“Most members of the search committee are men, and they’ll often bring in a token woman candidate after they’ve decided to hire somebody else,” one signer of the letter told Science.

The letter said Summers’ emphasis on tenuring younger faculty—because it comes at a time when many women have children—may have contributed to the trend.

But Summers said that hiring more young faculty may actually increase the number of tenured females in coming years.

“I think it’s clear that there are more women in younger cohorts than there are in older cohorts and there are more women on the junior faculty than there are in the outside pool,” he said. “So the emphasis on hiring people before their best work is completed should contribute to increasing women and minorities on the faculty.”

And Kirby wrote that the nearly 40 percent of junior faculty offers to females last year represented the success of policies aimed at hiring more women.

“We can see results faster in searches at the assistant professor level,” he wrote.

Nancy Tobin ’49, research chair for the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard, said Harvard needs more transparency in hiring, including gender breakdowns by department—not only by the current humanities, social sciences and natural sciences breakdown.

While Summers has asked faculty to investigate why females lag behind males in various fields, Tobin said Harvard needs to do a self-study of female faculty hiring, as institutions like MIT, Princeton, Yale and Duke have done.

She added that while Harvard may not lag behind all its peers, it should be leading the field.

“Harvard’s probably in the middle of the pack for comparable institutions,” Tobin said. “It’s certainly not a leader, and we sort of expect that Harvard would be a leader, because it considers itself a leader. That comparable institutions aren’t doing better—I wouldn’t use that as an excuse.”

Summers noted yesterday that the University already makes a significant effort with its $25 million outreach fund to recruit female and minority faculty.

AT THE MEETING

Members of the Faculty Council—which is chaired by Kirby—said they discussed the issue extensively at their first meeting of the year yesterday.

“There were some strong opinions expressed,” said Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan.

Kirby announced a new initiative in which he said divisional deans will implement “extra-departmental mechanisms for identifying outstanding talent, with particular attention to women and minority faculty who might be recruited to Harvard.” He added that he had asked the deans for interim reports at the end of the semester with lists of tenure candidates and processes by which they would be included in searches.