Some Ivies Are Struggling in Efforts to Reduce the Gender Gap in Faculty Posts

Princeton University reports that while approximately half of the student body is women, only 25 percent of its tenure or tenure-track faculty are women.

Deborah Prentice, chair of the department of psychology and co-chair of the Trustee Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity at Princeton, told the student newspaper, “Our principled and well-intentioned efforts have not yielded the desired results.” She added, “When you advertise a job, you don’t just want to take into account who comes to it, you want to encourage people to apply, who don’t think they necessarily belong.”

At Harvard University, the story is much the same. A new report from the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences shows that there are 712 faculty members in this division of the university, which includes Harvard College. Of these, 181, or 25.4 percent are women. The report also showed that there are 557 tenured faculty members in the Arts and Sciences. Of these, 127, or 22.8 percent, are women.