The Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard has for several years published a report on the status of women at the University, based on data either published or, occasionally, made available by Harvard. Other than the annual Affirmative Action report required by law, which is a fairly technical document, no official comprehensive report on the status of women faculty and students has appeared for twenty-five years. For some time now we have urged unsuccessfully that Harvard should routinely publish such an annual document. Failing that, we must present our own version.

The past academic year has seen the University's first explicit statement in recent years of the importance of diversity to the academic enterprise, persuasively argued in President Rudenstine's report. During the year this commitment to diversity, specifically to Afro-American Studies, was demonstrated by the appointments of two additional prominent black male scholars to the tenured faculty. The Committee is delighted with this renewed emphasis on diversity but would like to see a similar commitment, moral and financial, to making women's studies and appointments of women scholars a comparably high priority.

In an effort to remedy at least to some extent the low representation of women on Harvard's faculty, the Committee established in the fall of 1995 the Harvard Women Faculty Fund, a tax-exempt escrow fund to be donated to the University at such time as the Committee believes the University has made significant progress in appointing women faculty, especially at the tenure level, and in developing a climate in which women students can thrive as men now do in all departments throughout the University. We are very pleased to report that in its first year our fund has received gifts and bequests approaching $500, 000.

The Committee was also instrumental in creating and raising funding for the Bunting Faculty Fellowships, designed to provide research time for ladder faculty women to enhance their likelihood of gaining tenure. Two fellowships were awarded in 1995-96; one of the Fellows has already been promoted. A third award has been made this year.

Although the four women appointed to tenure in the past year (see below) represent an apparent increase in the rate of tenuring female faculty, the total gain since 1993 is only three positions. The ninety new faculty positions to be provided by the capital campaign offer a singular opportunity for increasing the proportion of women faculty to a significant degree.

CURRENT STATUS - HARVARD FACULTY

We are encouraged to note that the number of tenured women in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the primary target of our efforts, has increased from 43 to 47, or from 10.6 percent to 11.2 percent. Nonetheless the total number of tenured women remains ridiculously small. We note also that the salary differential between women and men full professors at Harvard, as reported by the American Association of University Professors, is the largest of any of the universities with which Harvard normally compares itself. Women professor's average salary as a percent of men's is shown in Table 1 for this group of institutions.

Table 1

Institution	Women's Salary as % of Men's
Harvard	88%
Yale	90%
Cornell	90%
Chicago	91%
Columbia	91%
Berkeley	91%
Stanford	93%
Brown	94%
Johns Hopkins	94%
Princeton	94%

The actual difference between male and female full professors' salaries at Harvard in 1995-96 was $13, 200. While we are quite aware that on average women's salaries will remain below men's for some time because as a group women are later entrants to the rank, many studies (National Academy of Sciences, National Science Foundation, and others) also show that differences as large as this can almost never be accounted for on objective grounds and that about one-half of such a disparity remains unexplained by differences in age, experience, or measurable quality. Thus Harvard not only has the second-smallest proportion of tenured women in this group of universities (Yale is slightly lower) but it pays them, relatively, even worse.

We should also note that the average salary difference between head coaches of men's and women's sports at Harvard is $8,600, and between assistant coaches it is almost $9,400. Expressed in percentage terms, coaches of women's sports earn 81.6 percent and 75.1 percent, respectively, of the salaries of coaches of men's sports. These are not direct sex differences in salaries; all coaches of men's teams are male, but only nine out of twenty coaches of women's teams are women. Presumably the coaches' salary differences would be considerably larger if only women coached women's teams.

We have also become increasingly concerned about Harvard's own calculations of the availability of women faculty, the figures on which Harvard's utilization is based. (Ideally, the actual number hired should be proportional to the available pool.) Comparing these two quantities is the basis for setting hiring goals and is also a critical factor in determining compliance with equal opportunity mandates.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in its Affirmative Action Plan, gives only vague indications of how availability figures are arrived at, and the practice of reporting by disciplinary groups rather than individual departments leaves quite a lot of room for creative accounting. Nonetheless, availability figures should have some rational relationship to Ph.D. production at an appropriate time, adjusted somewhat for including chiefly those universities from which a given department would normally recruit faculty. It must be understood, however, that by recruiting senior faculty only from an extremely limited universe of other universities, Harvard helps to perpetuate underutilization of women. In essence, it is passing the buck to those institutions, condoning their limited choices, and then taking its own even more constricted pick of an artificially small pool. This sort of feedback loop results in creating the public impression that the pool of available women is much smaller than it actually is, and hence that Harvard is much closer to reasonable representation of women than it is in fact.

The federal regulations governing affirmative action in universities do permit an institution to confine its recruiting of faculty to those other organizations from which it has customarily hired. But they also attempt to encourage broadening the recruiting base precisely because the old methods result in simply perpetuating past discrimination against both minorities and women. Institutions that are found to be out of compliance - i.e. those that consistently fail to meet their hiring goals - may remedy the situation by showing good-faith efforts to broaden recruitment and to otherwise expand the pool. We see little evidence that Harvard has made such efforts despite falling short of its own hiring goals for women faculty nearly every year.

If we assume a period of ten to fifteen years after the Ph.D. as an average to attain senior faculty status, we can compare Harvard's stated availability data and current utilization rates with the actual supply of women Ph.D.s. We draw such a comparison in Table 2. It should be noted that such a time lapse is conservative; in most cases promotions to tenure are likely to occur at ten years or less while new hires at tenure level may occur later. Harvard both promotes internally and hires from outside.

Table 2

Field	Available Data	Current Utilization	Ph.D. Supply
			1980	1985
Humanities	24.3%	19.2%	39.6%	43.4%
Social Sciences	13.8%	10.0%	34.6%	41.1%
Natural Sciences	6.9%	5.1%	16.2%	20.6%

The fact that several of the 1995-96 tenure appointments were made by promotion from the ladder faculty (a practice we applaud) unfortunately also resulted in a decline of women at ladder ranks, from 62 to 57, or from 31.0 percent to 29.4 percent. This decline is the continuation of a trend; the number of female ladder faculty has decreased steadily from 73 in 1990 to 57 in 1995, a drop of 21.9 percent. Over the same time the total number of male ladder faculty dropped from 147 to 137, or 6.8 percent. Far from making bona fide efforts to increase the pool for potential senior faculty women, Harvard is actively reducing it. The only likely explanation for this particular disparity is that the promotion rate for women is about one-third that for men. A relevant statistic from the Harvard School of Public Health is that between 1980 and mid-1995 male assistant professors were promoted at twice the rate of female junior faculty.

Calculations of availabilty for ladder faculty are based directly on the proportions of Ph.D.s earned by women at a relevant time; normally that time is within one to four years or so before hiring. Officers of the University have sometimes argued that the proportion of women Ph.D.s from the highly selective institutions that normally produce Harvard's candidates is apt to be smaller than the national figures. Reputable studies lend no support to such conjectures; women are just as likely as men to earn their degrees from prestigious universities.

In Table 3 we again compare Harvard's stated availability data with current utilization and proportions of doctorates earned by women in 1990 and 1994.

Table 3

Field	Available Data	Current Utilization	Ph.D. Supply
			1990	1994
Humanities	50.8%	44.7%	45.6%	47.7%
Social Sciences	34.5%	28.6%	46.3%	49.4%
Natural Sciences	20.6%	19.1%	22.8%	25.7%

Harvard's 1996 Affirmative Action Plan therefore reports quite severe underutilization of women in FAS at both tenure and ladder ranks; that is, fewer women are on these faculties than would be expected based on their availability. The fact that Harvard does not report proportions of women for individual departments but only for the three major divisions (Humanities, Social Sciences,and Natural Sciences) and does not identify the institutions with which it compares itself for "availability" determinations makes it difficult to assess the data accurately.

Another matter of interest in these data is that Harvard continues to perpetuate the stereotype that women are found primarily in the humanities, by having significantly greater proportions of women faculty in these fields. In fact the proportion of women in social sciences has exceeded that in humanities for more than a decade, but the University clings to its outdated belief.

CURRENT STATUS - STUDENTS

Harvard's Affirmative Action report contains far less information about students than faculty and other employees, presumably because such reports tend to focus on employment equity. Nevertheless, Harvard's enrollment and degree candidate statistics reveal some disturbing gender disparities compared to national figures.

The proportion of women bachelor's degree candidates at Harvard in 1995 was 44.2 percent, compared with a national figure of over 54 percent for the last several years. Harvard's record also compares unfavorably with other highly selective universities, most of which are at or close to gender equality in numbers. Since 1990 Harvard has increased the proportions of women graduates only marginally, from 40.9 percent to 44.2 percent of total enrollment. This slight gain, however, did not occur across all racial groups. Harvard has been gradually increasing the numbers of minority students while keeping overall size essentially constant. In this process, the proportions of women compared to men for each minority group have risen slowly, with near-parity now attained in most racial groups except blacks, where women are 60.1 percent, and whites, where women increased just marginally, from 39.3 percent in 1990 to 40.7 percent in 1995. These figures must be interpreted cautiously because nearly 14 percent of all students do not indicate their racial or ethnic affiliation. Nevertheless, the proportion of women, especially of white women, remains small at Harvard. In contrast, women have been the majority of all students nationally for over fifteen years.

The Affirmative Action report provides insufficient information to assess the origins of such wide departures from the norm at Harvard. The University, however, has an obligation to explain to its own community and to the public that supports it why it seems unable to attain gender equality when its competitors have no such difficulty.

CONCLUSION

This report has focused on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences because of our deep concern over Harvard's failure to educate a representative proportion of women undergraduates, as well as our ongoing efforts to increase the proportion of women faculty in FAS. The University claims that it "has been trying to increase the pool of potential women and minority faculty through several special programs for encouraging students...to pursue academic careers." (1996 Affirmative Action Plan, p. 38.) The most obvious way to increase the pool is to make a Harvard education equally accessible to both sexes.

Not enough information is available to us to evaluate the reasons for such low proportions of women undergraduates at Harvard. We believe the University needs to explain such a large departure from national figures, and to remedy its causes. Once equal access is assured, other equity issues need to be explored.

The Harvard Women Faculty Fund is the clearest expression we can give to our abiding commitment to creating sex equity at the University. The living example set by continuing to have few women faculty, and fewer women students than men, is unfortunately much more convincing to male and female students alike than pious statements about equal opportunity. Harvard should assert its leadership role in ending sex discrimination by deeds, not words. We look forward to the time when that happens so that we can then turn over the Harvard Women Faculty Fund to our University.

by
Lilli S. Hornig, Ph.D. Harvard '50
The Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard
November 1996

URL: http://world.std.com/~cewh/
November 2004