This issue of On Campus With Women profiling what it means to be a woman who has chosen a career as a professor hit home for me in a very personal way. My younger daughter Emily is a fourth year doctoral candidate in African history at UCLA. The data and dilemmas in this issue are not abstractions.

When I received my doctorate in 1974, only 20% of doctorates were awarded to women. For Emily's generation, that number has more than doubled to 45.4%. Unlike my experience as one of only 9 female professors at my institution, Emily is more likely to have female colleagues and not be isolated because of her gender. She is also more likely to have colleagues of color. Today, 20% of doctorates—the highest in history—were awarded to members of racial and ethnic minority groups and women were the majority across those groupings,

While my first pregnancy propelled the enlightened president at my institution to invent a maternity leave policy for me, Emily, if she chooses to have children, will more likely be at an institution that has a defined childbirth leave policy already in place. This OCWW issue even highlights Stanford's and MIT's progressive childbirth leave policy for graduate students.

While my generation didn't have a name for it at first, Emily can, and does, turn to feminist scholarship—established, expansive, available—as an analytic framework for her dissertation. The majority of students she teaches will likely be women and she will have the benefit of teaching the most diverse student population in U.S. history. Her expectations for herself and what she should be and do are infinitely more expansive than mine ever were.

So I can measure in one generation the significant changes that have been wrought in higher education for women who decide to become professors. However, those changes did not happen naturally. Colleges and universities had to be wrenched from their old habits, threatened sometimes with lawsuits, given incentives or censures from government, dazzled by the sheer intellect and talent of women hired as faculty, or out-organized by women and some men who altered policies and practices that had kept women out or all too obedient when they were allowed in.

The sense of pride I feel in having played a very small part in the larger historical drama is tempered by the troubling findings captured in this OCWW issue. It is a reminder that for Emily's generation, detecting the sources of inequities will be all the more difficult. They are not so obvious, but are hidden unnoticed inside the very lining of the fabric of institutions. They are easy for all of us to miss.

That is, until an institution like Duke University initiates a comprehensive study of the status of women across the campus and discovers some shocking realities. While they were not paying attention and thought everything was proceeding toward equality so naturally, data revealed that the percentage of women assistant professors had not increased at all between 1991 and 2001. To be flat lined in a period when women earn almost half of the doctorates is a stunning discovery. Duke also learned through its systemic collection and analysis of data that women moving up the ranks had actually decreased in that period and that women were taking longer to be promoted from Associate to Full.

Just when things should have taken their natural course, the institution somehow reverted to its older exclusionary ways without even realizing it. The lesson is that the closer we come to gender equity, the more we need to resist abandoning gender as a lens of analysis. Without being attentive to gender, as people at Duke learned, old habits, practices, and structures that are so subtle, often so unconscious, very often unintentional re-establish earlier exclusionary patterns.

It is still a matter of making unnatural changes in academia, even for my daughter's generation.