The U.S. Department of Labor has ended its nearly decade-long investigation into whether Stanford University discriminated against female professors, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The department concluded that the university had not mistreated at least five of the 16 women who originally complained.

The 16 current and former female faculty members and researchers originally filed a complaint in 1999, saying they had been unfairly denied tenure or promotions or had been wrongfully terminated, at least in part because of their gender. Over the years, 11 of the women dropped out of the complaint for various reasons—some because they had settled with Stanford.

The university applauded the fact that the Labor Department had cleared it of wrongdoing in the case of the five remaining women, and issued a statement saying the department had found no “evidence of any systemic discrimination.” But a spokeswoman for the department told The Chronicle that this wasn’t necessarily the case.

“The claim that there were no findings in systemic discrimination is hard to say either way because the number of people who withdrew from the original complaint really affected our ability to generalize to that extent,” said the spokeswoman, Deanne Amaden. —Robin Wilson