Tenure Trends for Female Faculty

While popular perceptions may hold that women are steadily gaining an increased proportion of faculty positions at Harvard, a recent report issued by the Standing Committee on the Status of Women suggests that this trend is, at best, an uneven one. Recruitment figures indicate that the social sciences in particular have shown little, or sluggish, progress in hiring women faculty. Regarding junior faculty, for example, the report notes that in 1991, "an admittedly good year," 37 percent of junior faculty in the social sciences were women--but five years later, that figure had dropped to 30 percent. This took place in the context of an "availability rate"--the percentage of doctorates awarded to women nationally during the previous three years--that rose from 31 to 37 percent over the same period. "In the social sciences, in particular, we have lost ground," the report states.

Statistics vary widely by department, and percentages can change rapidly at that level, where numbers are small. Much depends on particular department chairs, who "tend to be less or more aware of the issue, and to put more or less effort into leading on this issue," says professor of history Susan Pedersen '81, Ph.D. '89, who chairs the standing committee. "At the junior level, searches are conducted very much by the departments," she explains, "while at the senior level, there is greater University involvement, such as with ad hoc committees."

Economics and history lagged the furthest behind their availability rates: in 1996-97, only 11 percent of junior faculty in economics and only 18 percent in history were women--just about half the availability rate (24 and 35 percent, respectively) of each field. Seventy-five percent of sociology's junior faculty, on the other hand, were female--about 50 percent above that discipline's 51 percent availability rate. However, since the absolute numbers are, again, quite small, annual fluctuations can strongly sway the statistics. The report's tabulation does not, for example, reflect three female junior faculty members who joined the history department this year. "This [pattern we found] is something that can be reversed," says Pedersen. "I don't think any of this is written in stone."

The recruitment of junior women is significant because internal promotions have been a more common route to tenure at Harvard for women than for men over the last decade. The standing committee found that Harvard departments in general extended fewer outside offers to senior women scholars than to senior men. In the last 10 years, across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), 18 percent of all offers and 25 percent of all promotions went to women, but women received only 16 percent of all offers made to outsiders. In the social sciences, this trend is even more pronounced: in the past decade, 60 percent (six of 10) of the senior women in these disciplines attained tenure through internal promotion, while only 27 percent (15 of 56) of the men arrived via that route.

The committee did not find all the news discouraging. It noted that tenure offers to women, across FAS as a whole, have been rising: from 1986 to 1991, women received 13 percent of Harvard's senior offers, but that figure rose to 24 percent between 1991 and 1996. Even so, the report says "the overall numbers remain disappointingly low: of 280 senior offers over those ten years, only 50 were made to women."