In the Globe, Linda Wertheimer investigates the problem of gender inequity at MIT.

Just one out of 25 faculty members granted tenure this year at MIT is female, a gender imbalance that appears to contrast with the university’s decade-old effort to boost the status of women.

[Blogger journalistic pet peeve: “appears to contrast”? Come on, Linda. I know you don’t want to look like you’re editorializing, but of course it contrasts.]

The point was brought home recently when the school’s in-house newspaper published a portrait gallery of the faculty members granted tenure this year; among the sea of male faces was the lone woman.

[Nancy] Hopkins, an outspoken critic of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers for his remarks about women’s ability in the sciences, said it was unnerving to see only one woman among the newly tenured professors featured in last month’s Tech Talk newspaper.”It’s a shock. I don’t have a thousand words as good as that picture,” said Hopkins.

There’s no simple villain here, not at a university with a female president. But according to Wertheimer, university officials “will investigate impediments to women receiving tenure.”

Note the implicit assumption in that quote—it’s important. If there aren’t as many women getting tenured as men, it’s because there are “impediments” to women receiving tenure. Yikes. That’s like a judge opening a trial by telling the defendant that he’s guilty, and this trial is going to find out why.

The questions that, in part, precipitated the demise of Larry Summers continue to plague academia. In a small way, perhaps, Summers can take comfort from that.