Tipping the Scales

When diversity at Harvard is discussed, issues of male-female ratios among students tend to be raised only in relation to social life: single-sex clubs and the like. But despite Harvard’s balance of undergraduate men and women, the issue of gender ratios is still very much alive in many concentrations, which must try to encourage students of both sexes to join while also responding to the unique needs of their predominately male or female constituencies.

In the Department of English and American Literature and Language, women concentrators outnumber men by more than two to one. At present there are 198 female students and 88 male students. “The gender breakdown has always been that way,” says undergraduate English programs administrator Inge-Lise Ameer, though she admits she is unsure why this is so. “One factor could be the gender breakdown of professors. I’ve never had anyone say to me ‘that’s why I chose to do English’ but that may be one of the underlying reasons,” Ameer says. Her suggestion plausibly speaks to student experience. About 30 percent of the tenured professors in the English department are women—a considerably greater fraction than in the Faculty of Arts of Sciences (FAS) as a whole—and the proportion of women in the junior faculty is even higher.

Yet Ameer emphasizes that despite its majority female undergraduate enrollment, the English department is by no means an exclusionary women’s domain. “We want to make it a comfortable and open environment for everyone, no matter what their sex,” she stresses. To this end the department recently instituted an overhaul of its entire departmental advising structure, with the hope of creating a more open and accessible environment for prospective concentrators. The department has instituted thrice-weekly e-mail updates, walk-in advising hours and special reading events. Ameer hopes these new initiatives will encourage prospective concentrators. “The overall goal is to make it comfortable for everyone to walk in no matter what their sex,” she says.

In the Department of History of Science (which oversees the undergraduate concentration in History and Science) the issue of gender is a little more complicated, though the approximately two-to-one proportion of female concentrators remains the same. As in the English department, administrators say it is unclear why women undergraduates are particularly attracted to their discipline. One possible cause could be the more “woman-friendly culture” in their department that differs sharply from the atmosphere in hard sciences such as chemistry or physics, says head tutor Stephanie H. Kenen.

“We have more women faculty and graduate students, which helps because they can act as mentors to the undergraduates,” Kenen says. And the emerging prominence of women faculty has gradually altered course offerings in the department, she says. “The department takes questions of gender in the sciences quite seriously, and there has been a significant rise in courses relating to gender over the past 10 years as the faculty has changed,” she says.

An additional motivation for women is that the concentration enables them to “keep one foot in the door of science” while investigating the subject from a more humanities-like social and cultural perspective, Kenen says. Specifically, Kenen says history and science attracts a lot of pre-meds interested in fulfilling their scientific requirements in a unique way. “Many women who study history of science find it a comfortable environment that allows them to fulfill pre-med requirements within a broader framework,” says Lucy R. Stackpool-Moore ’02, a joint concentrator in history and literature and history and science.

But in growing numbers, women are taking hard science courses in an attempt to meet pre-med requirements. Last year’s president of Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe (WISHR), Wenya L. Bi ’02, says that in her experience, the number of women in introductory science courses almost equals the number of men, though the number of women begins to dwindle once courses move beyond the level of pre-med requirements. Yet many women do choose to concentrate in a hard science—particularly chemistry. Women make up 50 percent of the chemistry concentrators in the Class of 2002—and according to Gregory Tucci, assistant director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, 50 percent of graduating concentrators go on to medical school.

In science concentrations that don’t satisfy pre-med requirements, the number of women does not match the chemistry department’s total. In computer science, for example, there are just 31 women amongst some 200 concentrators—15 percent. “Harvard’s story is not significantly different than nationwide trends,” says Steven J. Gortler, associate professor of computer science.

None of the administrators or students, of course, can pinpoint with accuracy what nationwide trend or particular high school experience leads more women than men to focus on the humanities—even while studying science—and more men to stick to strict scientific disciplines. What the students can describe is what it feels like to be the only girl in a room full of 20 eager-to-please male organic chemistry students. “I would inevitably be the only woman there,” says Yao Liu ’04, a chemistry concentrator who is the current president of WISHR. “That sort of discouraged me from going.” Liu is certainly conscious of the gender imbalance in the sciences, but she says the skewed demographics have not negatively impacted her experience.

“I have never felt treated differently or discouraged because I am a woman in the sciences at Harvard,” she says. “What is difficult here is that for women science concentrators, it isn’t that easy to find role models, since the faculty and teaching fellows are mainly male.” The chemistry department has three female faculty members alongside 20 males. However, these numbers will likely change in the coming years; in 2001-2002, new hires for entry-level postions in the department were almost 50 percent women—11 out of 23.

Slowly but surely, Harvard’s teachers are moving toward matching the nearly even gender ratio of its students. Overall, the number of senior women faculty in FAS has risen from 38 (9.6 percent) in 1991 to 78 (17.6 percent) in 2001. But for those concentrations still wrestling with unbalanced gender ratios, the increasing number of female professors is just one stop on the road to gender equality.