Introduction

Abstract

The last thirty years have seen enormous changes in the status of women in research universities. Barely tolerated in many such institutions even as students at the beginning of the period, women were essentially absent from the ranks of ftill professors, and were only small fractions of all faculty ranks. In 1977 in chemistry departments, for example, women made up just 1.9 percent of all faculty ranks in the top 25 universities (ordered by research and development expenditures) and in mathematics that pro- portion was 2.7 percent (National Academy of Sciences 1979:68). The Women’s Caucus of the American Physical Society published what came to be known as the Zeros Table, listing the great majority of research departments that had no women faculty at all. A chemistry department chairman in a flagship state imiversity declared that “over my dead body” would there ever be a tenured woman in his department. Just over twenty years later there are women on the permanent as well as the probationary faculties of every imiversity, in the arts, sciences, and humanities, in medical, law, and engineering schools.