A women’s advocacy group cited Northwestern as an example of universities using delay tactics against gender discriminatory lawsuits in a report the group released Tuesday.

The American Association of University Women reported that universities have an incentive to prolong proceedings because they have more resources than most plaintiffs.

“Ultimately the university makes the decision on what should happen, so we put (Northwestern’s) case in that section, because the section is about very typical tactics universities use to defend themselves,” said Leslie Annexstein, the director of the association’s Legal Advocacy Fund.

The report, “Tenure Denied: Cases of Sex Discrimination in Academia,” uses 19 cases, including one from NU, to dispel “the public perception that gender equality has been achieved in higher education,” Annexstein said.

Janet Lever filed a lawsuit against NU in 1981, charging that gender discrimination prevented her from receiving a tenured, or permanent, position at NU as an associate sociology professor.

“I felt I had done as much as or more than my male colleagues who got tenure,” said Lever, who is now a professor of sociology at California State University at Los Angeles. “I had unanimous support from my colleagues.”

Lever said NU officials told her she could wait until after a reconsideration tenure review, a period of eight months, to file an appeal. Later, the university argued and the court agreed that Lever did not file within the 300-day statute of limitations from when she received her first tenure denial notice. Lever’s case was never heard.

John Margolis, associate provost for faculty affairs, said he does not recall the 1981 lawsuit against NU but says progress in gender equality has been made.

“The number of female faculty at Northwestern has been growing steadily in tenured faculty positions, and we anticipate continued growth in those numbers,” Margolis said.

According to Annexstein, only 27 percent of tenured faculty at four-year universities are female.

At NU the Committee on Women in the Academic Community prepares an annual report for the university that is similar to the one from the American Association of University Women.

In certain departments, such as political science and foreign languages, NU hires more women than the statistics would predict, said Charlotte Crane, chairwoman of the committee.

But across the board, there is a discrepancy between the percentage of women with Ph.Ds and the percentage of women who were hired as full professors — a discrepancy the report said could be attributed to gender bias.

Psychology Prof. Alice Eagly agreed that the statistics could be a result of gender bias, but they are only “an early step to a more informative analysis.”

For the psychology department, the most recent COWAC report said NU did not recently hire any women, while women earned 60 to 65 percent of psychology Ph.Ds. But Eagly said there could be reasons other than discrimination for the statistics.

“Only a minority (of psychology Ph.Ds) desire to become professors,” Eagly said.

In addition, some academic departments are too small for data to indicate a meaningful trend or bias.

Lever conceded there has been progress since her days at NU, but it still would be na