Over the last decade the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard (CEWH) has published periodic reports on the status of women at the University, based on data published by Harvard or, occasionally, made available to us by Harvard officials. The current report, the fourth in the series, is based on the University's recently issued Affirmative Action Plan 2003 and also draws on surveys and publications from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and other scholarly sources.

CEWH has in the past had a particular focus on women in senior faculty positions, since that was the area in which Harvard appeared to be making the slowest progress over a number of years. In support of this focus we undertook two major initiatives: In 1995 we established the Harvard Women Faculty Fund, and in 1998 we sponsored a national invitational conference on women faculty in research universities. In 2001, following the completion of the Harvard-Radcliffe merger, the monies in the Women Faculty Fund were rededicated to endow the Radcliffe Alumnae Professorship, a tenured chair to be held in part at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. After only a year of effort, funding for this chair was completed well ahead of schedule, with matching funds from Harvard, in spring 2002.

The 1998 conference was held in recognition of the fact that the scarcity of women faculty was a national problem rather than one unique to Harvard and resulted in a book, EQUAL RITES, UNEQUAL OUTCOMES : Women in American Research Universities (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press 2003) edited by Lilli S. Hornig.

The finalization of the merger marked a watershed for women at Harvard, one that makes it more important than ever to monitor how the University is carrying out its obligation to insure a truly equal educational experience for women and men. This fourth report in our series examines the status of women faculty and students in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

FACULTY

A. Senior

Harvard's Affirmative Action Plan 2003, on which we base most of this report, uses faculty data as of 2002. In 1995, when we began this series, the senior FAS faculty comprised 419 individuals of whom 47 or 11.2 percent were women; the corresponding figures for 2002 are a total of 443 of which 81 (18.3 percent) are female. Thus the total senior faculty grew by 24, or 5.7 percent, while the number of women increased by 34, or 72.3 percent. This is indeed a signal achievement. We are delighted to note this progress and, without wishing to detract at all from Harvard's success in this regard, we do also note that this rapid improvement coincided with CEWH's concerted effort to call attention to this issue.

Since Harvard competes vigorously with a small number of its peer institutions in many respects, it is useful to compare how we are doing compared with some of our sister institutions. In Table 1 we show the percent of women senior faculty at ten top universities in 2000 and 2002; the figures for 2000 are taken from our book cited above.

It will be noted that although there are some changes in the order, Harvard remains in the middle of the pack, the fifth-highest in both years.

Gender proportions are only one indicator of equity; a more telling, though also more problematic one, is salary comparisons. Salary differences must be interpreted with caution due to differences in gender distributions among academic fields, age, work experience, and other factors such as labor conditions (e.g. non-academic competition in scientific and technical fields). While the particulars may differ among institutions, it is generally true for all universities that women are more recent entrants and that this accounts for some of their lower earnings. Still, comparisons among sister institutions are indicators of relative equity, and are given in Table 2. Harvard is in the lower half of the group.

Other factors that play an important role in ensuring gender equity of faculty are less readily quantified but increasingly recognized as critical. They include space allocations especially in natural science fields, collegial interactions, appropriate mentoring, and internal recognition of women's as well as men's achievements. A landmark report from MIT in early 1999, endorsed by the administration, detailed deficiencies at that institution and was widely acclaimed. It has since served as a model for similar self-studies elsewhere, and following its publication CEWH wrote President Rudenstine to urge a similar candid assessment of Harvard's situation; he replied that Harvard was "different" and no such effort was warranted. We continue to disagree with this view and now renew our request for such a study at Harvard, with similarly publicized results rather than purely internal, secret reports.

One follow-up activity to the MIT study was a meeting of presidents and provosts from nine top universities, including Harvard, held in early 2000 at MIT. The institutions pledged to examine their own situations and to reconvene a year later to compare notes, but no such meeting took place until spring 2003 and no results have been announced at Harvard.

B. Ladder Faculty

Over the past decade CEWH has maintained its major focus on senior faculty because that is where the University makes a truly long-term commitment. However, in the past few years we have also begun to look in more detail at the situation for women ladder faculty because that is where most universities raise their next generation of stars. In the past Harvard has had a stated policy (although one sometimes honored in the breach) of not promoting from within, although existing ladder faculty could be considered for promotion in open competition with outside candidates. This policy may have served well in the past, when academic jobs were designed for men and the compliance of wives and children was assumed, but that is no longer the case. Harvard has modified this practice in the last few years and currently perhaps one-third of senior appointments are made by promotion. The shift resulted from several factors, perhaps most saliently by the recognition that not only women but also male candidates were increasingly reluctant to uproot families to accept even a tenured Harvard appointment. The uncertainty of eventual promotion has also made junior faculty more reluctant to accept a Harvard appointment, given that in nearly all other major universities they would have better chances of permanency.

This overall shift makes it ever more urgent for Harvard to insure a supply of women ladder faculty that is commensurate with the steady and continuing growth of women among new Ph.D. recipients. In addition, civil rights laws require so-called "good faith efforts" to increase the supply of women and minority candidates if an institution has low numbers of them. All these factors make it urgent for Harvard to increase the proportions of women ladder faculty in order to achieve greater diversity of the senior faculty.

Unfortunately, Harvard has so far not succeeded in achieving what might be considered a reasonable proportion of women junior faculty-reasonable in the sense that it has some relationship to the supply of young Ph.D.s. In fact, the proportion of women ladder faculty has actually declined slightly since 1998, going from 33.7 percent to 33.5 percent while the proportion of Ph.D.s earned by women in relevant "source" years (2 to 3 years earlier, on the average) rose from 40 percent to about 44 percent. It should be noted that the number of ladder faculty has increased by only two individuals overall between 1997 and 2002. We believe Harvard is missing a major opportunity to select a more diverse faculty. The failure to train more women junior faculty certainly does not represent a "good faith effort" to meet equal-opportunity obligations.

Harvard again is not alone in this position, as the comparison with its sister institutions in Table 3 shows. Note, however, that all of these comparisons have some uncertainty built in due to Harvard's custom of not reporting the rank of associate professor in FAS or, for that matter, in its other schools. In those, however, it reports "Senior/Tenured" as distinct from "ladder" ranks. Thus one must assume that associate professors in FAS (which do in fact exist) are counted as "ladder" faculty. (For the entire university, Harvard does report associate professors-94 men and 44 women in 2002-in its annual tally to the American Association of University Professors). In other universities, associate professors may be either tenured or untenured, and only the latter would be counted as "ladder".

We also compare salaries for this group of faculty with those in Harvard's sister institutions. The results are shown in Table 4. Harvard was at the head of the group in 2000, but has slipped to fifth place in 2002. Regrettably, most of these universities are doing worse in 2002.

C. Field Distributions

Distributions of men and women differ substantially across academic fields, at Harvard and elsewhere. Contemporary evidence of many kinds suggests that these differences result primarily from deliberate institutional policies rather than from innate preferences. That does not alter the fact that there are fewer women than men in the physical sciences at this time, although readers should understand that more women earn advanced degrees in the sciences than in the humanities, contrary to popular belief. The sciences are simply much larger fields. As a result of this history, there are limited numbers of women Ph.D.s available for faculty appointments, at Harvard as elsewhere.

Since Harvard does not report faculty composition by department it is impossible to judge accurately its success in hiring women science faculty. Instead, we can examine only the overall figures for "natural sciences", which may be misleading because of variation among fields. For example, in 2000 women represented 43.8 percent of all new Ph.D.s but 44.8 percent in biological sciences, and a total of 24.5 percent of all doctoral degrees in physical-science fields (which include physics, chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, math, computer science, and others). Some data on proportions of women Ph.D.s in science fields are shown in Table 5, with a comparison with Harvard's female science faculty.