Tenure Problems Persist for Women

Ann Pellegrini's ('86) stay at Harvard was short and sweet. Despite positive recollections of her two years as a junior faculty member in the English department and acting director of women's studies, the gender studies specialist left the university for an associate professorship at Barnard.

"Harvard has a horrible record of tenuring junior faculty, and the English department has never tenured a junior woman," Pellegrini says. "And I thought given the work I do, I wasn't the kind of woman they would want to start with."

"She made a decision to get going while the going was good," says Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Bradley S. Epps.

Clearly, Harvard's traditional unwillingness to grant tenure to its junior faculty affects men and women alike. But Pellegrini says her status as a woman specializing in interdisciplinary research made the prospect of internal promotion at Harvard even more remote.

Had Pellegrini's research been in the hard sciences, her departure would have undoubtedly been seen as a casualty of a culture of discrimination against women in the field.

Just last week, MIT hosted its second conference on increasing women's participation at the highest levels of mathematics and the hard sciences, including representatives from Harvard, Yale and Stanford, which drew national attention.

But as an English professor interested in feminist and cultural theory, her loss was not quite so easy to label.

Female faculty in the humanities say that the obstacles they face rarely reek of conscious discrimination.

But critics within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) contend that many women's gender and their intellectual work become inextricably linked, ultimately making the goal of a gender-balanced faculty even more difficult to attain.

An Upward Spiral?

In terms of sheer numbers, there is little doubt that the University has made progress on gender equality.

One third of Harvard's junior faculty and 16 percent of its senior faculty are women, almost double the figure for tenured professorships in 1988.

One in six may hardly be impressive, but according to University Hall, current faculty members set the clock for change through their decisions to retire.

"Since we have a faculty already," says Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen '81-'82, "obviously any shift in its gender balance will be slow and incremental. The question is less the gender ratio within the faculty as a whole than the ratio among current hires."

Nine of the 19 tenure appointments this year were women. The most dramatic symbol of this success was its acknowledgement by longstanding Harvard critic Committee for Equality of Women at Harvard (CEWH).

The alumnae group, which had encouraged members to withhold their contributions to the University and instead place them in a special fund, has now offered to fund a joint Harvard-Radcliffe chair with the money.

And according to Mallinckrodt professor of physics Howard Georgi '67-'68, Harvard's women faculty are given salaries equal to their male counterparts.

But faculty say that Harvard's tenuring policies, evolving only slowly out of a near-blanket refusal to promote to the senior level, greatly reduce the numbers of top female scholars knocking on Harvard's door.

"In order to get the very best, if you tell them Harvard never promotes, they're not going to come," says Susan R. Suleiman, Douglas professor of the civilization of France and professor of comparative literature.

Of course, Harvard's record on granting tenure discourages junior men and women equally from taking positions at Harvard.

"Everybody comes in knowing they're going to seek a tenure-track position somewhere else," says Stephen H. Biel, director of studies for history and literature.

But this pattern makes the task of remedying historic inequalities much more difficult. And many talented female scholars who come to Harvard early in their careers--like Pellegrini--are lost for good when their career prospects become apparent.

"Harvard is not a tenure-track institution, and we lose a lot of women early in their careers," says Kenan professor of English Marjorie Garber. "Every [female] loss is more visible and problematic."

The pattern is unmistakable. "Many people come and leave. And they leave earlier. We lose a lot of very good people. They don't even apply," says newly tenured professor of Romance languages and literatures Bradley S. Epps.

Romancing Feminism

And though women continue to enter the humanities at Harvard, the degree to which they are accepted remains in question.

In its March 1999 report on the humanities, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women "heard concerns about...the sense of overwork experienced by many women...as a result of their small numbers and the fact that many are engaged in interdisciplinary work and have ties to more than one department or program."

Women in hard sciences are universally strangers in a strange land, attempting to penetrate a traditionally male world, but women in the humanities often say their specialties are demeaned as "women's work."

"Traditionally," says Professor of Romance languages and literatures Alice A. Jardine, "the quantitative has been male and the qualitative has been female...These forms of knowledge become genderized...[sex and subject] become linked in every way possible."

Harvard experts on cultural studies say women cluster in either established feminine areas of study or new disciplines which are theirs for the taking.

Jardine says the Romance department, whose senior faculty is evenly split between men and women, has gained notoriety among the faculty.

"Since the 1980's, the department has been identified by many elements of Harvard as the one having...feminist senior women who are very outspoken, and I do think it's made a kind of backlash...[But] when strong women intellectually congregate in a particular discipline or department, they have to be ready."

Between Fields and Nowhere to Go

Women's studies and other interdisciplinary programs at the University have also been Meccas for accomplished female scholars--a trend that Pellegrini attributes to the "gendering" of interdisciplinary work.

"Faculty in gender and sexuality are more likely to be doing interdisciplinary work and are more likely to be women," she says.

But some say women's concentration in these fields results in what Epps terms a subtle "lack of crediting" to their work.

"Women's Studies has always had second-class status in the minds of many at Harvard," says Acey Welch, co-chair of CEWH.

Most interdisciplinary research takes place in nondepartmental programs such as Social Studies, Literature, History and Literature and Women's Studies. And faculty in these fields say joint appointments often entail greater workloads and a lesser chance of promotion.

"You're spending half your time elsewhere..." says Garber. "It's a real problem that people in Social Studies don't get promoted."

Even for professors who find the time, often the very nature of their work is called into question.

"There's a difference of opinion as to the value of theory," says Pellegrini. "Interdisciplinary work is harder to evaluate because it crosses departmental boundaries... Departments retain people who maintain the narcissism of what the field is."

But even administrators like Garber who advocate departmental status for these programs acknowledge that it upset much of the Harvard establishment to do so.

Professor of Government Seyla Benhabib, chair of the Social Studies program and former chair of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, announced her departure for Yale this fall, saying she thought Social Studies would never attain departmental status.

Pedersen says FAS may soon pay the price if it does not devote extra attention and resources to interdisciplinary research.

"Women tend to be overrepresented in new and interdisciplinary areas of research," she writes in an e-mail message. "It is important, then, to make sure that field definitions for searches are broad enough to include those scholars. If one defines a field narrowly or without taking account of new areas of research, one can overlook top women scholars."

Mentors or Mothers?

According to the Standing Committee report, women with multiple departmental affiliations "report a real sense of overload."

Many female faculty say that they take on excessive administrative and mentoring responsibilities.

"A theory is that it's expected that women nurture and mother," Epps says. "And if they don't, they're not assuming a feminine role."

Georgi says he thinks female faculty members at Harvard are disproportionately overworked.

"Women have more advising hours, do more theses," Pellegrini says. "I like meeting with students at Harvard, but a good teacher is a way to damn a person for tenure, because they're going to look at your scholarship."

According to Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby this pattern holds, especially when women in a department are few and far between.

"40-45 percent of the students are women and there's two women in the department," she says. "There's no way you're not going to get a very disparate load."