Shopping for Diversity

Professors who have long urged Harvard to implement reforms benefiting female faculty members say they found an administrative ear this semester, after University President Lawrence H. Summers’ comments on women’s “intrinsic aptitude” for science threw the problems faced by female faculty members into the spotlight.

In the aftermath of Summers’ remarks—which were delivered at a Jan. 14 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conference and made media headlines nationwide—administrators convened the Task Forces on Women Faculty and Women in Science and Engineering.

On May 16, the task forces released their recommendations, which apply to all levels of the pipeline leading to science careers, from undergraduates and graduate students to postdoctoral fellows and junior and senior faculty members.

And Summers threw his support behind the task forces with a $50 million pledge dedicated to their goals.

“We recognized that the crisis in January offered us an opportunity to make long overdue progress toward creating a Harvard that was more hospitable and supportive of deserving women and minorities,” Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen, a member of the Task Force on Women Faculty, writes in an e-mail.

“The guiding vision of the report was to generate a set of recommendations at each of the academic career stage levels,” says Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences Barbara J. Grosz, chair of the Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering.

The task forces’ comprehensive attention to the pipeline, professors say, puts Harvard at the forefront of universities.

But in other areas—including the creation of a senior vice-provost position for diversity and faculty development and the recommendation of programs to help female faculty members balance work and family obligations—faculty members and outside experts say that Harvard has simply aligned itself with, rather than surpassed, peer institutions.

Many say the injection of cash into the initiative is just a starting point—and that deeper cultural change and an infrastructure that emphasizes accountability are needed before the recommendations can have a lasting impact.

“Right now there’s this great sense of urgency around these issues,” Grosz says. “The major challenge is going to be sustaining that energy. I hope that will happen through setting up various accountable structures, so maybe we won’t have to operate in panic mode,” Grosz continues.

FROM THE GROUND UP

The task forces recommended the creation of a senior vice-provost post for diversity and faculty development. The vice-provost—who administrators say will be appointed by the fall—will oversee the recruitment of faculty and will review all junior faculty hires and tenure appointments.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby said at the May 17 full Faculty meeting that he will create a position within FAS that will serve as a liaison between FAS and the new vice-provost.

In addition, the task force reports called for the creation of an “endowment or some other durable funding mechanism” to support “targeted hiring.” The eventual goal is to appoint 40 additional faculty members over the next five years.

To create a more hospitable atmosphere for female faculty members, post-doctorate fellows, and graduate students, the reports also recommended that Harvard adopt policies, like childcare funds and the extension of paid maternity leave to one semester, to help faculty members balance work and family.

At the undergraduate level, the task forces urged the creation of a summer research program for undergraduates, which the University hopes to have in place by the summer of 2006, according to Mariangela Lisanti ’05, co-chair of a working group that reported to the Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering.

The working group also recommended study centers for undergraduates enrolled in science courses.

The University said on May 16 that it planned to act immediately on a number of the proposals in the task force reports and to provide training on leadership and diversity for top University administrators during their annual summer retreat.

A Transition Committee—composed of Grosz, Professor of the History of Science and African and African American Studies Evelynn M. Hammonds, chair of the Task Force on Women Faculty, and Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—will work with administrators to figure out how to implement the rest of the task force recommendations and delegate responsibilities, according to the reports.

YEARS IN THE MAKING

Faculty members have urged administrators for years to take action on behalf of female faculty members.

In 1991, Grosz chaired the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Standing Committee on Women, which produced a report on women in the sciences at Harvard that foreshadowed some of the recommendations released by the task forces last month. The 1991 report expressed concern over how departmental environments affect female faculty members and graduate students and focused on the problems that accompany women along the career pipeline in the sciences.

“Harvard is justly proud of the achievements of its faculty, but has yet to adapt its appointment processes and departmental structure” to take into account competition from other universities and new expectations regarding family and professional responsibilities, the 1991 report read. “If Harvard is to be successful in senior appointments, it must attract and retain the best young women as junior faculty members.”

Grosz says that while some of the recommendations of the 1991 report were implemented—including an emergency child care program for faculty members—many of the recommendations, such as mentoring programs for junior faculty members, fell by the wayside as departments lost sight of the proposals’ importance.

“The 1991 report recommendations were implemented initially, and then memories faded,” Grosz says.

Grosz says her experiences with the 1991 report were important in informing her work this year.

The 1991 report was not the only past call for administrative consideration of the problems women in the sciences face.

At the Jan. 14 NBER conference, a few hours before Summers’ speech abruptly returned Harvard’s—and the national media’s—attention to women in science, Grosz presented a report on women in science and engineering at Harvard, in which she mentioned the same pipeline problems that appear in the May task force reports.

And Faust says the task forces began their work with the assumption that they would recommend a senior position to oversee faculty diversity, based on suggestions that the Standing Committee on Women made to Summers after his remarks.

“One of the [Standing Committee’s suggestions] was to have a person in the central position....Part of the task force charge was to explore what that position should be,” Faust says.

LINING UP OR EDGING AHEAD?

Grosz says that one of the goals of the task forces this spring was to set a standard for other universities’ policies toward female students and faculty members.

“The idea was to provide a national model of what could be done,” Grosz says.

“We surveyed what was out there, we took the best of what we could find, and then we tried to push it a little,” she says. “If we’re not ahead, we’re amongst the leaders.”

Faust also identified some areas in which the task force recommendations are trailblazing.

“We have, I think, in these reports some recommendations that are quite path-breaking—some of the recommendations for transition funding, for support for postdocs,” Faust says.

But Faust adds that several other schools—including Princeton, Stanford, and Columbia—have administrative positions similar to the senior vice-provost position that Harvard has committed to instituting.

Claire van Ummerson, Vice President and Director of the Office of Women in Higher Education at the American Council on Education, says that while the task force recommendations are significant for female students and faculty members, some of the ideas are not unique to Harvard.

“What they are saying is very important. It’s been said by other institutions that have done similar studies,” van Ummerson says.

AN OPPORTUNE MOMENT

National changes in higher education and the growth of FAS have given an impetus to the task force reports that some say may allow the recommendations staying power, which some of the 1991 proposals lacked.

“[Nationally] we have a large number of faculty that are going to be retiring in the next 10 years....There certainly is going to be a shortage of the best individuals. Several institutions are already positioning themselves to compete for that number of individuals. There’s an urgency now that wasn’t quite there in 1991,” van Ummerson says.

And as FAS aims to expand its ranks to 750 professors by 2010, a new focus on hiring junior faculty members and promoting them to tenured positions makes the task force initiatives—which suggest ways to improve the climate for female junior faculty members—particularly relevant.

“We’re in a university where we haven’t invested in junior faculty,” Faust says. “A lot of the recommendations of the report are about finding great people and investing in them. There’s an important culture change that has to come with the shift to tenure-track as it’s been designated in FAS,” Faust says.

Van Ummerson says that changing institutional culture has often been the biggest challenge for other schools with similar recommendations on the table.

She adds that the climate survey the task forces have recommended—which Faust says will begin in the fall—and other data-collection mechanisms provided for in the reports should make it easier to identify areas in need of cultural change.

Grosz says that the task forces focused on developing accountability structures to ensure implementation of the recommendations.

“Once we have a structure of oversight in place, I will feel more confident that our recommendations will see the light of day,” Cohen writes.

SHOWING THEM THE MONEY

Professors and administrators say the $50 million allocation toward the implementation of the task force recommendations is a symbol of Summers’ dedication to the proposals.

Faust says that Summers arrived at the $50 million figure himself after hearing the task force proposals.

“He responded to the reports, which he received on May 16, with a decision to commit that amount of money as a kind of indication of sincerity and good intentions,” Faust says.

Kirby says that it would be possible to spend the entire allocation just in beginning to implement the recommendations.

“It’s a fund that could be spent in a very short order simply by the hiring of a number of scientists,” Kirby says, though he added that hiring is not the only purpose of the allocation, and that FAS has other means to hire professors.

Summers says that the $50 million is a baseline number.

“I am confident that the $50 million is a floor on what the University as a whole is going to need to commit to this effort, and it seemed important to make clear that there was going to be a significant...tangible effort,” Summers says.

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.