Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, constantly ranked as one of the top business schools in the country, has only one tenured women on its faculty and a task force formed to examine the status of female professors at Tuck found they face a "chilly climate."
According to Associate Dean Mary Munter, the single tenured women places Tuck -- the oldest business school in the country -- in "about the bottom four percent" of the nation's business schools in terms of number of tenured women professors.
An article in Business Week three years ago that revealed Tuck had no tenured female professors was a source of embarrassment for the school, and sent administrators scurrying to try to fix the problem.
The fact that Tuck still has only one tenured women is another slap in the face to the administration.
Interim Dean of the Tuck School Colin Blaydon said, "Clearly the number of tenured women professors is not where it ought to be, and we are aware of that."
Tuck Professor Kaye Schoonhoven, the first and currently the only tenured woman professor at Tuck, said since her arrival she has felt very welcomed by her colleagues and said her gender does not play a large role in her work as a professor.
"Little of what I do seems gender-specific, given the nature of a professor's job, other than wearing an occasional suit with a skirt," she said.
Schoonhoven, who has been at Dartmouth since last January, also said she would welcome more women on the faculty.
"My perception is that Tuck may still have the fewest women faculty of the major schools of business," Schoonhoven said. "I hope we are able to modify this in the near future, since Tuck is searching for faculty in the accounting, finance, and economic areas."
According to Schoonhoven, a late 1992 Business Week article entitled "Where are All the Women Business Professors?" cited Tuck and the Stanford Graduate School of Business as having the fewest women professors.
While Schoonhoven said Stanford has recently hired a number of women faculty, removing it from the bottom of the list, she said Tuck has not.
"The Tuck School is making some progress, but is seems quite slow, given the progress that other schools, like Stanford, have made in the past few years," Schoonhoven said.
Only two more women are currently tenure-tracked, said Paul Argenti, director of communications.
Karla Bourland, who has been at Tuck since 1990 and is one of the school's tenure-track female professors, said the treatment of women professors at Tuck "has to do with subtleties, not discrimination per se -- things like inclusion in social and professional circles."
According to Bourland, being a woman professor at Tuck is complicated because there are too few women professors to meet the demands of students and faculty.
Women students frequently seek women faculty as mentors, some male student may feel more comfortable talking to womenand, in terms of representation on committees, there are not enough women to go around, Bourland said.
Blaydon said the small size of Tuck's faculty distort the figures. "We have a small faculty so the percentage doesn't look as awful," he said.
Edward Fox, the previous dean of the Tuck School, began moving aggressively to recruit women professors, according to Blaydon. Schoonhoven was recruited under Fox and came to Tuck as a fully tenured professor, Blaydon said.
In June 1992 a Task Force on Women at Tuck was established to examine the situation for women at the Business School.
The task force held confidential interviews with every woman who had ever taught at Tuck and organized discussion groups with women students and with faculty members, Munter said.
The task force found that women professors at Tuck experienced a "chilly climate," according to Munter, who was on the task force.
She described "chilly climate" issues as "actions that taken alone seem trivial but taken together have a major impact" and cited three examples: crediting a woman's idea to a man, men not maintaining eye contact when speaking to a woman or men ignoring comments made by women.
Munter said "chilly climate" issues are difficulty to resolve because they are ambiguous.
"It is a tough problem to deal with because the issues seem trivial but over time they have a big impact," she said.
But Munter said over time, the attitude at Tuck towards women is changing both in the classroom and in terms of faculty recruiting.
"There is a palpable change in the air, an increasing sensitivity and an increasing respect," she said. "I think that if you look at the situation for women at Tuck, numbers don't tell the story. The number are small, but we are making progress although we are not there yet."
The committee was comprised of four women: Director of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Mary Childers, Associate Dean of the Faculty Mary Jean Green, Munter and History Professor Mary Kelly, and four chaired professors at Tuck: Kenneth Baker, John Shank, Clyde Stickney, and J. Peter Williamson.
Although Tuck falls behind most business schools in terms of the number of tenured women professors, it has one of the largest percentages of female students.
According to Business Week's "Guide to the Best Business Schools," of the top 20 business schools, Tuck has the second largest percentage of female students, behind only the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.
Thirty percent of Tuck's students are females, according to a recent survey in U.S. News and World Report.
Problems with female professors have plagued Tuck for several years. Several years ago Susan Ashford, a Tuck professor who was offered tenure, declined and moved with her husband to the University of Michigan. Fox and Munter told The Dartmouth that Ashford left because she wanted to teach doctoral students.
Fox also previously told The Dartmouth that Tuck offered tenure to two other women professors and both turned the offer down. He said the women's decisions were based on family concerns, particularly "alternative career tracks" between the women and their husbands.
But Bourland told The Dartmouth in 1993 that it would be an "oversimplification" to say that Ashford and three other female professors all left due to "family and teaching preferences."
