The University is claiming success in its ongoing effort to get more women on the faculty, according to Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity Pat Jones. Women make up about 43 percent of the incoming faculty class but still represent only 24.3 percent of overall faculty.

“This has been ongoing for quite a few years,” Jones said. “This year was particularly good at recruiting untenured women.”

Jones, in a presentation at the April 19 Faculty Senate meeting on the status of women faculty, said that the percentage of female faculty at the University has risen from 17.8 in the last 10 years. While women make up roughly 17 percent of full-time professors, Jones said, they represent more than one-third of all assistant professors.

Jones attributed the higher number of female assistant professors to the fact that most applicants applying for assistant professorships are younger than those applying for full-time positions. The majority of female applicants tend to be young.

“Because of age discrimination regulations, we can’t look at age,” she said, “but in untenured positions most people applying are younger.”

University administrators have been working for years to increase the number of women on the faculty. In addition to the new childcare program for untenured faculty members with young children, announced at the April 19 Faculty Senate meeting, the University has created the Panel on Gender Equity and Quality of Life in an effort to examine the steps Stanford can take to attract more female professors.

“The effort to further diversify our faculty is among the most important priorities we have as an institution,” President John Hennessy said in an email to The Daily. “We have instituted a number of programs over more than a decade to [give incentive to] our departments to recruit and retain women and people of color.”

While Jones insisted that the quality of the applicant is still the University’s primary concern when hiring new faculty, she also explained that the administration is eager to bring in more women, particularly in those departments traditionally staffed by men.

“Physical sciences and engineering are some of the major departments where we have fewer women,” Jones said, “but that’s true at every university, not just at Stanford.”

According to Jones, the statistics of overall women faculty at Stanford are comparable to those of its peer institutions. While she claimed that the current growth in the percentage of women faculty is admirable, she said she is also confident that there is much more work to be done to narrow the gap between men and women on the faculty.

“It’s all in a matter of getting more women into thinking of faculty memberships as career choices,” Jones said. “What we’re seeing is that the numbers are slowly going up. We hope that more women will enter into the pathway or pipeline towards academic careers.”