WOMEN in the HUMANITIES

In recent years, women scholars in the humanities have made great strides towards parity in colleges and universities nationwide.

Why, then, asks a report released this month by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' (FAS) Standing Committee on the Status of Women, do women constitute only 22 percent of Harvard's senior Faculty in humanities departments--far below the average national rate?

Of the 129 tenured Faculty in humanities departments, only 28 are women.

This month's report, the third and final installment in a series on the status of women Faculty members, found that women in the humanities face the same obstacles that women encounter in other academic divisions.

Women scholars face both a dearth of female role models and the need to gain a tenured position during their prime childbearing years.

The first two reports, published in 1991 and 1997, discuss women in the natural sciences and women in the social sciences, while the most recent focuses on women in the humanities.

Committee Chair and Kenan Professor of English Marjorie Garber said each report deserves attention by Harvard Faculty members and administrators.

"The three issues build upon one another--we hope to reissue them collectively," Garber said. "We hope they are the beginning and not the end of a FAS-wide discussion."

The Report

The report emphasizes from the start the scarcity of women Faculty members in humanities departments. "No solutions to the larger issues can be envisaged without a significant increase in numbers," it reads.

Demographics in the humanities follow Faculty-wide trends.

Of the 433 senior Faculty members, only 58 are women. The number of female Faculty in the natural sciences, and social sciences is also below the national average.

Moreover, the report stated, women scholars are often assigned extra administrative duties when they are outnumbered in a department.

The relatively small number of women senior Faculty often leaves women undergraduates, graduate students and junior Faculty without enough role models. Garber pointed out, however, that junior Faculty members need not always have role models of their own gender.

Glass Ceiling?

Faculty demographics are better balanced among junior Faculty in the humanities, where 45 percent are women, but the gender balance has not yet reached the senior level.

As the report notes, Harvard has an abnormally low rate of junior Faculty members--both male and female--who are promoted internally to tenure positions.

The Department of English and American Literature and Language, for example, has never promoted a junior Faculty woman to senior status.

In the College, departments hire junior Faculty members for an eight-year contract. Their departments can choose to review the Faculty for tenure during their seventh year if they are plausible candidates for permanent positions, and the junior Faculty may be promoted to senior status at that time.

But very few junior Faculty members will get the opportunity to sign back on, according to Committee member Julie A. Buckler, assistant professor in the department of Slavic languages and literatures.

"Harvard is infamous for not having a tenure track," Buckler said. "In the past, only in exceptional cases were junior Faculty grown into senior positions."

According to Buckler, part of the reason why so few junior Faculty members get promoted is due to Harvard's high standards for senior Faculty members.

"This is Harvard, and Harvard wants to have the very best in the world," Buckler said. "You can only have a permanent place here if you are world class."

With just seven years before junior Faculty members are eligible for tenure, much of their scholarly work must be done early in their careers.

"You have seven years to prove you are a world class scholar, and that's a very tall order," Buckler said.

The report also notes that some junior Faculty members feel the same creative and unique approach to scholarship that initially got them positions in the University precludes them from ultimately receiving tenure.

Harvard's reluctance to promote from within is hardly news, but Garber said she believes getting the word out will help raise awareness of the gender imbalance.

"I hope people will not skip directly to the to the recommendations, but pay close attention to the reasoning and analysis in the first half of the report," she said.

Tenure or Toddler?

The eight-year pre-tenure period is difficult for both male and female junior Faculty members, but it can be an especially hard task for women.

Finding a mate and starting a family is difficult while trying to fulfill departmental duties and publish the scholarship necessary to achieve tenure.

Committee member Irene J. Winter, Boardman professor of fine arts and professor of the history of art and architecture, recalls one encounter with a particularly insensitive male colleague at the University of Chicago. When he learned of her academic aspirations, he said, `"So you want to be an archaeologist--well, you will never marry."

Although few would be so blunt today, women in the humanities still face a conflict between family and tenure.

"As they say, the tenure clock and the biological clock are running at the same time," said Elizabeth M. Doherty, committee member and assistant dean for academic planning in FAS.

"It is an issue that affects women differentially, but it is increasingly affecting men as well," Doherty said.

But Buckler said departments are now trying to help their junior Faculty members give the tenure promotion their best shot.

Garber said women do have a chance to lead personal as well as professional lives, even with the current pre-tenure period.

"What is impressive to me is that there are many women who are making families and getting tenure," she said.

"Things are shifting; they're just not shifting fast enough," Buckler said. "Department culture plays a major role in setting juniors to do well at Harvard. I've had a very good experience here."

The `Token' Woman

Even after achieving tenure--the academic equivalent of the Holy Grail--women in the humanities say they still face challenges to full parity.

Winter said Harvard's failure to create a Faculty-wide gender balance has often left tenured women feeling like the "token woman" in a department.

When she was beginning her career, she said, one of the ways women made their voices heard in academia was by obtaining the status of what she called the "honorary male."

Garber, the first woman to receive tenure in the Department of English and American Literature and Language, was the only senior woman scholar in her department for several years.

"Being the only [woman] is really very stressful," she says. There are currently six senior women in that department, none whom were promoted internally.

Others say they feel an extra burden because they are among the few tenured Faculty women in their department.

"It's crucial that women Faculty not be `token females' because if so, everything [they] say is the `female perspective,"' Winter said.

If It's Broke, Fix It

The report makes several suggestions to help remedy the gender imbalance still prevalent in most departments at the College.

Doherty said improvements could be made in the pre-tenure periods to help women create careers at the same time that they are forming families.

Extending the number of pre-tenure years would allow women to have more time to establish themselves in their fields, and doing more to make child-care affordable would let women maintain their progress once they already have children, according to Doherty.

Currently Harvard provides facilities for childcare but gives no subsidies to pay for the care.

Harvard has already taken some initiatives to help women junior faculty members. Following the birth of a child, junior Faculty men and women who are the primary caregivers of the child may take a semester of teaching relief. Faculty members who have taken this relief may also have the possibility of extending their pre-tenure appointments by one year.

Garber said actions by both the administration and by the departments to review the report will also help women's situation in the FAS.

According to the report, departments should adhere to Harvard's affirmative action policies that ensure diverse applicant pools. They should also give junior faculty members course reductions for the first year.

The report also says junior Faculty members should be informed of their prospects for tenure promotion, and if they will not receive tenure, departments should assist them in finding positions at other universities.

Equity between junior and senior Faculty members in their departments should be increased, the report says.

Junior Faculty should be included in departmental meetings, meetings should be scheduled, if possible, during daytime hours to accommodate Faculty members who have nighttime engagements, and departments should encourage junior Faculty members to be active in forming curricula, to teach courses and to join committees, according to the report.

But as the report states, dramatic changes in the status of women in the humanities will only come with an increase in their numbers.

Although Winter says she recognizes that the vast majority of Harvard's Faculty is male--only 13.4 percent of current senior Faculty members are women--she said she sees improvement coming.

"I think the University really is interested in improving these numbers," Winter said. "Even in the last 10 years, changes have been made, but at the same time, it's important that everyone take the patterns in the three reports seriously and find ways to implement change in institutional and departmental culture."