A decline in the number of tenure offers made to women in recent years prompted the scrutiny of administrators and members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)­—months before University President Lawrence H. Summers’ Jan. 14 remarks on the representation of women in the sciences drew Harvard into public controversy.

Last academic year, 12.5 percent of FAS tenure offers, or four out of 32, went to female professors­­—a drop from 36 percent in 2000-2001, the last year that Neil L. Rudenstein served as University President—and only one of the 22 newly tenured faculty in the 2003-2004 year was female.

At the end of the 2003-2004 academic year, 26 professors signed a letter to Summers and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby calling on Harvard to reverse the downward trend in tenure offers made to women.

In fall of 2004, 86 professors, including 73 of the 86 female senior Faculty members, released a statement urging administrators to make reversing the decline of FAS tenure offers to women their “highest priority.”

Facing heightened pressure from professors, both Summers and Kirby denounced the decrease in tenure offers to women and vowed to reverse it through both external hires and internal promotion.

In early October, Summers met and solicited ideas from 50 professors regarding ways to increase the representation of women amongst the ranks of tenured faculty.

In a Faculty meeting last December, Summers called last year’s numbers “unacceptable” and said they will not be repeated.

“Our results in appointing senior women are unacceptable,” Kirby said at the same Faculty meeting. “Last year should have been and will very quickly become an anomaly.”

Some administrators and professors pointed to a lull in active efforts to identify eligible women faculty for tenure as the reason behind last year’s low numbers.

“After several years when a larger number of tenure offers were made to women, we may have become complacent for a while,” Acting Chair of the Germanic Languages and Literatures Department Judith L. Ryan writes in an e-mail.

At the October 2004 Faculty meeting, Summers described the “sinusoidal character” of University efforts to hire and tenure women as responsible for the fluctuation in percentages of female tenure—when attention paid to the recruitment of women rises and falls, the number of women tenures rises and falls respectively.

Summers said at the meeting that FAS must work “to identify outstanding candidates, to promote outstanding candidates, to recruit outstanding candidates, and...[to] do so not just now, but on a continual basis.”

“I think that a lot of FAS members, from faculty to deans, have been asleep at the wheel. It can take over a year from defining a senior faculty position to making an offer, so we are still seeing the fallout from several years of non-attentiveness to the issue,” Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen, a member of the FAS Standing Committee on the Status of Women, writes in an e-mail.

Ryan also points to the current absence of an affirmative action dean or assistant affirmative action dean, a spot once held by Kenan Professor of English Marjorie Garber.

“When Professor Garber was in that office, she was very proactive, talking individually with department chairs and reminding them of the need to keep the idea of hiring women and minorities in mind during searches,” Ryan continues.