huth says, “because then the odds of identifying qualified women candidates can get substantially better.”

Huth says that if a woman is highly qualified but does not fit the job description precisely, the physics department still “moves rapidly” in order to try to recruit the female professor, who is termed a “target of opportunity.”

“We are beginning to be more proactive in identifying targets of opportunity,” Narayanamurti says. “You want to make phone calls to the right people.”

University President Lawrence H. Summers has been pushing for the hire of younger professors so that their best work is produced at Harvard.

Harris is particularly receptive to the emphasis on younger female hires because young professors are more likely to uproot. “We’re more willing to make an offer to younger women because it’s hard to recruit women who are established professors and have a family,” Harris says.

But Nicoara says that Summers’ policy could have detrimental effects on the hiring of women who may be starting families around the same time their male contemporaries are producing some of their best work. “Summers’ plan goes against having more women at the senior level,” Nicoara says, “because most women in math who are big in their field became so later on than many of their male colleagues.”

And the University should be more willing to accommodate couples in academia, she says. “If the husband is an academic in a different field,” Nicoara recommends, “then the University should try to provide position in that field or at least grant visitor status until they can find something in the area.”