B-School Tenures Its Fourth Woman Ever

The Business School last week granted tenure to a woman for the fourth time in its history, school officials said yesterday.

Professor of Business Administration Carliss Y. Baldwin, a finance scholar who has been on the school's faculty since 1981, will be the third professor currently teaching at the school. The other tenured woman, Henrietta Larsen, gained tenure in 1961. She died in 1983.

"The fewness of women [on the school's faculty] reflects the comparative fewness of women in graduate studies in business 15 years ago," said Baldwin, who received her masters and doctorate degrees in Business Administration from Harvard.

"When I was [at the B-School] as a student, there were very few women doing graduate studies in business at all," said Baldwin. "As we age we come up for consideration, and some of us are lucky enough to gain tenure," said Baldwin, who earned her undergraduate degree in economics at MIT.

Schiff Professor of Investment Banking Samuel L. Hayes III said Baldwin's appointment will bring a wide-ranging young talent to the faculty, and relects the School's commitment to increasing the presence of women professors.

"She is very bright and thoughtful with a broad and eclectic interest in finance," said Hayes, Baldwin's former teacher at the B-School. He also noted her studies of the interplay between government and business.

Hayes also cited the value of Baldwin's work as an analyst with the investment banking firm, Morgan Stanley. "She is not a theoritician without a grounding in the real world," he said of Baldwin.

Hayes said it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit women to the Business School not only because there are so few women in the field but also because many institutions have stepped up their efforts to recruit the few numbers that do exist.

Baldwin may be one of many women to be granted tenure by the School in the years to come, Hayes said. "We've done our level best to attract, hold, and nurture women faculty, and now we're seeing the payoff. I'd expect we'd see further payoffs,"he said.

This fall, Baldwin will teach a seminar onempirical approaches to corporate finance, and inthe spring she will lead a seminar on the theoryof corporate finance. She is currently writing apaper with the working title: "Selling GovernmentAssets: the Lessons of Conrail," which deals withthe government's auctioning of the then-newlyprofitable railroad in 1984