Another professor recalls an end of the semester evaluation in which students commented on a female colleague’s fashion choices as opposed to her teaching.

“It seems empirically that women have a harder time being respected and getting that credibility in the classroom needed to be a good teacher,” adds another female professor, who wished to remain anonymous.

Satisfaction ratings from female faculty at the Business School fell well below the average at all of Harvard’s other graduate schools, according to a faculty survey administered in 2007, and the Business School reported the second largest difference in satisfaction ratings between male and female faculty.

But faculty members note that the gender skew is not a problem specific to Harvard Business School, as peer institutions such as Stanford, Wharton, and Kellogg report even lower percentages of women on faculty.

“Is the Business School a horrible place? No,” says Business School professor Regina E. Herzlinger, who was the first woman to receive an endowed chair at the school in the 1980s. “Academia needs to look at women and be cognizant that there are unconscious and conscious biases.”

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

As Light enters the final months of his deanship, the Business School continues its efforts both to attract and to support female faculty, such as routinely placing ads in publications like “Women in Higher Education,” which is geared towards female academics.

Going forward, the Business School aims to increase the representation of female junior faculty hires to 40 percent, according to David Bell, who is the senior associate dean and director of faculty planning and recruiting.

Bell attributes the gender gap at the school in part to the limited pool of female talent, explaining that “because there is pressure across all institutions to hire women, they’re in great demand.”

For female students at the Business School, Bell adds, the low proportion of women on the faculty may negatively affect academic performance, though he says it is unclear whether female senior faculty are better mentors than males to female junior faculty and students.

“If that’s true, obviously the fact that we have a high proportion of male tenured faculty for historical reasons might lead women to have a harder time being successful,” Bell says.

To combat gender-related insensitivity, Light encouraged Business School faculty to attend a seminar on unconscious bias given by psychology professor Mahzarin R. Banaji of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences this spring, and the school’s annual Christensen Center Colloquium—which helps faculty learn how to teach the case method—will highlight gender issues this fall.

“This is something we definitely talk about in our faculty meetings,” business administration professor Andrei Hagiu says. “But I don’t think there’s discrimination here.”

And business administration professor Robin Ely, who also teaches in the Business School’s Women’s Leadership Forum, says that there is no single explanation for the dearth of female faculty members.

“There are small inadvertent things that go on in our culture, but there is no blatant sexism here,” Ely says.