The Gender Equity Report -- released last week with detailed data about female faculty at Penn -- also announced the establishment of two ad hoc committees.
One will look into how female doctoral students reconcile parenthood with work, and the other will examine how faculty members on the tenure track balance career and family obligations, Associate Provost Janice Bellace said.
Several female professors say that these committees are necessary to address issues that face many women in academia.
Dental School Biochemistry professor Phoebe Leboy said that while she is excited about the committees, she believes there are other issues that do not relate to career-family balance that are important to female faculty members.
"There are a thousand little assumptions that people make about gender differences every day," she said.
History professor Ann Farnsworth-Alvear thinks officials should look more closely at the school's maternity-leave options.
The current legal foundation for maternity leave at the University is based on disability, so neither a father of a newborn child nor a mother who has adopted a child is considered "disabled" and thus is ineligible for paid leave.
She also said that under Penn's maternity-leave policy, a woman who has a baby during the summer cannot obtain maternity leave during the academic year, meaning that she may not be able to make up for lost research opportunities during the summer.
She added that the only way to get around this problem at the moment is by having supportive department chairs "fudge" facts about when the baby was born.
-- Uri Friedman
