No place for women? Harvard's changed

Tamar Lewin

Five years after Lawrence H Summers, then the president of Harvard University, suggested that innate differences might explain why women are less successful in science and math careers than men, Harvard is, in some ways, a different place.

Professors can get up to $20,000 to help pay for child care, there are new programs to encourage young women to pursue science and research careers, and seven of the 16 members of Harvard's Council of Deans are now women.

"This is not your father's Harvard," said Martha Minow, dean of the law school. In the furor over his remarks, Summers — now the senior economic adviser to President Obama — resigned and was replaced by Drew Gilpin Faust, the first woman to lead the university. Universitywide, slightly more than a quarter of Harvard faculty members are women, an all-time high, with the senior faculty accounting for most of the increase. Women also lead the engineering school, the law school, the education school, Harvard College and the Radcliffe Institute. And while Harvard extended 4 of its 32 tenure offers to women in the year before Dr. Summers's speech, last year, tenure offers went to 16 women and 25 men.

Since Dr. Summers's resignation in 2006, Harvard has also poured millions of dollars into child care centers and family-friendly programs for the faculty — including research-enabling grants that let junior faculty members take their babies and nannies on field trips.

But Harvard has changed in another way, too: Its endowment has lost $11 billion. And with budget cuts now high on the agenda, Dr. Faust acknowledged that changes might be coming in its spending on such programs. "This was a pilot, an experiment, described as that," she said. "We're collecting data on what works best, and still thinking that through."

Then, too, with the faculty expected to shrink slightly in coming years, bringing in more women will be more difficult.

In his now-infamous remarks, at a conference in January 2005, Dr. Summers said "there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude," which he said are reinforced by "lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination." Today, there is little eagerness at Harvard to discuss the Summers incident. Two top scientists, Cynthia M. Friend, the former head of the chemistry department, and Barbara J. Grosz, who led a task force on women in science after Dr. Summers's speech, declined to be interviewed.

At Harvard, as at most American research universities, math and science remain male domains. The math department's first tenured woman, Sophie Morel, arrived just three months ago. The department admitted two female graduate students this year and none last year. NYT