Pharr, a former FAS associate dean, also wrote that “there is a crying need for more FAS women in positions of power and visibility in the university.”

“I think it’s fair to say that many of us would like to see more than one woman on the Corporation,” she wrote. Hanna H. Gray, the former president of the University of Chicago, is the only female currently on the seven-member Corporation. Gray will be replaced in June by former Duke University and Wellesley College President Nannerl O. Keohane, who will become only the third woman ever to serve on the Corporation.

Pharr said that Radcliffe’s own researchers could inform the University’s emerging initiative. She cited as one example Cabot Professor of Social Ethics Mahzarin Banaji, a psychologist who has studied gender disparities in attitudes toward mathematics. In online tests that ask subjects to categorize various pictures and words, Banaji has found that females associate “math” with unpleasant stimuli much more readily than males do.

Banaji wrote in an e-mail from India yesterday that “the implicit, not to mention explicit, stereotype associating math with male has been demonstrated time and again to affect women’s performance on math and their attitudes toward math.”

“In this day and age to believe that men and women differ in their basic competence for math and science is as insidious as believing that some people are better suited to be slaves and other masters,” Banaji wrote.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.