On December 14, 2004 — a full month before his now famous remarks to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) symposium on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce" — Harvard President Lawrence Summers chaired an extended discussion of the issues regarding women and tenure at the December meeting of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).
In that meeting — a summary of which was published last week in Harvard Magazine — lay the seeds of everything that would come afterward.
According to the summary, the meeting began with a series of exhortations from the University administration regarding the level of tenured women. FAS Dean William C. Kirby told the faculty the limited number of tenure offers to women in the prior year (four of 32) was "unacceptable."
The Dean for the Social Sciences David Cutler informed the faculty that in the future there would "no [departmental] search devoid of discussion of this issue."
The Dean for the Humanities Maria Tator told the faculty the numbers "send a distressing signal" to students and junior faculty, and announced that her division would henceforth "monitor [faculty] searches, maintain records, and intervene with departments."
Following the formal presentations by the administration, several faculty members spoke about the steps they thought had to be taken. Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen called for more women in positions of leadership, citing "scholarly findings" that women were more likely to be hired for jobs generally held by men when there were more women in "critical administrative posts."
Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby asserted women were being "disproportionately attracted to non-academic professions which have made far more progress in hiring: law, business, and medicine." She thought there had to be more "effective" faculty searches (which she defined as ones that would emphasize "scholarly brilliance" rather than a candidate’s "decisions on family timing or her career schedule").
Assistant Professor of English Ann W. Rowland urged efforts to develop junior faculty "during the life stage when many women face their most consequential family choices."
The marching orders could not have been clearer, and President Summers ended the meeting with his own endorsement of what had just been discussed:
President Lawrence H. Summers characterized the afternoon exchanges as "a very successful effort at collective consciousness-raising." Turning to specifics, he urged faculty members to raise any concerns about diversity during tenure reviews. Rather than making it an exception to extend the tenure clock to accommodate junior faculty members’ family needs, he suggested, reasonable accommodations of this sort ought to become the routine expectation. And departments could advance the broader University goal, he noted, by helping each other make key appointments when spousal positions are involved.
Raise the issue of diversity during tenure reviews. Routinely extend the tenure clock. Trade spousal appointments between departments to meet a “broader” goal. Summers’ consciousness seemed pretty highly raised.
But, in his final comments to the faculty, there was a little seed that would grow into an oak in the following month:
Finally, Summers challenged Hoxby’s assessment that women are making greater progress outside academia.
In a letter he sent last July to faculty members concerned about gender and tenure, Summers wrote, "I have been struck by the pervasive sense that, nearly a generation after the achievement of much greater gender balance in the ranks of those being trained for academic and professional careers, there has not been commensurate advance of women to the highest levels of these professions" — in the elite professoriate, at leading law firms, atop major businesses, or as leading physicians at major hospitals.
Examined this way, he said, the unfortunate fact is that FAS’s 19 percent representation of women among senior professors appears relatively favorable.
Accordingly, he suggested on both occasions, more research was needed to understand "pipeline" issues in society at large. To begin, Lee professor of economics Claudia Goldin and Allison professor of economics Lawrence F. Katz will conduct a longitudinal study of "highly talented women across a range of professions." In other words, Summers said, even as the University had to do better in its own faculty hiring, it had an academic opportunity to explore these broader social concerns.
Uh-oh. The warning signs were there: The suggestion the university was actually doing better than the rest of the business and professional world. The statement that more research was necessary to understand the "pipeline" issues. The conclusion that the FAS faculty needed to meet an "academic opportunity" to study the issues — which might be complex.
One month later, Summers appeared before the NBER symposium and suggested that "discrimination" was a relatively small part of the problem, that all-encompassing work requirements and women’s choices might be the main issue, followed by a puzzling statistical variance at the top (and bottom) of intrinsic aptitude tests, and that — here we go — more research was necessary to understand the issues, which were complex, but that it was the scholars’ responsibility to do it.
And all hell broke loose. It turned out the Harvard faculty didn’t need no stinkin’ research.