Still in the Shadows

One of Harvard’s academic hotshots sits in a spacious eleventh story office in William James Hall, where the south-facing windows offer a view of Cambridge and the Boston skyline that would make any Bain Capital exec green with envy.

With its modern furnishings and no-nonsense style, it is the office of a professional. Books are neatly stacked in bookcases, next to colorful photos and stacks of papers. A laptop fan buzzes busily as a University star taps away.

A Fulbright scholarship, a Harvard undergraduate degree and a Harvard Ph.D., three decades of teaching at leading research universities and more awards and honors than you or I or Tom Hanks could imagine—this isn’t an amateur.

Oh, and this isn’t a man, either.

But if you had asked Morss Professor of Psychology Susan E. Carey thirty years ago if she could have imagined herself behind this cherry wood desk, she might have been a tad skeptical.

Carey graduated from Radcliffe in 1964, back when milk and cookies was the consolation prize for young women who hadn’t been asked to dinner in Eliot House. She returned to Harvard in the early 1970s to earn her Ph.D. in psychology, and in the course of her studies became friends with the head of the department.

“We were buddies,” she says, but that friendship only carried so far. After returning from a conference, he approached Carey, telling her how exciting his recent honorary society meeting had been.

“You would really love this,” he told her, and Carey imagined that her invitation would be forthcoming. “But of course there are no women in it—we just couldn’t have women.” He informed her that the Harvard faculty could never have a woman join its ranks. Carey, more than a little offended, just rolled her eyes and held her tongue. “I didn’t say, ‘You wanna bet?’”

The now-tenured Carey—with round, dark-rimmed glasses and a spacious office to boot—is one of 88 senior women out of the 439 tenured faculty members in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Many of these women are of Carey’s generation, scholars who spent their formative years battling explicit gender discrimination to reach the vanguards of their respective fields.

But now, there seems to be a new battle mounting on the horizon. Though the proportion of women tenured faculty is at a high of 20 percent, the number of tenure offers being made to women has steadily declined since the end of the 2000-2001 academic year.

According to Science Magazine, women comprised 37.1 percent of tenure offers made at Harvard in the academic year 2000-2001—a number that now seems meritoriously high. This past academic year, only four of the 32 tenure offers were made to women, a startlingly low 12.5 percent of promotion offers.

Last June, 26 senior faculty women sent a distressed letter of response to University President Lawrence H. Summers and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, expressing their concerns about the precipitous slide in tenure offers. This fall, 73 female senior faculty members agreed to sign a statement urging the administration “to assign its highest priority to reversing the downward trend of the past three years in FAS senior offers to women.” Summers and Kirby agreed to meet with 50 female senior faculty members on October 6 in the Barker Center. Both expressed concern about the drop in offers, but many women present weren’t sure if concern would translate into action. The meeting did, however, get the faculty—women and men—talking.

“We just wanted to get this out on the table,” says Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen. A member of the newly formed Senior Faculty Caucus for Gender Equality, Cohen is heartened that her concerns are ringing loud and clear.

Much of the resulting buzz has been about the problems that women on the path to promotion must always confront. Though women now have more chances to advance into the faculty’s highest echelon, that promise is obscured by latent discrimination and by every professional woman’s dilemma—balancing kids and a career.

But these factors have been around for decades, and tenure offers have only fallen sharply in the last four years—since Summers took office. While Dean Kirby is certainly a key player as FAS’s top administrator, President Summers has the sole ability to set a directive and a tone for the entire University. And though Summers has paid lip service to the idea of a diverse, inclusive faculty, his hiring priorities seem to exacerbate the problems that have consistently edged women off the tenure track.

NARROWING THE FIELD

Mention of the tenure process often evokes images of wiry, grey-haired men in tweed discussing someone’s personal life, brandy in hand. And while these stereotypes might have some truth to them, there is a protocol.

When considering senior faculty appointments, departments approach the Dean of FAS for permission to start deliberations.

After the Dean gives the go-ahead, the department pulls together a short list of candidates, asks 15 or 20 scholars outside of Harvard for advice on the candidates’ qualifications and has its senior faculty members write confidential letters to the Dean making the case for or against the person in the hot seat.

If the Dean approves a case, an ad hoc committee is formed, comprised of three outside scholars, two senior Harvard faculty members from outside the candidate’s department and the man himself—the President of the University—who chairs all of these closed-door sessions. These are your tweed-clad, brandy-sipping decision-makers.

Tenure at Harvard brings job security, but it is also brings reputation, the affirmation that a particular candidate is the best in her field. “If the tenure process means anything,” Cohen says, “it’s supposed to be a check that we have fully explored the talent in the field, and that this was the best appointment we could make.”

BLIND TO BIAS

In the statement to President Summers, the Women’s Caucus suggested that women must be included in faculty promotion committees, ad hoc and internal. But how will the inclusion of women in the process help? Aren’t men just as capable of making judgments on the qualifications of female candidates as they are for male candidates?

“People will hire people who are like them, other things being equal,” Jayne Professor of Government Jennifer L. Hochschild says over the phone. With few female voices in the recommendation and ad hoc processes, a female candidate’s prospects tend to drop.

Hochschild is wary of whether or not women candidates are held to the same standards as men. “‘Aggressive’ in a letter of recommendation is a term of praise for a man, but not for a woman,” she says. “We sure do like hard-driving and really assertive men, but not in the case of women.”

Professor of Psychology Elizabeth S. Spelke agrees. “What might be considered an assertive, positive dynamic in a man could be seen as abrasive and pushy in a woman.”

Perhaps concerned about straining relations with their male peers, all ten women FM interviewed were reticent about naming specific incidents of discrimination. Carey, who was forthcoming with her experience thirty years ago, was more reluctant to give specific examples from the near past. But regardless, each of the ten said that they had definitely witnessed subtle discrimination at Harvard.

This kind of implicit gender discrimination is further aggravated by a lack of senior women in the decision-making process. The most important recommendations for a tenure offer come from a department’s chair and senior faculty, but of FAS’s 30 primary departments, only seven have female chairs—including temporary and acting chairwomen.

In some departments, the proportion of senior women is miniscule. Out of 36 senior faculty in the Physics Department, for example, four are women. Out of 35 senior faculty in the Economics Department, two are women. Out of 18 senior faculty in the Chemistry Department, one is a woman—the chair.

Hochschild says that without the input of more women, the members of ad hoc and hiring committees may remain unaware of their own biases. “Without concrete information about the kinds of barriers that can get in the way, people don’t recognize them,” she says.

But some barriers are even more obvious.

According to Klein Professor of Philosophy and of the Classics Gisela Striker, Harvard forces its faculty to pursue a “notorious workload.”

“I’ve seen people who say they’re just not going to put up with it,” she says. Though the workload could make faculty of both genders buckle, Striker says that the pressure may be “exacerbated for women.” With appointments in two departments and now-grown children, Striker sympathizes with her junior faculty colleagues. “For people who come through the ranks and want a family, the tenure process is particularly hard.”

But these factors have been around for a bit, and while the University once galloped ahead at an impressive speed to bring women into the fold, the clip has since slackened.

Looking out over the storied brick buildings of Harvard Yard as the sun begins to set, Carey tells it straight: “Clearly, somebody took their eye off the ball in the past four years.”

Maybe the new crowd has placed high stakes on a different horse.

IS PROGRESS NOW PASSÉ?

In the past, Harvard presidents and key administrators took the lead in forging opportunities for women faculty.

In 1988, after receiving heavy criticism for lackluster recruitment for women and minorities, then-Dean of the Faculty Michael A. Spence called for a committee to report recommendations to the Faculty Council to improve minority and female hiring and promotion.

The ten-member Verba Committee—chaired by Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba—made its final report in March of 1989. Among other points, it urged the Faculty Council to consider the establishment of a new administrative position: an Associate Dean for Affirmative Action. The Faculty Council heeded the Committee’s advice and appointed the first dean in the fall of 1989.

During his thirteen years at Harvard, Associate Vice President and Assistant to the President James S. Hoyte worked closely with the Associate Dean for Affirmative Action. “I met periodically with the dean, and we reviewed various efforts of departments to increase women and minority hiring,” he says. Hoyte coordinates the University’s affirmative action and equal opportunity policies, and his office publishes Harvard’s annual Affirmative Action Plan.

Mr. Hoyte explains in his thick Boston accent that the Associate Dean had the latitude to lean on departments when they made promotion considerations. “There was this focused effort, and up until a couple of years ago, it was quite clear, quite energetic, and quite encouraged by a number of senior faculty women, [which] resulted in very strong performance.”

And the results were promising for Harvard and for then-University President Neil L. Rudenstine, who had urged the University to consider these questions. By the end of the 1990s, tenure offers soared within FAS, and the proportion of tenured women in the Faculty took an upward swing in 1998 that has continued to the present.

But nobody would say that the situation was rosy, even in the heyday of the 90s. Former-Associate Professor of Government Bonnie Honig was denied tenure in the spring of 1997 despite lavish praise and recommendations from her department and peers in the field. Fifteen female senior faculty members wrote another infamous letter, this time to President Rudenstine, insisting that he reconsider the denial on the grounds that Honig may have been at a disadvantage because of her gender. No action was taken, and in the summer of 1997, Honig accepted a position at Northwestern University, where she now holds a tenured political science professorship.

Despite some fumbling along the way, though, the University and its female faculty were gaining new ground.

A STEP BACK

Kirby acknowledges in an e-mail that the current numbers are disturbing, but he hopes that a new approach will help. “This year we will add new, division-wide searches that will aim to identify outstanding talent across departments and disciplines, with particular attention to women and minority scholars,” he writes. However, the Divisional Deans’ main priority is interdisciplinary hiring.

And it was only after the elimination of the Affirmative Action Deanship in 2002 that the numbers began to tank. Even the creation of Divisional Deans in 2003 has done nothing thus far to alleviate the decline.

“Since there has not been that position,” Hoyte says, “I meet only from time to time with the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs [Vincent Tompkins] on faculty matters, but more frequently with the people in FAS Human Resources.” Recently, Hoyte has had less of a say in faculty hiring and has shifted focus to administrative and staff hiring.

Not surprisingly, the Women’s Caucus for Gender Equality is pushing for the reinstatement of an Affirmative Action Dean. “A committee or ombudsman person looking at these issues can be very healthy,” says Professor of Psychology Elizabeth S. Spelke. “There needs to be a presence to keep everybody on track.”

Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby ’88 agrees. Hoxby, well known for her school voucher lecture in Ec 10, is the first and only woman to be brought through the tenure track in the Economics Department. While she considers her own experience in the tenure track “reasonably straightforward,” she feels that someone needs to be looking over ad hoc committee shoulders.

“The Dean [for Affirmative Action] kept an eye on things all the time, talked to departments year in and year out about these issues, and she would come back and ask about scholars mentioned before,” Hoxby says. “People really liked what she was doing.”

Since he came to the University in 2001, Summers has been unabashedly involved where Presidents have traditionally been hands off. It was a surprise, then, that in interviews with The Crimson and in meetings with the faculty, the President pinned the blame for declining tenure offers on the departments. Summers urged them to “step up their energy” in seeking qualified female academics, saying that few women were brought to the table in the first place.

While Summers is correct in pointing out the small-scale failures of departments, it is unrealistic to expect large changes to come about without strong administrative action. “There has to be a clear message from the President and the Dean [of the Faculty] and the Provost and the Divisional Deans that this is important,” says Hochschild. “This is not rocket science, but I’m skeptical of whether it’s actually been done as well as it could have been.”

In an interview with the Crimson, the President says that the duty of focusing on women and tenure is not exclusive. “This isn’t a special responsibility, it’s a general responsibility with respect to all searches,” Summers says. But by diffusing responsibility—among departments, chairs, Divisional Deans, search committees, and various other administrators—there is no culpability when things go awry and no consistent effort to hiring and promoting women.

TOUGHER THAN IT SEEMS

While Summers and his administration embrace the idea of more women faculty, their actions to date have seemingly undermined this goal.

One of Summers’ stated hiring priorities has been recruiting academics of a certain age. Lately, the University has been seeking tenure candidates who are the so-called “rising stars” in their fields, a 30-something crowd. While many men may hit their academic prime during these years, women are reaching their biological prime. For some female scholars, the choice may come down to starting a family or starting a career.

“Even with the most cooperative of husbands, having children can cause problems,” says Striker, who had children herself while still a junior faculty member at Columbia. “One effect of having children is that you don’t write as much,” Striker says. Since publishing is one of the most important considerations when a promotion is brought to the table, not having a book with your name on the cover is a serious detriment.

To add to these more recent complications, there are small pockets of critics who think that the slide in tenure offers may speak to larger problems with Summers’ and Kirby’s approaches to encouraging the promotion of women.

One senior woman in the social sciences, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because she wished to maintain good relations with her colleagues, claims that Summers and his administration, in trying to lay the blame for the slide in offers on departments, “force them into a quota type of thinking.”

Rather than engaging the departments and pushing them to consider some of the barriers that women scholars face, Summers and Kirby force them instead to think primarily about numbers. “It makes people think there’s a choice between getting excellent scholars and getting a woman,” she says. “This approach causes a lot of problems in the department.”

SIGNS OF CHANGE

“If we’re truly able to go after the best without biases,” says Spelke, “we’re going to be hiring an increasing proportion of women, who are getting more and more doctorate degrees and coming through the academic pipeline.” Spelke is certain that if we don’t address the problem on all levels, we run the risk of hurting the quality of our faculty.

But she, as well as many others, are optimistic that the dialogue taking place under the crystal chandeliers of the Faculty Room and behind the ornate wooden doors of the Barker Center will help usher in a new generation of tenured women faculty.

Carey exudes confidence as her staff begins to clean up the toys and books in the waiting room of her developmental lab. “We have a critical mass of women here, and the critical mass of wßomen got together.”

With a Caucus demanding a reassessment of the promotion process, Carey has hope that new attention will be directed to the issue of gender equality, and that FAS will soon see the number of offers made to qualified women rise once again.

As the interview wraps up, she remembers when, as a graduate student, a psychology professor took some of his male colleagues to lunch. Carey later found out that the mealtime conversation focused on the “woman problem.”

“Basically,” Carey remembers, “he said that women finish their Ph.D.s and then they get pregnant, and they don’t do their work, so why are we training women?”

And though such rhetoric is no longer acceptable, there is concern that the remnants of outright sexism still color the tenure process. And with the current administration, there are two struggles that will have to take place—one against the unintentional but pervasive discrimination, and another against an administration that is hesitant to back words with action.