The panel also recommended that schools allow professors to take multi-year leaves of absence to tend to family responsibilities.

In an interview Friday, Jane Mansbridge, an expert on feminism who holds the Adams chair in public leadership and democratic values at KSG, praised the panel’s suggestions as “creative and interesting.”

She said that allowing faculty members to take multi-year leaves might be “not particularly good for students”—particularly doctoral candidates who are dependent on a single professor for dissertation advising.

But Mansbridge added that the “possible trade-off” between multi-year leaves and student advising is not an insurmountable obstacle. She noted that when she took a three-year leave as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, she continued to advise doctoral candidates.

The panel’s proposals are unlikely to be implemented at Harvard by the Task Force on Women Faculty appointed earlier this month by Summers.

The group’s chairwoman, Evelynn M. Hammonds, professor of the history of science and of African-American studies, said in an interview Friday that the proposals for a part-time track, tenure clock postponement, and multi-year leaves are all “outside the purview of the task force.

But Higgins Professor of Natural Science Barbara J. Grosz, chair of the newly-formed Task Force on Women in Science, said in an interview last night that “there are no limits on what we can propose.” While Harvard currently allows junior faculty to request that their tenure clock be stopped, Grosz said her task force would consider a policy under which the tenure clock would automatically stop for junior faculty with young children unless the professor asked that it keep ticking.

Grosz’s group met for the first time Friday. “It’s premature to say what we will recommend,” she said. “Stay tuned.”

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.