{"id":42336,"date":"2023-02-28T13:47:24","date_gmt":"2023-02-28T14:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/?p=42336"},"modified":"2023-02-28T15:36:50","modified_gmt":"2023-02-28T15:36:50","slug":"how-mit-scientists-fought-for-gender-equality-and-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/2023\/02\/28\/how-mit-scientists-fought-for-gender-equality-and-won\/","title":{"rendered":"How MIT scientists fought for gender equality \u2014 and won"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On the Shelf<\/p>\n

The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science<\/p>\n

By Kate Zernike
Scribner: 432 pages, $30<\/p>\n

If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from <\/i>Bookshop.org<\/a>, whose fees support independent bookstores.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1999, MIT made the shocking admission that the university had discriminated against its women scientists \u2026 and promised to do better. The 16 women who had challenged the status quo, most notably Nancy Hopkins<\/a>, the reluctant de facto leader<\/a>, were thrilled but eager to return to their roles as elite scientists.<\/p>\n

They largely moved on. So did the Boston Globe reporter who broke the story, Kate Zernike, trading her higher education beat for a national correspondent role<\/a> at the New York Times. But nearly two decades later, the #MeToo movement compelled her to revisit the moment for a new book, \u201cThe Exceptions<\/a>: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2018, I was thinking, it\u2019s great that people now think that executives cannot take off their bathrobes<\/a> in front of junior employees, but it struck me that the bias and sexual discrimination the women at MIT had pointed out actually remained a much more pervasive problem,\u201d Zernike said recently on video while on a family vacation in Utah.<\/p>\n

Covering politics, she has repeatedly seen men\u2019s success attributed to \u201cgenius\u201d while women get grudging credit for \u201cgrinding away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not take women as seriously intellectually or professionally, so this story underscores that point and serves as a reminder of the way we look at people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The issue became personal once Zernike had children. While male colleagues plastered cubicles with their kids\u2019 art, she didn\u2019t because she didn\u2019t want to be seen as a mom first<\/a>. It didn\u2019t help. Men at the paper would toss off comments like \u201cI was told you couldn\u2019t travel\u201d or \u201cI just figured you wouldn\u2019t want that job anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople make fun of workplace training we have to do but unconscious bias is real and so subtle,\u201d she says. \u201cTalking to women in different fields, I realized we\u2019re not quite as far along as I\u2019d hoped. It struck me that Nancy\u2019s story could be instructive to people.\u201d<\/p>\n

In intimate detail, Zernike narrates Hopkins\u2019 entire journey \u2014 from uncertain undergraduate in 1963 to determined postdoc to innovative cancer researcher and admired professor. \u201cIt was really important to Nancy that I show her passion for science and show her doing science,\u201d Zernike says. \u201cShe stumbled into this role as women\u2019s advocate. It was not something she sought out.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"A <\/p>\n
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Kate Zernicke returned to the story of change-making MIT women scientists in \u2018The Exceptions.\u2019<\/p>\n

(Harry Zernike)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Still, it\u2019s the obstacles that drive the narrative \u2014 an esteemed scientist grabbing her breasts, male colleagues trying to appropriate her work, lower pay, less grant money and less lab space for her and other women. Hopkins secretly measured every room in the building where she worked to prove her male superiors were lying about the space imbalance.<\/p>\n

Working alone or with men had made it easy to ignore systemic problems, and still easier for the scientist to blame herself. \u201cIt\u2019s humiliating so you don\u2019t tell anyone,\u201d Hopkins said during a phone interview. \u201cIt was only when women came together and saw the pattern that it changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zernike builds her case with the stories of other women, including cytogeneticist and Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock<\/a>, geneticist Mary-Lou Pardue, nanotechnologist Mildred Dresselhaus<\/a>, social psychologist Lotte Bailyn and oceanographer Penny Chisholm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hopkins says she was initially reluctant when Zernike reached out again; she didn\u2019t want to relive the fight. She had already attempted and abandoned a memoir. \u201cBut the other women in our group wanted this story told in fuller form,\u201d Hopkins said. \u201cIt was painful to go back \u2014 I was naive and clueless \u2014 but reading it I can now understand my own life. You see the historical context.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Perhaps as a sign of how pervasive those biases are, only seven of the book\u2019s photos are just of women; five are portraits of men or have a man as the focal point. \u201cI was not conscious of doing that,\u201d Zernike says.)<\/p>\n

For decades, each woman scientist\u2019s presence was considered by men to be an exception, underscoring the sense that women were not equal even though they had to work harder, sacrifice more and battle against endless slights.<\/p>\n

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\"The <\/p>\n
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\u201cThe Exceptions\u201d by Nancy Hopkins.<\/p>\n

(Scribner)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cWhen the MIT report came out there was this right-wing backlash, saying it was just these women complaining. So I wanted the book to be a close-up experience of what it feels like to be marginalized,\u201d Zernike says. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to object every time because you look like a whiner. But it\u2019s the accumulation of them that makes things so hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopkins insisted Zernike interview the men involved and give their version proper space. The response was mixed. The most prominent scientist, Eric Lander, was unrepentant. (Lander was recently forced to resign<\/a> from President Biden\u2019s cabinet due to accusations of bullying.) By contrast, Harvey Lodish, his partner in shoving Hopkins aside from a course she created, had done some personal reckoning.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s said, \u2018You should write this book, just please don\u2019t discourage women from going into science,\u2019\u201d Zernike says. \u201cHe can recognize in the greater context how this might have seemed to her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Years after the MIT apology, Lodish actually partnered with Hopkins to try bringing more women into the biotech field. When Zernike asked what changed for him, he responded, \u201cWe all grew up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back, Zernike and Hopkins both give mixed grades on what\u2019s improved since 1999. \u201cThe mistake every generation makes,\u201d Zernike cautions, \u201cis thinking that the progress they see is the end and therefore we don\u2019t need to keep talking about this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopkins agrees, which is why she sees value in a book recounting the events decades later. \u201cIf you don\u2019t keep working at it, things will not only stall, they may go backwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both women point to less than encouraging statistics \u2014 higher attrition rates for women, who still represent less than 25% of the workforce in science and engineering.<\/p>\n

Yet they celebrate MIT\u2019s transformation: The university\u2019s president, head of research, chancellor, provost and dean of science are all women, as are five out of eight department heads in the school of engineering. Hopkins, who insisted on a Black co-chair when named to lead a diversity council after the 1999 report, emphasizes that this list includes a Black woman, an Asian American and immigrants from Turkey and Pakistan \u2014 women for whom the obstacles \u201chave been doubled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as crucially, the culture is finally changing. While Hopkins and many of her generation forewent having children, she notes that women today show up for job interviews pregnant, take family leave and still get tenure. And, per Zernike, the lionization of the \u201clone genius\u201d in science, often used as a cover for bullying, is gradually giving way to a spirit of collaboration. \u201cAs we see more women in leadership roles, we will see that model shift more,\u201d Zernike says.<\/p>\n

When asked if men are educable on this front, Zernike laughs and points out that \u201cmy sons by osmosis learned that women can be geniuses.\u201d While she was writing \u201cThe Exceptions,\u201d Zernike showed her boys \u201cGood Will Hunting<\/a>,\u201d set at MIT. In the famous scene in which Will (Matt Damon) takes a break from his janitorial duties to solve a nearly impossible math problem, Zernike says her 13-year-old burst out, \u201cWow, he\u2019s Nancy smart.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the Shelf The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42336"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42349,"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42336\/revisions\/42349"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}