Harvard To Increase Funding for Childcare

Harvard University will increase its aid for childcare services by $7.5 million in an attempt to boost the number of females among the senior faculty, according to a report released June 13 by the Senior Vice-Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity Evelynn M. Hammonds, but some professors wonder whether the attempts to improve childcare fully address the problems faced by female faculty members.

The June 13 report, which deals broadly with issues of faculty diversity, is the first to be publicly released by Hammonds’ office. Her office was established almost one year ago at the recommendation of two task forces on women created in the wake of outgoing University President Lawrence H. Summers’ Jan. remarks on the dearth of female professors in the sciences.

Hammonds said the childcare initiatives are intended to seal the “leaky pipeline” present at Harvard, in which the percentage of female faculty falls from at least one third of tenure-track professors to less than a quarter at the tenure level at the majority of the University’s schools. The differences are especially drastic in certain disciplines; the report includes data showing that in the natural sciences, 25 percent of the faculty on the tenure track in the 2005-2006 academic year was female. But women represent only 8 percent of tenured professors in natural sciences, which Hammonds said is alarming considering the available pool.

“Having good support around childcare is really important for the success of our junior faculty,” said Hammonds. “That’s why the focus is there.”

The increased childcare funding will be used to expand the 350 childcare slots available on campus to 450 through expanded daycare centers. The report said that Hammonds’ office would push for at least two new daycare centers to be established.

Harvard will also increase the amount of scholarship funds for childcare available to faculty members, post-doctorate fellows, and graduate students

In addition, the report noted that Hammonds’s office has worked to standardize parental leave guidelines among Harvard’s 11 schools, ensuring that all schools automatically grant a minimum of one paid semester free of teaching duties for faculty members with a new child.

In an interview, Hammonds said the focus on childcare was a response to concerns that surfaced during a survey completed by 244 junior members of Harvard’s faculty this fall. In the survey, junior faculty said that childcare was one of the areas where Harvard’s practices were least effective.

Professor of Sociology Martin K. Whyte, who teaches a course called Sociology 108, “The Sociology of Work and Family,” said that Harvard’s environment is poorly suited to a parent’s lifestyle.

“There’s a whole thing about the institutional culture that basically ignores family responsibilities,” Whyte said, pointing to the numerous meetings—like the monthly faculty meetings that take place at 4:00 pm on Tuesdays—that occur at times inconvenient for faculty with children. “If you’re a single parent it’s very difficult. There's a part of the institutional life of Harvard that you just miss out on.”

But in interviews, some professors cautioned that looking to childcare reforms as the primary solution to the dearth of women in the senior faculty underestimates other historical forces still at work.

“A variety of employers around the country are trying to address these issues by allowing more flex-time and family leave,” said Whyte. “But in terms of Harvard, a lot of the problems have to do with the ways the senior searches are conducted and the ways in which are those are not friendly to women candidates.”

In response to research that shows women are often overlooked in traditional search processes, the report contains a number of new guidelines aiming to make searches more equitable. For example, the report calls for search committees to be “diverse in background, perspective, and expertise.” Hammonds herself reviewed over 400 tenure appointments over the past year, and in almost two dozen cases her office provided funds to help recruit professors from groups that are under-represented in the faculty.

MIT’s Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology Nancy Hopkins ’64, who has led numerous task forces at MIT that studied and publicized the challenges facing female academics at major universities, said that the survey may be biased towards some concerns among junior faculty and overlook broader problems faced by women at all levels of academia.

"The difficulty of having a family the way these careers are structured is well-documented and it probably looms large in the minds of young women who are thinking about that sort of career," said Hopkins, who sparked the controversy over Summers’ January 2005 remarks when she brought them to the attention of the Boston Globe.

"The important point is that even women who didn't have a problem balancing work [and] life discovered there was yet this other problem,” Hopkins added, pointing to her own research which shows that female professors at MIT, including those with tenure, have historically received smaller offices and less support than their male colleagues.

Hammond said that her work is not done. Next year, her office will conduct a survey of the entire Harvard faculty, collecting data that will allow a thorough examination of the relationship between gender or ethnicity and differences in factors such as salaries and chair appointments.

“We labor under no delusion that the initiatives to date—in part or in whole—fully address our institutional issues, or solve the work-life dilemmas our faculty, staff and students face every day,” Hammonds wrote in the report.

--Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.