The Boston Globe today reports that Harvard is establishing new child care and other grants for female and junior faculty (totaling $7.5 million over the next three years), in an attempt to support their careers and make Harvard a more women- and minority-friendly place.

The details can be found in a report released today on the website for Harvard’s new office for faculty development.

All this comes two weeks before Larry Summers’s last day at Harvard. He may point to this as something good that came out of his administration. But it’s a bit ironic to think that maybe all this wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t made those controversial remarks last year about women in science. A lot of these new developments came out of reports from Harvard’s Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering, which were created not long after Summers made those comments.