Gender in the Humanities...and Beyond

Despite the larger numbers of women scholars in the humanities nation- and worldwide, the "numbers and percentages of women [faculty in these fields at Harvard] remain low," according to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' (FAS) Standing Committee on the Status of Women. The committee's report, issued in March, follows a 1991 investigation of women's status in the natural sciences and a 1997 analysis of the social sciences.

Some of the problems uncovered affect all junior-faculty members, but the authors--15 faculty members and administrators, women and men, tenured and not--emphasize that the challenges facing women pursuing academic careers in the humanities at Harvard "derive from their small numbers," which expose them to high administrative burdens and deprive them of opportunities for mentorship and cross-disciplinary work.

Although nearly half the untenured humanities faculty members are women, the study notes that "the proportion of women in the senior ranks is much lower (22 percent, despite the greater availability of women...)." Indeed, 9 of the 14 humanities departments--many very small--have only one tenured woman, or none. (Comparative literature, the fifteenth humanities department, has no faculty of its own.) Five departments have no women, or only one, in the junior ranks. From the 1987-1988 academic year through the current one, the number of tenured men in the humanities overall has held steady (100 then, 98 now), and the number of women has risen (from 16 to 28); among junior faculty members, the number of men has decreased (45 to 28), and that of women has changed little (from 19 to 23) as the ranks have shrunk.

The report's "most dismaying finding" was that promotion to tenure from Harvard's junior-faculty ranks is less likely in the humanities (21 percent of appointments, 1986-1987 through 1997-1998) than in either natural or social sciences (47 percent and 34 percent), and has held steady in the humanities despite rising in the other academic divisions. Here, the report sees two structural factors at work: Harvard's long-time preference for hiring external candidates; and young scholars' understandable interest in the generally scarce tenure-track humanities positions that do exist around the country. As these factors intersect, the report notes, Harvard finds it more difficult to recruit at the junior-faculty level, because candidates prefer positions where they have a better chance of securing tenure.

In some departments, like English and American literature and language, the report notes, "a number of highly talented women have been hired as assistant professors, stayed for two or three years, and left for more secure jobs at excellent places"--a phenomenon that recurred in that department this spring. (A "majority of departments in the humanities have never promoted a woman to tenure," the report notes.) The "cost of such short stays to the institution...is enormous," the report suggests, given the effort expended in repeated searches and "the loss of service and University citizenship incurred when an experienced junior colleague leaves."

The report, not yet formally discussed by the full FAS, suggests that building a "critical mass" of women in the humanities will require "searching scrutiny" of existing "institutional practices and prevailing intellectual habits of mind." It concludes by noting that "all the major administrative officers of the FAS" are men, as are Harvard's president and provost: "In the history of FAS only one of these posts, that of dean of the graduate school, has ever been held by a woman."

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