Stepping up to the Front Door

Shortly after becoming president of Radcliffe in 1972, Matina S. Horner went to the Faculty Club to meet with a member of Harvard's main governing board. Although women traditionally had been led in through the back door of the club and served in a dining room apart from the men, Horner thought it time for a policy change.

"I finally decided that being ushered into the back room would not do," she says.

Horner claimed a seat in the main dining room and declined gentle invitations from the staff to follow custom and retreat to the back room. She says that the surprised staff allowed her to remain, thereby ending a Harvard tradition of segregation.

Dean of the School of Education Patricia A. Graham was startled by similar treatment in the late 1960s, when she visited Harvard for the first time. She entered through the back door and was led to a separate dining room. "I think they're better since then," says Graham, who later became the first female dean of a Harvard graduate school.

Women administrators interviewed last week say they do no think they have been discriminated against during their Harvard careers. But they add that Harvard still has a long way to go to meet its affirmative action goals and the University may not be moving fast enough.

"I think [the University's hiring of women is] heading in the right direction," says Dr. Eleanor G. 'Shore '51, associate dean for faculty affairs in the office of academic programs in the Medical School. She says that she believes President Bok, who appoints deans and other high level administrators, is committed to promoting women. "There is a wish from the top down that we move in that direction faster."

"At Harvard the personnel office is supposed to be a service, but the schools themselves and the person who does the hiring has an awful lot of autonomy," says Jacqueline O'Neill, associate vice president for state and community affairs. "It's difficult to say if there have been deliberate strategies. It's not like the president issues an edict that the next three middle managers you hire must be women."

Moving Through the Ranks

Landmark appointments have been slow to arrive. Graham came to Harvard 14 years ago and later became the University's first female dean when she assumed the helm of the Ed School. Last fall, Sally H. Zeckhauser became the University's first woman vice president. Still, only a handful of Harvard's top posts are held by women.

According to the Office of Human Resources, 50 percent of the Harvard administration--including both senior posts and middle managers--is female. Yet, critics of the University charge that most women in the administration work at the bottom levels, as secretaries and lower-rung supervisors.

Women officials indicate that these middle managers have a good chance of moving up through the ranks of the Harvard administration as they have done themselves.

"I think it's only a matter of time until there are more women at the top echelons," says Zeckhauser, who was promoted from within, rising through Harvard Real Estate to the vice president for administration. Horner, too, followed the inside track when in 1972 she became the first Radcliffe president to come from inside the University.

Now that women have begun to reach the upper ranks of Harvard's administration, Horner says, their presence has contributed to what she calls a changing perception of women in the University.

In the late 1970s, she says, women at Harvard commonly found themselves stereotyped as less competent than their male counterparts. Horner describes being the only woman at an administrative discussion of a complicated mathematical concept. The man leading the meeting asked Horner to say when she understood the idea, as an indication to him that he was making himself clear. Horner says the man had assumed it would be difficult for a woman to grasp the complicated concept.

But Horner says this kind of attitude has grown less prevalent during her tenure. "The presence of these women [in the administration] have challenged so many unfounded assumptions that existed," Horner says.

While some women administrators say they feel their working environments are integrated, others say they often find themselves alone in a room full of men, aware that their individual successes are not always repeated.

"I'm usually the only woman in a room," during meetings, Graham says. "You feel that people are going to remember you because you don't look like anyone else," she adds.

O'Neill recalls that at her first board meeting of the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce the men in the room stood up when she entered, unaccustomed to having a woman join them. "I think they were more uncomfortable than I was," O'Neill says.

Within the University community, however, O'Neill and other administrators say they note progress. Candace R. Corvey, associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for finance, says it is unusual to find herself the only woman at a meeting. Zeckhauser says when she arrived at Harvard, she rarely found herself working with women, but that has changed.

"By the 1970s it was not as extraordinary as it would have been earlier" to be a woman in a meeting, Shore says. "Obviously we were never 50 percent, but rarely did I go someplace where there weren't any women in the room."

Although many female administrators describe positive personal experiences, they acknowledge that some of their colleagues have not been so lucky.

"I feel I couldn't have been better treated by Harvard in terms of career opportunities," says Corvey, who devises the budget for Harvard's largest faculty. "Having said that, I think it's very important to suggest that my experience can't be generalized."

Some female administrators fault Harvard for the consistently low numbers of women at the top.

The dearth of women administrators at Harvard "probably can't be explained by demographics alone," Corvey says.

Graham says women haven't reached high positions of authority at Harvard because they "haven't been asked." She adds, "I think Harvard missed a lot of good opportunities on the way" to her appointment.

Harvard's large size and decentralized system of management partially explain why so few women have reached the top tiers, administrators say.

Harvard is "changing slowly because it's a big institution. When you have a large institution like this, the incentive for change is minimized. Sometimes it's slow to change," O'Neill says.

"I really think what we're seeing is a continuous process, the endpoint of which is fairly predictable," says Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence. "Over a period of time I would expect the number of women to increase steadily--it will take longer in some areas than others."

Most women interviewed say they think conditions for women vary throughout different parts of the University. In particular, hiring policy is a decentralized task, conducted differently throughout Harvard's divisions.

"I think there are imbalances. I see pockets of a lot of women and pockets of men in the administration," says Elizabeth C. Huidekoper, director of the office of budgets and director of sponsored research. "I think the balance has to be maintained. In certain areas, you have to have some sort of affirmative action to attain a balance."

Despite some continuing problems, administrators say women applicants for administrative positions today may be entering a different job market than their predecessors.

"I would suspect in the last five years that the candidates are being judged for administrative positions purely on their merits," says Huidekoper. "Ten years ago women had more of a barrier than they do now."

"In the early days, people didn't know how to find women [for administrative posts]," Horner says. "They were out of the network that identified people."

"I think that if you have a cadre of senior people who are looking for quality first, and gender second, they're likely to find more women [than before]," Graham says. "That's certainly our experience [at the Ed School]. I think you've got to make sure that the women are coming in."

In recent years, Harvard has made more of an effort to find and promote women. In fact, some administrators say they think affirmative action may have played a positive role in their appointments.

Zeckhauser says of her October promotion, "I think I got lucky. I think it was inevitable that one of us were going to get here one day. I don't think it hurt" to be a woman.

Women administrators say it is only a matter of time before women reach the University's highest tier, the Corporation that has final control over all policy decisions.

"I think the members of the Corporation would [also] like to see a woman on the Corporation. I think it would be quite likely." Horner says.

Harvard "is changing and will continue to change," Huidekoper says. "What you need is first some affirmation of women and then it takes hold."