In came as a surprise to many readers that in the 2014 WIAReport Annual Survey of First-Year Women at the Nation’s Leading Research Universities, Harvard University ranked next to last in its percentage of women in the entering class. Last fall, only 775 women were in the first-year class of 1,622 students. Thus, women were 44.8 percent of the incoming class. Of the leading research universities that responded to our survey, only the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena had a lower percentage of women in the first-year class.
But Harvard reports significant progress this year. For students who will be entering Harvard this fall, nearly 49 percent are women. Some 82 percent of the women accepted for admission at Harvard this spring have decided to enroll at the university.