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.

In March 1999, Melodye W. Wehrung was named director of Equal Opportunity Programs and Compliance for the University, charged with preparing and publishing the Annual Affirmative Action Plan and with reporting the progress of hiring and retention of female and minority faculty members. Wehrung left the University in Spring 2002 and her position was terminated.

Administrators have pointed to opportunities to recruit women faculty in its long-term plans for FAS. Kirby said in October that the effort to expand the faculty, which has grown from 636 to 676 professors in the past two years, may allow Harvard to recruit more diverse faculty members.

Also, impending retirements of faculty members, one third of which are currently over the age of 60, will provide open spots for recruitment, according to Kirby.

Gender diversity among Harvard’s junior faculty has also been spotlighted in recent years.

Kirby said in June 2004 that hiring women—particularly to junior faculty positions—was one of his top priorities as dean.

In the past 10 years, the percentage of junior faculty members in the humanities that are women had decreased by almost 15 percent, to 35 from almost 50 percent in the 1990s, according to Kirby’s second annual letter to the Faculty, in 2004.

Women comprise 20 percent of Harvard’s senior faculty and over 30 percent of its junior faculty, according to Kirby’s letter. The breakdown continues with women representing 42 percent of junior Faculty in the social sciences and 17 percent—twice the percentage five years ago—in the natural sciences.

This year, 45 percent of those who have accepted assistant and associate professors are women and 80 percent of tenure-track offers made to women were accepted, Kirby writes in an e-mail.

THE UNIVERSITY RESPONDS

The fallout from Summers’ January comments drew even more attention to concerns of hiring and supporting female faculty.

In February, the University established two task forces, one on female faculty and one on women in sciences, which ultimately pledged $50 million to support female students and faculty in the University’s science departments, as well as creating a senior vice-provost position for faculty development and diversity.

While the inquiries of the task forces were underway, five female professors held a panel in March, sharply critiquing the University’s efforts to address the barriers encountered by female scholars.

“We stand at a moment where we want to change the culture and composition of our universities,” Evelynn M. Hammonds, a professor of African and African American Studies who chairs the Task Force on Women Faculty that Summers appointed in February, told an audience of nearly 200 members.

The professors identified structural problems with the tenure system, calling for more internal tenure promotions and criticizing the University for failing to take into account traditional obligations to family.

According to Kirby’s May letter to junior faculty, the University next year will make $5,000 available to new tenure-track faculty to use towards the expenses of child care.

FACULTY FAULT LINES

But the intensification of efforts to hire and tenure women faculty is not without controversy, with some professors protesting the use of group preferences in faculty hires and promotions.

“What I understand by gender equality is that all persons should be treated equally,” Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse wrote in an October e-mail. “[This] argues not for equal opportunity but for equal outcome.”

“I wouldn’t like to see a big type of push for one kind of person for one year,” says Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol, who emphasized that the University needs “a more sustained commitment to make sure that we’re recruiting the best people to our faculty regardless of gender and race.”

“The search process continues to be very rigorous…I think the possibility that standards will suddenly be lowered is very slight,” Ryan writes in an e-mail, addressing possible concerns that special attention to gender diversity would lower standards of merit and scholarship in tenure searches.

“Casting our net more widely for women and minority candidates will expand and strengthen, not weaken, the recruitment pool, in my opinion. No one is saying hire any woman,” Cohen writes in an e-mail. “Rather, we’re saying figure out the fields where women are doing cutting-edge and important work and make sure that you define positions with an eye to capturing that talent.”

The University’s active efforts to accommodate women faculty have also drawn criticism from faculty members.

Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 opposes the efforts of the University to minimize women’s choices between work and family, arguing that the University is presuming that women who want to take time off from work are “making a foolish or irresponsible choice.”

“I don’t think our measures should be directed away from the choice women might make to stay at home,” Mansfield says.

AMONG THE PACK

Studies suggest that the Harvard’s difficulties in tenuring and supporting female faculty mays be in line with nationwide trends.

According to a report released by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in April 2005, the underrepresentation of women and differences in pay between men and women in university faculties are still pervasive, though the percentage of tenured female faculty nationwide has risen over the last two decades.

The report said that there are more than twice as many men as women in the full-time faculties of doctoral universities, and that women are 10 to 15 percent less likely than men to be in tenure-eligible positions.

Some professors expect to see an increase in the number of tenure offers to women in the next few years.

“I anticipate that over the next few years the situation will improve, reflecting a higher consciousness about the need for greater faculty diversity resulting from the crisis of this past academic year,” Cohen writes in an e-mail.

“I would imagine that in the course of this year more tenure offers have already started being made to women, and this trend will continue next year,” Ryan writes in an e-mail. “We will see the results of this year’s efforts next year.”

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