Harvard Comparatively Weak On Women in Sciences

To the editors:

Re "Women in Science" (Science and Technology, Feb. 10): You did a good job of presenting a complicated issue. As a former two-term chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Women in Science and Engineering, however, I feel it is necessary to put this subject in a more comprehensive context.

It is true nationally that women are a minority in most natural science fields other than life sciences, but Harvard's record in this respect seems worse than those of many similar or competing institutions. The figures you cite for concentrators in various science departments are similar to or slightly smaller than the proportions of baccalaureate degrees granted in those fields nationally; all science fields, everywhere, lose concentrators before graduation. Although it therefore appears that Harvard produces a smaller percentage of female science majors than the national average, that conclusion probably isn't quite accurate. Rather, any such deficiency is most likely due to the fact that Harvard enrolls a smaller percentage of women overall than do most comparable institutions. At a time when women earn 54 percent of baccalaureate degrees nationwide, Harvard still enrolls only about 46 percent women, and this skews the proportions of women concentrators in all fields.

To illustrate the problem: your article cites the fact that there are 247 male and 242 female biology concentrators, or 50.5 to 49.5 percent, and concludes that women are therefore only 1 percent less. But the male-female ratio among all Harvard students is 54 to 46, so there are actually proportionately more women biology concentrators.

While Harvard ranks eighth nationally as a baccalaureate source of male Ph.D. scientists and engineers, it is only 17th for women, according to National Science Foundation data. The absolute ranking is not important because it is dependent largely on total enrollments. But the gender differences do matter. Yale, Stanford, Brown, Cornell and several flagship state universities all graduate relatively larger proportions of future women scientists and engineers, so it can indeed be done without loss of quality. These figures are based on Ph.D.s granted between 1991 and 1995, and thus refer back to college graduates of the late 1980s, when Harvard's proportion of women was about 2 percent smaller than it is currently and many comparable institutions also had smaller numbers of women students. As a general rule, however, the most selective institutions usually have higher proportions of women science students than the average.

The continuing paucity of women science faculty, untenured as well as tenured, surely contributes materially to Harvard's relatively poor showing in educating women scientists. No woman smart enough to be a Harvard student can fail to note that she is unlikely to have much of a chance at the kind of science career that is being modeled so attractively for men. It is also possible that the admissions process somehow fails to identify enough promising women science students. In addition, there are persistent reports of women being discouraged by some faculty members' disparaging attitudes.

For a more general understanding of the issues, your readers should know that the facts about women in science and academic careers differ considerably from the common assumptions about the salience of family obligations and the grounds for women's decisions about careers. Nearly 40 percent of the women who pursue academic careers are unmarried and do not have small children, so the various family-friendly policies, important as they are to the other 60 percent, don't apply. But, strikingly, career outcomes differ minimally among the two groups, and married women with children are the more successful. Women's academic careers in humanities and social science fields are no better on the whole than in the sciences; in law and medicine they are much less successful, as Harvard's own numbers demonstrate. The problem isn't family obligations and time, or greater intrinsic difficulties in one field than another; it is discrimination in the workplace.

Taken together, women's under-representation among students and, notably, on the faculty, with egregious shortages in both social and natural sciences, makes Harvard appear to consider women less important than men. I doubt that the university really intends to send that message, and it should take more decisive steps to change it. LILLI S. HORNIG   FEB. 26, 1998

The writer received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1950.