by Christine Stansell

Jubilation reigned at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study in Cambridge last week, where I'm a fellow this year. The new president of Harvard is an admired and appealing figure, beloved by her staff and garnering immense affection even from the visiting scholars who've only known her for six months. About three-quarters of the fellows are women, and fully aware of the ardor of what Drew Faust just accomplished. To jump through one hoop after another, ever higher, for six months! The pleasure of the moment has only been enhanced by the new president's straightforward approach to being a candidate--no coyness or feminine demurral, she has said calmly from the beginning that yes, she wanted the job. She has her work cut out for her on many fronts, not the least on the creation of more equitable terms for women to work as faculty. People are always surprised when I tell them there are severe problems for women working as professors in the Ivy League, because everyone who went to these places after, say 1980--or has had children there--remembers so many female teachers. They're surprised to learn that they were temporary instructors who were never up for permanent jobs, or assistant professors now long gone because they got fired or left because they knew they never had a chance. The sciences are widely known to be fearsome obstacle courses; what's less known is how difficult it is across the board. A quick count at Princeton several years ago showed that the social sciences were only incrementally better than the sciences in their proportion of tenured women--about 20 percent. In important departments--philosophy, economics, politics--the numbers barely budge. In my own admirable and enlightened department, the all time high was in the early 1990s, with about a third of the tenured faculty female; since then, the number has crept down. We can still all fit in our tiny ladies' restroom. But while college administration has opened up, with four women heading the academic equivalent of Fortune Five Hundred corporations--Faust at Harvard, Ruth Simmons at Brown, Amy Gutman at Penn and Shirley Tilghman at Princeton--the faculties are a very different matter. Here, the intractable problems that affect women across the professions take hold. Little conscious or overt prejudice, but patterns of reward and promotion that consistently work to women's disadvantage, despite everyone's best efforts. Talented women drop off the fast track and "choose" less pressured jobs. The loss is theirs; but more important, it's the universities'. Motherhood, it turns out, is the killer--what academic women have long suspected has now been demonstrated in several huge statistical surveys. Motherhood radically lowers a woman's chance of getting tenure, while it significantly increases a man's. The appalling fact unearthed by a massive study out of UC/Berkeley several years ago was that over 50 percent of tenured women have never had had child in the household at all--not a biological child, not a stepchild, not a foster child. Fathers, on the other hand, gain in academic rewards from their children. Statistically, each child of a man makes him more likely to get tenure. The brilliant young mother appears stressed out and underproductive. The brilliant young father, no longer the obnoxious young nerd he might have seemed when he was hired, now seems all the more human and charming for his (discrete) family responsibilities. The new presidents are survivors of this process. All of them are mothers and lived to tell the tale and prosper. Simmons and Tilghman actually have more than one child--which has been the death warrant of many a woman's Ivy League career. How much they can do to find a way through what amounts to a crisis in training and retaining women in the professions remains to be seen. It's not as if higher education can afford any longer to squander so much talent