Under Administrative Pressure, Faculty Committee Ends Women’s Research Symposium

Harvard administrators pushed a faculty committee to cancel a long-running, biannual symposium featuring tenure-track women’s research, citing legal concerns about hosting a single-gender event, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Standing Committee on Women, which had hosted the symposium for roughly 15 years, ultimately decided to stop running the event after Faculty of Arts and Sciences leadership advised against selecting speakers based on gender.

The FAS will now host a new gender-neutral version of the program, Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser wrote in a Wednesday email to faculty obtained by The Crimson.

The symposium, held twice yearly, traditionally featured tenure-track women faculty, though it was always open to the full FAS community. Past invitations explicitly listed women speakers selected by the committee.

At an Oct. 3 meeting of the Standing Committee, Zipser advised the committee against holding a single-gender event, suggesting that it host the symposium without gender-based selection or have the FAS take over the event.

“In Fall 2025, FAS leadership advised the SCW that single-gender invitations of symposia speakers should be avoided,” standing committee chair Mary D. Lewis wrote in a statement. “After several discussions within SCW, it became clear that there was no way to satisfy the FAS advisory without losing some sense of the spirit and purpose of the symposia.”

Faculty members expressed frustration with the guidance at a Nov. 7 meeting of the committee, according to a faculty member familiar with the matter.

In January, Lewis informed committee members by email that the Standing Committee would no longer host the symposium, opting instead to graduate the program as the committee had done for previous initiatives, according to a faculty member familiar with the matter.

“After several discussions within SCW, it became clear that there was no way to satisfy the FAS advisory without losing some sense of the spirit and purpose of the symposia,” Lewis wrote in a statement to The Crimson.

The cancellation comes as Harvard has scaled back diversity-focused programming amid heightened federal scrutiny. Last April, the federal government accused Harvard of disparate treatment in its hiring and promotion of white, Asian, straight, and male faculty. In the months that followed, Harvard renamed offices and revised administrative language to remove explicit references to race, gender, and equity.

Lewis emphasized that the Standing Committee has historically focused on strengthening academic careers by advocating for policies such as parental leave, tenure-clock extensions, and childcare support — work that, while often addressing disproportionate burdens on women, has benefited faculty more broadly.

“Nevertheless, I am concerned about the future of mentoring, networking, and support for women scholars at Harvard in the present climate,” Lewis wrote.

Lewis also said that the committee has previously piloted initiatives that later became FAS-wide practices, including a tenure-track mentoring program that eventually expanded to include faculty of all genders.

“Even so, it is safe to say that the reasons these events were launched in the first place have not vanished,” she wrote.

—Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at abbysg.97. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.