Goldin, in collaboration with Katz, is currently researching the history of interactions between educational institutions and the wider economy in America, and how the benefits of economic outcomes and growth are distributed.

“One would think that women who are in more selective institutions would have fewer constraints, but we’ll see,” Goldin says of her research.

Goldin asserts that Summers has long been aware of the many issues faced by female professors and sought to address them.

“This is something that has concerned him deeply before he became president of Harvard. Larry knows all about this. He wasn’t born yesterday,” says Goldin, adding that Summers solicited her and other faculty members’ views on women faculty and tenure in May 2004.

There has been a much publicized decline in the number of Faculty tenure offers to women, which dropped last year to 12.5 percent—four out of 32—from 36 percent three years ago.

The University’s commitment to recruit female faculty may be there, but finding actual policies that ultimately work require intensive, long-term research, Goldin says.

“If you find individuals who are extraordinary and you know their work and you know their minds, well, you could hasten the tenure process for a long list of people—not just for women, but men,” says Goldin, who says that a policy of delaying the date at which women faculty come up for tenure so that they can start families may actually make it difficult for them to ever be tenured.

“The real difficulty is exactly what to do,” Goldin says. “And sometimes well-intentioned policies go awry.”

—Staff writer Tina Wang can be reached at tinawang@fas.harvard.edu.