There are currently 181 female professors within FAS, constituting 25 percent of tenure-track and tenured faculty members. Despite University-wide efforts over the last five years to support gender diversity in the Faculty, the number of women in the Faculty stands at 2007 levels, according to the annual report.

The issue of faculty diversity was raised at yesterday’s Faculty meeting, during which Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Professor Elena M. Kramer briefed the community on behalf of the Standing Committee on Women.

Kramer said that the committee has analyzed the dual issues of hiring women faculty members and promoting them to tenured positions at Harvard. Female tenure-track professors, she said,  are more likely than their male counterparts to leave Harvard before receiving tenure.

Meanwhile, there has been insignificant growth in underrepresented minorities since the school limited the expansion of its faculty, according to the report. Non-white, non-Asian minorities represent slightly more than 5 percent of the Faculty.

Because there are so few minorities in the faculty, the committee could not perform a an analytical assessment of the situation analogous to that for gender diversity, according to Kramer.

—Staff writer Noah S. Rayman can be reached at nrayman@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Elyssa A.L. Spitzer can be reached at spitzer@fas.harvard.edu.