Harvard Increases Funding for Childcare

Harvard will increase its aid for childcare services by $7.5 million next year in a move intended to boost the number of females among the ranks of senior faculty, according to a report released June 13 by Evelynn M. Hammonds, the senior vice-provost for Faculty development and diversity.

But while professors widely lauded Hammonds for initiating reform of the University’s family policies, some questioned whether the narrow focus fully addressed the problems contributing to a dearth of women in Harvard’s senior ranks.

The report, which deals broadly with issues of faculty diversity, is the first to be publicly released by Hammonds’ office, established last July at the recommendation of two task forces on women. The forces were created in the uproar following outgoing University President Lawrence H. Summers’ Jan. remarks about the “intrinsic aptitude” of women for science.

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 to less than a quarter from the junior to senior ranks.

The trend is visible across most of the University’s schools, according to demographic data presented in the report. In the natural sciences the disparity is especially apparent. In the 2005-2006 academic year, 25 percent of the faculty on the tenure track in the natural sciences was female, but women represented only 8 percent of the tenured professors in the discipline.

“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 add 100 new slots at Harvard-affiliated daycare centers, increasing the total to 450. The report said that Hammonds’ office would push for at least two new daycare centers to be established, including one on a new campus in Allston.

Harvard will also increase childcare scholarships available to faculty members, post-doctorate fellows, and graduate students to $2 million.

In addition, the report noted that Hammonds’ 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.

Hammonds said in an interview that she focused on childcare to respond to concerns that surfaced during a survey completed by 244 members of Harvard’s junior 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 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.

As mothers compose a greater percentage of the workforce, employers nation-wide are adjusting to demands for more flexible schedules and leave time. But Whyte said that looking to childcare reform as the primary solution to the dearth of senior women 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 those are not friendly to women candidates.”

The report contains a number of new guidelines designed to make searches for new faculty more equitable. For example, the report calls for search committees to be “diverse in background, perspective, and expertise.” This year, Hammonds also oversaw faculty recruitment, reviewing over 400 tenure appointments, and in almost two dozen cases her office provided funds to help woo professors from groups that are under-represented in the faculty.

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.