Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this Podcast Will
Speaker 1: Kill You. Welcome everyone to the latest episode in our
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Speaker 1: the book of the Week. Pullitzer Prize winning journalist reporter
Speaker 1: for the New York Times since two thousand and author
Speaker 1: Kate Zernike joins me to discuss her recent book, The Exceptions,
Speaker 1: Nancy Hopkins, MIT and the Fight for Women in Science.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety nine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT
Speaker 1: made an extraordinary admission that they had discriminated against women
Speaker 1: on its faculty, confirming a suspicion held by many for
Speaker 1: many years and prompting a reckoning for institutions of higher
Speaker 1: education across the country. In The Exceptions, Zernichi, who was
Speaker 1: one of the reporters at the Boston Globe to break
Speaker 1: this story in nineteen ninety nine, revisits the sequence of
Speaker 1: events that led to sixteen women on the faculty of
Speaker 1: MIT coming together to demand a seat at the table
Speaker 1: that had for so long been denied. Zernike centers this
Speaker 1: story on groundbreaking molecular biologist doctor Nancy Hopkins, taking readers
Speaker 1: through Nancy's educational and career journeys, and culminating with the
Speaker 1: story of how armed with a tape measure and Nancy
Speaker 1: began to quantify the marginalization that women faculty at MIT faced.
Speaker 1: By taking this panoramic approach, Zernichie paints a vivid picture
Speaker 1: of how gender equality in higher education evolved over the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, starting with more overt or explicit gender discrimination,
Speaker 1: such as denying women students access to the library on campus,
Speaker 1: and shifting to be more subtle, more insidious, like senior
Speaker 1: faculty men of course, lying about how much lab space
Speaker 1: women faculty have compared to the men. Spoiler, women actually
Speaker 1: had much less.
Speaker 2: But you probably could.
Speaker 3: Have guessed that.
Speaker 1: Zernike's thoughtful storytelling places these events in the broader context
Speaker 1: of changing gender roles and popular discourse on whether women
Speaker 1: could or should be scientists.
Speaker 3: In the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: What results is an enlightening, infuriating, but ultimately inspiring book
Speaker 1: that everyone should add to their to read lists. When
Speaker 1: this story broke in nineteen ninety nine, it was at
Speaker 1: a time when the problem of sexual discrimination in higher
Speaker 1: education was kind of thought to have been solved, at
Speaker 1: least for the most part. Nancy Hopkins and the other
Speaker 1: women faculty across the MIT campus who brought this marginalization
Speaker 1: to light showed that that was far from the truth,
Speaker 1: and being scientists, they quantified this marginalization and minimization clearly
Speaker 1: demonstrating that their experiences were not just one offs, that
Speaker 1: it was not just the attitude of one particular department,
Speaker 1: that it was not about scientific achievement or not being
Speaker 1: a team player. That the discrimination they faced was systemic
Speaker 1: and actively discouraged women from remaining in science in academic institutions.
Speaker 1: This story resonated with me so much to learn about
Speaker 1: these amazing women and how they refuse to be ignored,
Speaker 1: how through their tireless efforts they made higher education a better,
Speaker 1: more welcoming place for women in science today. I am
Speaker 1: so grateful. At the same time, I think this book
Speaker 1: resonated to such a degree because parts of this story
Speaker 1: feel painfully familiar. It serves as a reminder that the
Speaker 1: problem of marginalization in academia is not close to being solved,
Speaker 1: but we are a whole lot closer now than we
Speaker 1: would be without the efforts of Nancy Hopkins and the
Speaker 1: other women faculty at MIT featured in Kate Zernike's amazing book,
Speaker 1: The Exceptions. So let's take a quick break here and
Speaker 1: then get into some questions. Kate, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining me today. I am thrilled to chat with
Speaker 1: you about your incredible and incredibly infuriating book, The Exceptions.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me about the title of your book?
Speaker 1: Who are the Exceptions? Where did this title come from?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I'm so excited to be here,
Speaker 2: thank you for having me. You know, it's really a
Speaker 2: question of not just two are the exceptions, but what
Speaker 2: are the exceptions? And I started out this book and
Speaker 2: I knew exactly what the story was. I knew the
Speaker 2: arc of the story, but I didn't know the title.
Speaker 2: And I would say about halfway through the reporting, it
Speaker 2: became clear to me that like, there was no other title,
Speaker 2: there was nothing else that I could call this book.
Speaker 2: Because every time I talk to people so often in
Speaker 2: conversation or as I was reading something, I would stumble
Speaker 2: on this word, which was like exceptions, or it was
Speaker 2: the exception, or she was exceptional, and so on some
Speaker 2: level it was like, well, historically, like why are these
Speaker 2: women so exceptional? Why is it so exceptional that women
Speaker 2: can succeed in science, you know, do you have to
Speaker 2: be exceptional in the sense of being exceptionally smart? Like
Speaker 2: is there something genius or unique about you? But it
Speaker 2: was also you know as women. As I talked to
Speaker 2: these women and ask them about their story or their stories,
Speaker 2: they would say to me, well, you know, this thing
Speaker 2: happened to me, but I thought it was the exception,
Speaker 2: or I thought I was the exception, or I thought
Speaker 2: it was just the circumstances. You know, it was really
Speaker 2: just the exception. And this just as it accumulates, you
Speaker 2: start to thinking, well, actually, no, that's not exceptional, like
Speaker 2: this is actually very common, and you know, the exception
Speaker 2: starts to look more like the rule. So for some women,
Speaker 2: this manner of dealing, you know, telling yourself this was
Speaker 2: the exception, this was just the circumstances. That was a
Speaker 2: way of coping, and it actually allowed them to be successful.
Speaker 2: Like they just put blinders on and said, you know,
Speaker 2: if I get distracted by this stuff, I'm going to
Speaker 2: go off the rails and I can't do that. But
Speaker 2: for other women it was it became very demeaning and
Speaker 2: very crippling in a way because they kept something would
Speaker 2: happen to them, and they would say, oh, well, I
Speaker 2: must be the problem here, and so it stopped them
Speaker 2: from succeeding. So it was just this sort of interesting
Speaker 2: you know. It was this idea of how seeing these
Speaker 2: things as the exceptions can help and can hurt. But
Speaker 2: also these women really were, on the most fundamental level,
Speaker 2: they were exceptional because they were able to get jobs
Speaker 2: in science at a time when women couldn't. They were
Speaker 2: exceptionally right, they were exceptionally accomplished. But this whole idea
Speaker 2: of being the exception was in some way holding them back.
Speaker 2: Even just what Mit did here, which was to admit,
Speaker 2: as a result of all the work, of all the
Speaker 2: research that these women did, that it had discriminated against
Speaker 2: the women on its faculty, that in itself was an
Speaker 2: exceptional move. And really it wasn't just the women who
Speaker 2: were affected and sort of influenced by this idea of
Speaker 2: things being exceptional, of circumstances being exceptional. It was the men.
Speaker 2: One of the men who became an early ally to
Speaker 2: these women talked about how he knew all of their
Speaker 2: stories and he understood, you know, he thought he understood
Speaker 2: what was happening in their lives. But there's a point
Speaker 2: in the book where all these women are in his office.
Speaker 2: There's six women in his office, six of the total
Speaker 2: sixteen of the story, and one after another they tell
Speaker 2: their stories and they tell their experiences, and he says
Speaker 2: later that this was he compares it later to one
Speaker 2: of the greatest scientific epiphanies he's ever had, like a
Speaker 2: real Eureka moment, and he said, you know, had any
Speaker 2: of these women come to me one on one, I
Speaker 2: would have said, oh, her problem is this. Her problem
Speaker 2: is that it's the exception, it's not the rule. Seeing
Speaker 2: as women and hearing their stories one after another, he
Speaker 2: was like, oh, we have a problem. And that's what
Speaker 2: really started the whole series of events in motion that
Speaker 2: did ultimately result in MIT acknowledging it had discriminated against
Speaker 2: the women on its faculty.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about that incredible, extraordinary admission.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of jumping to the end of
Speaker 1: your book chronologically, but can you tell me how you
Speaker 1: first came across this story of Nancy Hopkins and the
Speaker 1: other women faculty at MIT that faced this like decades
Speaker 1: of sexual harassment and discrimination. And then finally we're able
Speaker 1: to get that acknowledged.
Speaker 2: I started covering higher education for the Boston Globe in
Speaker 2: September of nineteen ninety eight, and my father, who was
Speaker 2: a physicist, said to me at the time, Oh, you
Speaker 2: should look into the work this woman named Millie dressel
Speaker 2: House is doing to get more women into physics. And
Speaker 2: Millie was this incredible when we talk about exceptional, she
Speaker 2: was amazing. She had four children. The story was that
Speaker 2: she had taken a total of five days maternity leave
Speaker 2: because two of the kids im born on weekends and
Speaker 2: one on a snow day. I mean, it was really
Speaker 2: she's extraordinary, She's exceptional. So my father says it to me,
Speaker 2: and I think, well, that is the worst idea ever, Like, what,
Speaker 2: what's the action there? What's actually happening in that story.
Speaker 2: It's going to be some story about, like, you know,
Speaker 2: some good program trying to solve a long standing problem.
Speaker 2: Six months later, I got a tip from someone in
Speaker 2: the newsroom that there was something going on with women
Speaker 2: in discrimination and MIT. And the only thing I had
Speaker 2: was the name of this woman, Nancy Hopkins, and her
Speaker 2: phone number, and so I called her and she told
Speaker 2: me that in fact, MIT was going to admit that
Speaker 2: to discriminated against the women on its faculty. And I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, well, there's definitely a verb in that story.
Speaker 2: There's you know, there's action there. And that was really
Speaker 2: striking to me. And this was not something in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight you thought was going to happen. I thought
Speaker 2: when I heard about women in discrimination MIT, I thought, oh,
Speaker 2: someone's file of the lawsuit, right, and it'll be like this,
Speaker 2: he said, she said story. Then she tells me that
Speaker 2: the reason MIT is admitting this is because this group
Speaker 2: of women, including her, led by her, had gathered the
Speaker 2: data to show how women were discriminated against. So it
Speaker 2: was salary and lab space, and you know the amount
Speaker 2: of work that they did outside of their you know,
Speaker 2: their their usual job roles, you know, speeches and appearing
Speaker 2: on committees. That work was generally done for free. All
Speaker 2: of the ways in which women were disadvantaged compared to men.
Speaker 2: So that to me just struck me as kind of like,
Speaker 2: there's this traditioner on MIT of hacks right where they
Speaker 2: sort of you know, before we heard hackers, it was
Speaker 2: MIT hacks, and they would do things like clever scientists.
Speaker 2: They would do things like take a part a cop
Speaker 2: car and put it up, you know, reassemble it on
Speaker 2: top of the Great Dome and mit. But what these
Speaker 2: women had done struck me as that kind of hack,
Speaker 2: you know, like they had leaned into their science to
Speaker 2: prove their case. So I sort of love that aspect
Speaker 2: of it. So I went and I met with Nancy
Speaker 2: in her office, and she talked to me about really
Speaker 2: what I was so striking to me at the time.
Speaker 2: And again we have to remember this as March of
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety nine, but she talked about that this wasn't
Speaker 2: discrimination the way we tend to think of it, right,
Speaker 2: It wasn't like I mean, there was there was some
Speaker 2: overcases of that, right, like salaries were lower, but the
Speaker 2: way they described it was marginalation. And it was really
Speaker 2: just the sort of pushing with the gradual pushing aside
Speaker 2: of women across the arc of their careers, across the
Speaker 2: you know, as they got older. The problem wasn't as
Speaker 2: they were junior faculty members. It was really you know,
Speaker 2: as they advanced in their career, they were gradually sort
Speaker 2: of pushed aside what they described as marginalization. And again
Speaker 2: they said, like this was not what we thought discrimination
Speaker 2: looked like we thought discrimination was the door closed on
Speaker 2: you someone telling you they have to say I'm not
Speaker 2: hiring you because you're a woman. In fact, it was
Speaker 2: much more subtle than that. And now when we look back,
Speaker 2: they used this word at the time, and it was
Speaker 2: a fresh word at the time. What they were talking
Speaker 2: about was unconscious bias, which of course now we're so
Speaker 2: familiar with, But at the time that was really a
Speaker 2: new idea. And so I really do credit these women
Speaker 2: in MIT with making that concept, with popularizing that concept
Speaker 2: and making people understand just what it looks like.
Speaker 1: One of the most kind of compelling aspects of this
Speaker 1: is that were the most shocking aspects is that MIT
Speaker 1: acknowledged that this is what had happened over years. So
Speaker 1: what was so extraordinary about this admission and kind of like,
Speaker 1: what were some of the changes immediately that resulted from
Speaker 1: this acknowledgment.
Speaker 2: The admission by MIT is in nineteen ninety nine, but
Speaker 2: the women first came together in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four, and for many twists and turns that I
Speaker 2: tell in the book, it took an incredible four and
Speaker 2: a half years for this to happen, for this to
Speaker 2: become public. So MIT started fixing issues for the women
Speaker 2: pretty much almost as soon as they started coming together.
Speaker 2: The women come together, they ask for this committee to
Speaker 2: sort of outline the problems, to look into the problems,
Speaker 2: and the dean who was their great ally, starts beginning
Speaker 2: to address them. What happened in nineteen ninety nine that
Speaker 2: was really striking was the story. So my story ran
Speaker 2: on the front page of the Boston Globe on a Sunday.
Speaker 2: The women at MIT and I did not think we
Speaker 2: understood that this was really an incredible story and something amazing.
Speaker 2: But I think we all thought, maybe this is just
Speaker 2: an MIT story, or maybe just a story of women
Speaker 2: in science. What happens when the story appears the next morning,
Speaker 2: a Monday, the en of science. They're this man who
Speaker 2: was their great ally, the Dena of Science, shows up
Speaker 2: at his office and there's a news crew from CBS
Speaker 2: Evening News outside his office. That Tuesday, the New York
Speaker 2: Times runs the story and it's front page and suddenly, really,
Speaker 2: you know this again. This is like sort of it's
Speaker 2: an early Internet era, so things don't really go viral
Speaker 2: as much as they do now, but as much as
Speaker 2: they did then. It really did go viral, and women
Speaker 2: across the country and across the world started saying, like really,
Speaker 2: writing into Nancy and to all these other women and saying,
Speaker 2: I thought I was the only one who had this problem,
Speaker 2: but this is my problem too. So what MIT really
Speaker 2: did was acknowledge a problem that women thought that they
Speaker 2: had been suffering alone. It put the problem on the map.
Speaker 2: It made it a problem that other universities had to discuss.
Speaker 2: One of the things that the MIT women like to
Speaker 2: point out is that other universities initially said like, oh no,
Speaker 2: this isn't a problem we have, like Harvard was. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a great quote in the Harvard Crimson, like, oh no,
Speaker 2: this isn't an issue for Harvard. Well, of course, it
Speaker 2: had been an issue for Harvard for many, many years.
Speaker 2: Harvard had had, you know, a committee on the Status
Speaker 2: of Women. They've been doing reports on the status of
Speaker 2: women for years. The sorts would be issued, be printed,
Speaker 2: someone would put it on a shelf, no one would
Speaker 2: notice it. So I think, really, what was so extraordinary
Speaker 2: was that the president of MIT, Chuck Best, put his
Speaker 2: name to this, and he had this great quote that
Speaker 2: was repeated in every in every newspaper story, every editorial
Speaker 2: about this and what he said. I'm probably going to
Speaker 2: get the words a little bit wrong, but I think
Speaker 2: I can remember it pretty much word for word. Was
Speaker 2: I've always thought that gender discrimination in higher education was
Speaker 2: part perception, part reality true, but I now understand that
Speaker 2: it is that reality is the greater part of the balance.
Speaker 2: And for him to say that, I mean that was
Speaker 2: like Nancy Hopkins really, you know, almost fell off her
Speaker 2: chair the minute she read that phrase. And I think,
Speaker 2: you know, the fact that it was MIT, the fact
Speaker 2: that it was this prestigious institution, really helped. But it
Speaker 2: really did just put the discussion on the map. So
Speaker 2: in many concrete ways there were changes. You know, the
Speaker 2: Ford Foundation gave a million dollars for other universities, for
Speaker 2: MIT and other universities to work out the problem, to
Speaker 2: do the sort of analysis that these women had done
Speaker 2: at MIT, looking at resources for men and for women.
Speaker 2: They gave those that money went to help other universities
Speaker 2: do the same thing. Suddenly you really saw there was
Speaker 2: really an acceleration in the number of women at being
Speaker 2: asked to lead. By two thousand and two, you had
Speaker 2: three women as presidents in the Ivy League. You had
Speaker 2: a president of MIT, who's a woman, very soon after.
Speaker 2: So I really do think like this put that conversation
Speaker 2: on the map. It made women in science the question
Speaker 2: of why do we have so few women at the
Speaker 2: highest levels of math and science. It put that question
Speaker 2: on the map.
Speaker 1: And that question has deep, deep roots. And as someone
Speaker 1: who went to grad school in the twenty tens, it's
Speaker 1: really too easy to forget how different things are in
Speaker 1: higher education today compared to not just like the late
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, but also the mid especially the mid twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Like I knew about pay differences, I knew about tenure
Speaker 1: being withheld or just not being hired in the first place.
Speaker 1: But when I was reading your book, it was the
Speaker 1: little things that really stood out to me, like these
Speaker 1: mon dane acts of discrimination, like not being able to
Speaker 1: buy faculty football tickets, or these like gender dining hall restrictions.
Speaker 2: No love room for you, little girl, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: And I was wondering if you could sort of paint
Speaker 1: a picture of what it was like to be a
Speaker 1: female student or a female faculty member at Radcliffe around
Speaker 1: the time that Nancy Hopkins then Nancy Doe was at
Speaker 1: school there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Nancy graduates from Radcliffe in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 2: and that was I think the first or second year
Speaker 2: that Radcliffe and Harvard actually had a joint graduation, so
Speaker 2: women still got separate diplomas, which is kind of amazing.
Speaker 2: I mean, just to go to your point, I'll get
Speaker 2: back to that, but like to go to your point
Speaker 2: about being in the twenty tens, we forget that in
Speaker 2: even nineteen ninety nine there was no daycare on campus.
Speaker 2: Like that was I mean, that alone is it's just
Speaker 2: an extraordinary change. But Radcliffe, Harvard and Radcliffe in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty so in nineteen sixty to nine sixty four. This
Speaker 2: was some of my really favorite part of the book
Speaker 2: to research because first of all, you write about universities,
Speaker 2: and they remember everything, they memorialize everything, so there's just
Speaker 2: a ton of archival work that you can look into.
Speaker 2: So that's really wonderful. But it is, as you say,
Speaker 2: it's so striking how different it was. You know, so
Speaker 2: there were you know, Radcliffe existed, that was where the
Speaker 2: quote unquot girls. There were men of Harvard and girls
Speaker 2: of Radcliffe. That was where the girls were educated. But
Speaker 2: of course there were no women on the faculty. Right,
Speaker 2: So if you were a young woman at Radcliffe, you
Speaker 2: were learning from men. You were not allowed to wear
Speaker 2: pants downstairs in the dorms at Radcliffe, you had to
Speaker 2: wear skirts. You were not allowed in the main library
Speaker 2: on the Harvard campus because there was some fear that
Speaker 2: you would be a distraction to the men. You know,
Speaker 2: you were in the same classrooms with men. But that
Speaker 2: was really only since World War Two. And the reason
Speaker 2: that Harvard made this accommodation was that during World War Two,
Speaker 2: of course, so many men left to be on the battlefield,
Speaker 2: so they needed the tuition from women. You know, you
Speaker 2: couldn't stay out past midnight. And what was so striking
Speaker 2: to me though about those years is I think we
Speaker 2: tend to think of, you know, maybe nineteen sixty, right,
Speaker 2: which is when the National Organization for Women is founded.
Speaker 2: We tend to think of that as kind of the
Speaker 2: beginning of the women's movement. But when you look at
Speaker 2: this class of you know, they arrive in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: they graduate in nineteen sixty four, it really became clear
Speaker 2: to me that this was a generation very much on
Speaker 2: the cusp, right, like they're not quite that you know,
Speaker 2: full push of the second wave feminism. But they're starting
Speaker 2: to change, right, So they're starting to push for, Hey,
Speaker 2: we don't think we need to be checking into the
Speaker 2: dorm by midnight every night or eleven o'clock every night.
Speaker 2: We don't think we need that kind of babysitting. More
Speaker 2: women were starting to major in things like biology rather
Speaker 2: than the traditional fields of English and history, right Like,
Speaker 2: they were starting to imagine a more professional future for themselves.
Speaker 2: But they were also this was so you know, it
Speaker 2: was amazing to me reading their yearbook because there are
Speaker 2: these essays by these young women who are graduating and
Speaker 2: they talk about themselves as a generation of culturally induced schizophrenics.
Speaker 2: And the schizophrenia for them is they believe that they
Speaker 2: are going to be able. They're going to be the
Speaker 2: first generation that is going to be able to really
Speaker 2: have a career and to have a family, and they
Speaker 2: won't have to make the choices that women have had
Speaker 2: to make for so long. And they're being encouraged in
Speaker 2: this by the president of Radcliffe, a woman named Polly Bunting,
Speaker 2: who is herself a scientist. But they're sort of, you know,
Speaker 2: they're struggling with this idea, right Like, they think that
Speaker 2: the men of Harvard are going to treat them as equals,
Speaker 2: but they're not really sure yet, and they're still waiting
Speaker 2: to see. I talked to, you know, some of Nancy's
Speaker 2: friends who ultimately did not have careers and went on
Speaker 2: to have children. They say, well, I always felt inadequate
Speaker 2: because I wasn't choosing to have a career. And of
Speaker 2: course Nancy struggles with, you know, well, I'm not really
Speaker 2: sure I want children. I really want a career. So
Speaker 2: whatever you were doing, and I do think again, this
Speaker 2: is a struggle that women still are working on. Whatever
Speaker 2: you're doing, you're feeling inadequate, You're thinking I can't possibly
Speaker 2: do both things and do them both well. Going back
Speaker 2: to this whole idea of the exceptions, and the woman
Speaker 2: Millie dressel House I mentioned right with the four kids.
Speaker 2: She was an amazing semiconductor physicist. She had many twists
Speaker 2: and turns in her careers, and also an extremely supportive husband.
Speaker 2: So there are many things to explain her success. But
Speaker 2: really what the leadership of MIT did for decades was
Speaker 2: say to women, well, why can't you be like MILLI?
Speaker 2: And so the women themselves were like, oh, oh, I have
Speaker 2: to be like Milli, And so, you know, I talked
Speaker 2: to this one woman, one of the women in my
Speaker 2: story Wonderful Woe, named Penny Chisholm, who's a National Medal
Speaker 2: of Science winner. Now she's a marine biologist, but she
Speaker 2: was in the School of engineering because I kind of
Speaker 2: didn't know what to do with her when she arrived
Speaker 2: in the seventies. And she says that, you know, in
Speaker 2: her in her reviews and her discussions about her career,
Speaker 2: men would compare her to Milli, and she would say,
Speaker 2: how exactly does my work as a marine biologist compare
Speaker 2: to Milly as a semiconductor physicist, And really there was
Speaker 2: no way except that they were both women. But so
Speaker 2: there was That's another way in which this whole idea
Speaker 2: of the exceptions kind of inhibits women because they're being told, well,
Speaker 2: you know, you can do it. And you know, Mit
Speaker 2: was able to point to these exceptions and say, well,
Speaker 2: what's our problem with women?
Speaker 1: We have Milli, And it's like it doesn't really send
Speaker 1: the message that it's okay if you don't want that,
Speaker 1: whatever that is. I think that that is something that
Speaker 1: really stood out to me too, is you know, when
Speaker 1: Nancy was deciding what to do postgraduation, and these sort
Speaker 1: of these different paths that at the time were kind
Speaker 1: of still split with like maybe a very narrow like
Speaker 1: route right down the middle. Some people could both you know,
Speaker 1: wanted to have a career in science as well as
Speaker 1: having children and like raising those children. How did that
Speaker 1: influence Nancy's choices?
Speaker 2: Yeah, in an incredible way. You know. Nancy, like many
Speaker 2: of us, I think as a planner. And so if
Speaker 2: you consider the culture that she was entering, women tended
Speaker 2: to have three children. They had the last of those
Speaker 2: by age thirty, which is you know, in our like
Speaker 2: looking back at that, that's kind of extraordinary. A lot
Speaker 2: of women don't start having children now until thirty. So
Speaker 2: Nancy thinks she's nineteen, graduated from college, and she's thinking, okay,
Speaker 2: I have she's got one year until graduation when we
Speaker 2: first meet her, and she's like, I have this one
Speaker 2: year to figure out what I'm going to do with
Speaker 2: the next ten years of my life, because I only
Speaker 2: have ten years to have this incredible career, because then
Speaker 2: I have to get married and have kids. Like she
Speaker 2: understood she had to do it all, and she understood
Speaker 2: that her time was very limited, so she ultimately she
Speaker 2: goes to grad school, but she does it really only
Speaker 2: because her mentor, James Watson, tells her she should do this.
Speaker 2: But she doesn't really want to go to grad school
Speaker 2: because she's like, why would I need a PhD when
Speaker 2: I'm just going to drop out of science by thirty.
Speaker 2: So initially it really shapes her early career choices, but
Speaker 2: ultimately she gets very lucky because she not only does
Speaker 2: she have Jim Watson as her mentor, but she decides
Speaker 2: to drop out of graduate school to go do this
Speaker 2: big experiment that she's really really curious about, and she thinks, like,
Speaker 2: I don't care if I have a PhD. The experiment
Speaker 2: turns out to be enough of a success that she's
Speaker 2: able to get her PhD by doing that experiment, and
Speaker 2: then at that point she says, oh, okay, I'm going
Speaker 2: to keep doing this, but again, I'll stop doing it
Speaker 2: when I'm thirty. She ultimately does. She marries her boyfriend,
Speaker 2: she anticipates having children, but it really produces this incredible
Speaker 2: tension with her and her now husband Brooke, and I
Speaker 2: describe it, as Nancy does, as kind of the love triangle, right,
Speaker 2: like she knows she wants to be married to her husband,
Speaker 2: but she really loves science. She doesn't want to give
Speaker 2: it up. She knows just based on seeing the women
Speaker 2: around her. You know, the women around her, if they're
Speaker 2: successful scientists, it's because they don't have kids. There aren't
Speaker 2: many of them for the most part. The women around
Speaker 2: her that she sees have children, and they're not running
Speaker 2: their own labs. They're working in the labs of their husbands,
Speaker 2: and so she thinks that that's what she has to do.
Speaker 2: So she marries very briefly, she drops out of science
Speaker 2: because she's like, I just can't do this. I cannot
Speaker 2: have children in this marriage and also have science. Ultimately,
Speaker 2: you know, the other tension that's interesting here, and I
Speaker 2: think maybe still also common, is that she has the
Speaker 2: struggle with her husband because he sees that she is
Speaker 2: more successful than he is. He's struggling to get published,
Speaker 2: he's struggling to get a job as a professor of English,
Speaker 2: and so ultimately he leaves her. Nancy is again lucky
Speaker 2: enough that she has this training and she can get
Speaker 2: a job, and she at this point has to work.
Speaker 2: She gets these job offers from MIT and Harvard, takes
Speaker 2: the job offer from MIT, but she tells herself like,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to get married ever again, and I
Speaker 2: will not have children. That is the choice that she makes,
Speaker 2: and she thinks that she is making a choice for science,
Speaker 2: and that is it's the only logical choice. And what's
Speaker 2: really striking to me about all of the sixteen women
Speaker 2: who are involved in this story, is it really I
Speaker 2: think it's only half of them had children, so that's
Speaker 2: you know, it just shows the constraints against women at
Speaker 2: that time. If they wanted to be successful in science,
Speaker 2: they recognize that they could not also have a family.
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break. We'll be back in just
Speaker 1: a few Welcome back everyone. I've been chatting with Kate
Speaker 1: Zernike about her book The Exceptions Nancy Hopkins, MIT and
Speaker 1: the Fight for Women in Science. Let's get back into
Speaker 1: things earlier. We kind of talked about how this generation
Speaker 1: that Nancy Hopkins was part of graduating from Radcliffe in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four was sort of this cusp generation. And
Speaker 1: in your book, I remember reading that in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the proportions of doctorates earned by women and tenure track
Speaker 1: faculty positions held by women at universities in the US,
Speaker 1: those proportions were actually lower in many cases in the
Speaker 1: seventies than at the turn of the century. What were
Speaker 1: some of the drivers for this sort of downturn and
Speaker 1: how was this is sort of a two parter, but
Speaker 1: how was this new, more subtle discrimination different than in
Speaker 1: past decades where it was just like a sign on
Speaker 1: the door, do not enter the library.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know again, one of the extraordinary things about
Speaker 2: this whole mit story in nineteen ninety nine was that
Speaker 2: I think there still was a subtle, maybe unexpressed bias
Speaker 2: that the reason there weren't a lot of women in
Speaker 2: math and science is because either women didn't want to
Speaker 2: do math and science or that they actually weren't that
Speaker 2: good at math and science. But it really gave the
Speaker 2: great lie to that whole idea because there were women
Speaker 2: at that point, There were women as undergraduates, whours who
Speaker 2: were who wanted to get into science. The problem was
Speaker 2: really at the faculty level. So something was happening. It
Speaker 2: wasn't that, you know, for many many years we thought, oh,
Speaker 2: we just need to fill the pipeline and get more
Speaker 2: women into science, and then they will organically become faculty members.
Speaker 2: So that story gave the lie to it. But as
Speaker 2: you say, you know, when I went to do the
Speaker 2: work expanding this from a newspaper story twenty years ago
Speaker 2: into a book and you look at the numbers in
Speaker 2: the early twentieth century, you see that again, like, it's
Speaker 2: not that women weren't good at this or weren't interested
Speaker 2: in this. It really was something culturally that was happening.
Speaker 2: And the period that I really am struck by is
Speaker 2: during World War Two. So again you know, as men leave,
Speaker 2: as men go join the fight, the number of women
Speaker 2: who became professors actually really rises quite substantially. What happens, though,
Speaker 2: is the men come back from the front, and colleges
Speaker 2: and universities, including by the way, women's colleges, decided that
Speaker 2: it was actually there was more prestigion having men among
Speaker 2: your professors, men as college presidents. So the number of
Speaker 2: women as professors begins to go down. Women's colleges begin
Speaker 2: having male college presidents. Again. I mean, it's just this
Speaker 2: whole shift. I think it really was this idea in
Speaker 2: the fifties that women's place really was to have a family,
Speaker 2: to be at home, right, that was the whole that
Speaker 2: was the image that they thought that they were fulfilling.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that we see after World
Speaker 2: War Two is that universities begin adopting anti nepotism policies,
Speaker 2: so they won't hire a husband and wife together, and
Speaker 2: of course, who are they going to hire the husband
Speaker 2: or the wife. They're going to hire the husband. The
Speaker 2: only way that a wife who has perhaps met her
Speaker 2: husband when they are both PhD students as scientists, the
Speaker 2: only way she can get a job at the same
Speaker 2: university in most cases is that she could work in
Speaker 2: his lab, because then she will get money not from
Speaker 2: the university but from outside out, from external funding. So
Speaker 2: you see a lot of women who go to work
Speaker 2: not as lab heads in their own right, but they
Speaker 2: go to the work in their husband's labs. So that
Speaker 2: was really the pattern up until about the seventies.
Speaker 1: And then in the seventies people began to realize that
Speaker 1: maybe this narrative that had been pushed for so long
Speaker 1: about how well, women just don't like science, they're just
Speaker 1: not good at science and they want to stay home
Speaker 1: with the kids like that might not actually be what's
Speaker 1: happening here. That it might be that in the workplace
Speaker 1: they're either facing extreme discrimination, harassment, marginalization, or just being
Speaker 1: actively discouraged from seeking training in science. Can you talk
Speaker 1: about this like shift.
Speaker 3: And how it was received by the public.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, the sixties was such a time of ferment,
Speaker 2: and one of the things that was most interesting to
Speaker 2: me was reading about the early sixties and President Kennedy's
Speaker 2: Commission on the Status of Women, and that in itself
Speaker 2: was sort of a separate and long story. But what's
Speaker 2: so striking is that this commission identified a lot of
Speaker 2: the things that we're still talking about today and a
Speaker 2: lot of things that didn't get resolved or really addressed
Speaker 2: their years, so family leave, you know, maternity leave, daycare,
Speaker 2: universal childcare, all of these things. You know, they proposed
Speaker 2: a universal basic income, which today is like, you know,
Speaker 2: still considered a pretty fringe idea. But I think that
Speaker 2: was really that was a group of women who and
Speaker 2: their report became a best seller, by the way, which
Speaker 2: is really again very striking. I mean, it was sort
Speaker 2: of like, you know, we think about maybe the nine
Speaker 2: to eleven Report or something that becomes the best seller.
Speaker 2: This was a major event in American society, but it
Speaker 2: really was this this discussion about you know, well, why
Speaker 2: is it that women aren't succeeding in science? And maybe
Speaker 2: it's because you know, if you read some of the
Speaker 2: early newspapers at MIT, when when women start to become
Speaker 2: a greater percentage of the students, it's still like, well,
Speaker 2: but they're not very attractive. You know, you have to
Speaker 2: you got to go to Wellesley to find the really
Speaker 2: good looking girls. And you know, there was this idea that, well,
Speaker 2: we don't want women in the labs because, as one
Speaker 2: person says, like they're going to spill their nail polished.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's really silly, petty stuff. What happens in
Speaker 2: the seventies, That's that's interesting, And I think, you know,
Speaker 2: we have to remember that laws can't fix everything, but
Speaker 2: they do they can signal a culture shift. So after
Speaker 2: the President's Commission on the Status of Women in nineteen
Speaker 2: makes its report, in nineteen sixty three, President Kennedy signs
Speaker 2: the Equal Pay Act, and there is just sort of this,
Speaker 2: There are laws passed, Anti discrimination laws begin to be passed.
Speaker 2: Of course, the sixties was a wave of antidiscrimination laws
Speaker 2: in many respects against many different marginalized groups. But so
Speaker 2: universities recognize that they could no longer discriminate. Then, of
Speaker 2: course comes Title nine in nineteen seventy two, and there
Speaker 2: really was pressure. There was a way for women to
Speaker 2: say to universities, you have to hire us because you
Speaker 2: are getting federal funding and discrimination against women is against
Speaker 2: federal law. So universities recognize that they had to hire
Speaker 2: more women. The other interesting thing that's happening at the
Speaker 2: end of the sixties is that men on campuses are
Speaker 2: suddenly saying that, well, we don't want to be on
Speaker 2: all male campuses, like we don't want Harvard to be
Speaker 2: single sex anymore. So men are demanding, you know, they
Speaker 2: want co education, and that happens, and really in the
Speaker 2: seventies there was a push for more women on the
Speaker 2: fact culty, but the real push was to get more
Speaker 2: women into higher education for co education. That's when you
Speaker 2: see the Ivy's going co ed. Vassar starts taking men,
Speaker 2: of course, and there really is this idea that we're
Speaker 2: going to educate both and again organically like this will time,
Speaker 2: time will fix this problem. Right. So to go back
Speaker 2: to Millie dressl House, who does this report at MIT
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy two. One of the things she notices
Speaker 2: is that there's some sort of obvious, more obvious ways
Speaker 2: in which women are discriminated against, Like there are no
Speaker 2: women's bathrooms near the near the halls where women take exams,
Speaker 2: so they have to like run twenty minutes back to
Speaker 2: find a bathroom. So things like that are addressed, but
Speaker 2: it's also, you know, the comments that people are making
Speaker 2: about women not belonging here. Millie has this idea in
Speaker 2: the early seventies that it's hard for women to speak
Speaker 2: up in class, but if every class has at least
Speaker 2: two women in it, those two women will feel less
Speaker 2: shy about raising your hand. I mean, imagine that just
Speaker 2: for a moment that there's there are classes where there
Speaker 2: is only one woman and like whatever, you know, forty
Speaker 2: one hundred men. And so Millie says, she does this
Speaker 2: kind of back of the envelope calculation, and she says, Okay,
Speaker 2: if we can just get fifteen percent women in all
Speaker 2: of our departments, every class will have at least to women,
Speaker 2: and that will help women feel stronger, feel more confident
Speaker 2: raising their hand and speaking up in class. And that
Speaker 2: will be one change. And I do think that MIT
Speaker 2: does first in the seventies and then again in the eighties,
Speaker 2: because of a real push from the male president, does
Speaker 2: begin to get more female students, but the percentage of
Speaker 2: women is faculty at MIT. There's a big bump in
Speaker 2: the early seventies because of affirmative action. Suddenly, lo and
Speaker 2: behold nineteen ninety four. This group of women gets together
Speaker 2: and they're like, oh wow, in fact, the percentage of
Speaker 2: women on the faculty has not changed this whole idea.
Speaker 2: You know, women are now fifty percent students in many departments,
Speaker 2: even more than that in a couple of departments, but
Speaker 2: we're not getting the women aren't ending up as faculty.
Speaker 2: So what is going on here? And ultimately, as I said,
Speaker 2: it's the pipeline leaking. And you have to think, why
Speaker 2: is the pipeline leaking? And it's the same problem that
Speaker 2: had begun to be identified in the early sixties, which
Speaker 2: woul the institutions were just sort of built by men
Speaker 2: for men, that women weren't really welcomed there. They were tolerated,
Speaker 2: but not welcomed, and so many women, frustrated, decided to
Speaker 2: kind of give up and leave. No, we call it
Speaker 2: opting out now, they didn't call it that back then,
Speaker 2: but that's what they were doing. They ultimately decided my
Speaker 2: family needs me, My family appreciates me more than the
Speaker 2: people at work to so I'll just go back to
Speaker 2: my family.
Speaker 1: Was it also around this time that the term minutia
Speaker 1: of sexism was kind of introduced? Can you explain what
Speaker 1: this term is? Because I mean, I love and hate
Speaker 1: this term.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: So I was like, oh, yes, that's yep, still around today.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a
Speaker 3: bit about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. There's a woman in the book named Mary Rowe
Speaker 2: who is the ombudsman at MIT in the early seventies,
Speaker 2: and she called it Saturn's rings, right, Like, so all
Speaker 2: of this dust and debris that you can't and when
Speaker 2: you're in it, you don't really notice that it's dust
Speaker 2: and debris, but you step outside you're like, oh God,
Speaker 2: look at that. That's really noticeable. So the manute of sexism,
Speaker 2: as Mary describes it, is not these are the problems
Speaker 2: that like, none of us would raise our hand and
Speaker 2: complain about, right because who wants to sort of who
Speaker 2: wants to fight all the time? These are things that
Speaker 2: you notice and you know, let it slide again. It's
Speaker 2: sort of like the exception right, But it's the very
Speaker 2: small exceptions, so you're not included in a meeting. Well,
Speaker 2: I don't know. Was that a snub or was it
Speaker 2: just like those guys are friends and that's why they
Speaker 2: ended up deciding to go into this venture together. It's
Speaker 2: the very small things that none of us would raise
Speaker 2: our hand and complain about, but ultimately it does end
Speaker 2: up in women being pushed aside. The women at MIT
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety nine use this phrase marginalization, and I
Speaker 2: guess I love that in the same way you do
Speaker 2: the manutiae of sexism, because to me, it implies like
Speaker 2: this sort of subtle pushing aside. It's not anything again
Speaker 2: that like you can complain about there's no law to
Speaker 2: prevent this, but you sort of have the sense that
Speaker 2: it's happening. And then on top of that, because you
Speaker 2: have to spend all this energy and time, or because
Speaker 2: you end up spending all this energy and time thinking
Speaker 2: about huh, was that a snub or was that just me?
Speaker 2: Is that just Is that the exception or is that
Speaker 2: the rule that adds to the level of discrimination, because
Speaker 2: of course you're spending your time doing that rather than
Speaker 2: you know on the job that you're there to do.
Speaker 1: It's also one of those things where, especially before the
Speaker 1: terms like marginalization or even before like the minutia of
Speaker 1: sexism was introduced, it's I think difficult to see those
Speaker 1: types of things in yourself, just like you said, like,
Speaker 1: am I imagining this? Am I not? And so I
Speaker 1: think that that can make it really difficult to identify
Speaker 1: larger patterns. And you talk about this in your book too.
Speaker 1: And the introduction of the term sexual harassment helped many
Speaker 1: people put words to, you know, be able to articulate
Speaker 1: what they had experienced for years and it was like, oh.
Speaker 3: There's a word for that.
Speaker 1: But in other cases, I feel like there is some
Speaker 1: resistance to apply the term to themselves because what they
Speaker 1: experienced wasn't what they thought discrimination looked like. Do you
Speaker 1: think that this played a role in the efforts to
Speaker 1: hold universities accountable for these unfair practices, just like the
Speaker 1: disconnect between here's this term that sounds very serious and like, oh,
Speaker 1: but my experience is I'm used to this, like this
Speaker 1: happens all the time.
Speaker 2: I think that's definitely true. You know, Nancy Hopkins will
Speaker 2: say Nancy says, now you know it took me twenty
Speaker 2: years to recognize the problem. It took me fifteen years
Speaker 2: to recognize that it was happening to other women and
Speaker 2: another five to realize what was happening to me. And
Speaker 2: that that idea of sexual harassment and being a you know,
Speaker 2: not wanting to mention that phrase, not really accepting that
Speaker 2: that's what's happening to you, that definitely played for her,
Speaker 2: because for Nancy, sexual harassment meant there had to be sex, right,
Speaker 2: someone had to make a move on you and then
Speaker 2: deny you a job because they you know, you hadn't accepted,
Speaker 2: You hadn't you hadn't given in. So I think there
Speaker 2: was real confusion. I think to your point, it probably
Speaker 2: insulated universities to a degree because women weren't going to
Speaker 2: bring it up, and so they didn't have to deal that,
Speaker 2: they didn't have to mention it. Sometimes, when I've been
Speaker 2: talking about this book over the last year or so,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like I'm like, oh God, I hate
Speaker 2: talking about this because there is now it's so hard
Speaker 2: looking back now when you know, we talk about unconscious bias,
Speaker 2: now we talk about sexual harassment. And I think there's
Speaker 2: there's really an eye roll element to it. People are like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: I had like I had the training on that it's
Speaker 2: not a real thing. I don't have that, or it's overhyped,
Speaker 2: you know. There's like this sense that there's just like
Speaker 2: an excess of wokeism. But what I tried to do
Speaker 2: in the book was really explain really because of that,
Speaker 2: because I was worried that people kind of roll their
Speaker 2: eyes and be like, yeah, whatever, stop you're complaining. What
Speaker 2: I wanted to do in the book was just show
Speaker 2: how this day in and day out, that these how
Speaker 2: this the minutia of sexism, the sort of slow grinding
Speaker 2: of this really sort of wears down Nancy, wears her
Speaker 2: down over a period of years, to the point that
Speaker 2: she finally feels like she has no she has no
Speaker 2: option but to mention it because otherwise she's just going
Speaker 2: to leave science. And I think the pattern probably was
Speaker 2: more often that women did leave science. So I think
Speaker 2: the fact that women were reluctant to talk about sexual
Speaker 2: harassment actually ends up insulating universities because they didn't have
Speaker 2: to deal that, they didn't have to respond to the complaints.
Speaker 1: Many of the scientists that you write about, including Nancy Hopkins,
Speaker 1: like we've talked about attributed their own mistreatment and the
Speaker 1: discrimination they faced to their own personalities or the personalities
Speaker 1: of those around them, like Oh, that's just the attitude
Speaker 1: on the fifth floor, or like oh, I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: been so forceful in that meeting, so shrill for Nancy,
Speaker 1: how did this internalization and also especially the myth of
Speaker 1: meritocracy in science eventually give way to the growing awareness
Speaker 1: that this was not just an exception, this was a
Speaker 1: systemic issue.
Speaker 2: So this for me was in many ways the hardest
Speaker 2: part of the story to report and convey and the writing,
Speaker 2: but also the most fascinating and compelling. She starts out, really,
Speaker 2: I mean, she's not she's not an activist, she's not
Speaker 2: a feminist, and she really hates feminists right like, she
Speaker 2: thinks feminists are the problem. There are these women who
Speaker 2: are whining about everything. They're the women who complain about
Speaker 2: every little thing. She doesn't want to be that person.
Speaker 2: And she thinks science is a meritocracy. Lucky me, I'm
Speaker 2: incredibly well trained. I'm in this field that is a meritocracy.
Speaker 2: All I have to do is do my work, get
Speaker 2: good results, and I can win an Amoil prize. That's
Speaker 2: what she thinks, and you know, I like to say
Speaker 2: the next twenty years is her schooling, right, But so
Speaker 2: I had to figure out, you know, when, because this
Speaker 2: is something you know, you're not going to find in
Speaker 2: the archives at Harvard, even necessarily in her diaries or
Speaker 2: which some of which I had. Was this whole idea
Speaker 2: like when did she change? When did when did kind
Speaker 2: of the light begin to go on in her head?
Speaker 2: And it really was when she I think the start
Speaker 2: of that is when she reads a biography of Roslin Franklin, who,
Speaker 2: of course was with James Watson, Nancy's mentor, Francis Krek,
Speaker 2: and Maurice Wilkins. Roslin Franklin contributed to understanding the structure
Speaker 2: of and Roslin Franklin died tragically young. She died before
Speaker 2: the three men who she had worked with were awarded
Speaker 2: the Nobel Prize for this discovery. We now understand that
Speaker 2: Roslin Franklin actually did play a real, very important role
Speaker 2: in this, but that was not known at the time.
Speaker 2: But Nancy reads this biography of Roslin Franklin, and not
Speaker 2: only does she realize that Roslyn played this huge role
Speaker 2: in decoding the structure of DNA, but more importantly, she
Speaker 2: sees how the men viewed Roslin. And this book is
Speaker 2: written by a friend of Roslin's, and it really describes
Speaker 2: Rosalind as much more of a human, much more of
Speaker 2: a well rounded person. And Nancy realizes that like her,
Speaker 2: Like Nancy, Roslin was very passionate about her science, very driven.
Speaker 2: You know, she chose not to have children because she
Speaker 2: was so in love with science. And Nancy reads this
Speaker 2: book and she thinks, oh, this is my life, and
Speaker 2: she begins to see how the same way that Rosin
Speaker 2: was viewed, many of the men around her are viewing
Speaker 2: her this way. And that's where she kind of, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not that she has this total epiphany, but she
Speaker 2: begins to notice different things. Think she thinks is, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm on this fifth floor at MIT, if the cancer
Speaker 2: center at MIT. It's very competitive. It's just that it's
Speaker 2: too competitive. I have to leave the fifth floor, so
Speaker 2: she goes to the third floor. Then she discovers that
Speaker 2: men from outside MIT are taking credit for her work,
Speaker 2: which is of course the same exact thing that happened
Speaker 2: to Roslyn Franklin. And so it really is it's this,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the ways someone describes it about
Speaker 2: Franklin was this slow robbery right like it's things are
Speaker 2: slowly being taken from her, and Nancy ultimately leaves her field.
Speaker 2: She leaves the field of cancer research and goes into
Speaker 2: a new field. And that's when she goes into studying
Speaker 2: zebrafish and she tries to get more space for her
Speaker 2: zebra fish tanks, and she realizes she can't get more space,
Speaker 2: but all the men have the space they need, so
Speaker 2: she literally takes out her tape measure and goes around
Speaker 2: the building and measures all the lab space, all the
Speaker 2: office space, discovers that she is a fully tenured professor
Speaker 2: at MIT has less space than men without tenure, and
Speaker 2: she begins to complain about it. Then she discovers that
Speaker 2: her salary is lower. And then there's the final straw
Speaker 2: that breaks the camel's back is that she co develops
Speaker 2: this class with a younger man, and suddenly her department
Speaker 2: head informs her that she's no longer going to be
Speaker 2: teaching that class because the younger man wants to teach
Speaker 2: it with another guy. And then she discovers that these
Speaker 2: men are going to form a company around this course,
Speaker 2: and as they tell her, they intend to make millions.
Speaker 2: So it's like this again, it's this gradual edging out.
Speaker 2: So this course is taken away from her, and she thinks, well, again,
Speaker 2: her default is this must be my fault, this must
Speaker 2: be my problem. But then she looks at her teaching
Speaker 2: evaluations and she realizes no, in fact, I get some
Speaker 2: of the highest teaching ratings in this entire department. There
Speaker 2: is no way that I'm being pushed out for this reason.
Speaker 2: It's not a matter of meritocracy. That science, like so
Speaker 2: many other fields, like life, depends on the relationships you have,
Speaker 2: depends on who's conferring the merit. You know, we have
Speaker 2: this idea I think that merit is like gravity. You know,
Speaker 2: there's some equation that determines it. But of course merit
Speaker 2: depends on many things. It depends on the context, depends
Speaker 2: on who's awarding the merit right, it depends on many
Speaker 2: different things. So I think one of the great lessons
Speaker 2: from this whole, from the book and from the whole experience,
Speaker 2: is that there is no such thing as pure meritocracy,
Speaker 2: because if there were going to be one, it would
Speaker 2: be science. And science is not it.
Speaker 1: Like I said, I've I went to grad school in
Speaker 1: the twenty tens, and we have come a long way
Speaker 1: in academia since this story broke in nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: but the problem of discrimination, marginalization, sexual harassment, it's still
Speaker 1: very much present across all parts of academia. And I
Speaker 1: think that one of the biggest issues is that there
Speaker 1: are rarely formal channels to share feedback about professors or
Speaker 1: potential advisors without fear of retaliation. That combined with the
Speaker 1: fact that professors don't get training in mentorship often at
Speaker 1: least like that seems to be the general rule in EEB.
Speaker 1: What are some of the ways you think we can
Speaker 1: do better or what are some of the biggest problems
Speaker 1: that still exist.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons that we think of science as
Speaker 2: a meritocracy is because we do have the sense of like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's all about data. It's all about numbers, right, And
Speaker 2: then our in our data loving society, there's this whole
Speaker 2: idea that we can like optimize things, right, and so
Speaker 2: like there is this optimal number and that's that's the
Speaker 2: meritocracy when when you reach that number. So I do
Speaker 2: think that I think we have to think about numbers,
Speaker 2: but in a different way. So the way that I
Speaker 2: think about numbers and how it solves, how it helps
Speaker 2: to solve this problem is you just need more women.
Speaker 2: You just need to keep hiring women. What tends to
Speaker 2: happen is what happened at MIT in the early two thousands,
Speaker 2: which is that, again, as as had happened in the
Speaker 2: early seventies, there was a wave of new hiring of
Speaker 2: women in MIT. Then the dean, who had been sort
Speaker 2: of very much behind that idea, hire, you know, hire
Speaker 2: more female scientists. He leaves, and again the number sort
Speaker 2: of plateaus again. So you need people who are we
Speaker 2: need to continue pushing further to be more women, because
Speaker 2: we just have to change the perception of who belongs
Speaker 2: right like. So there's a documentary in which Nancy features,
Speaker 2: which some of your listeners may have heard about, called
Speaker 2: Picture a Scientist, And the title from that documentary is
Speaker 2: taken from this idea that when you ask children to
Speaker 2: draw a scientist or to picture a scientist, picture a genius,
Speaker 2: they draw a man. Right when you ask someone to
Speaker 2: draw a leader, they draw a man holding a briefcase.
Speaker 2: That's our traditional picture. I will say, I think that
Speaker 2: is beginning to change a little bit and again, one
Speaker 2: of the ways we change that is just to change
Speaker 2: the numbers. What happens now is that women come into
Speaker 2: a field, and because most of the prestigious fields in
Speaker 2: this country have been dominated by men, our picture of
Speaker 2: who belongs in that field is still a man. So
Speaker 2: you need to have the numbers so that our picture
Speaker 2: of that begins to change. And I do think that
Speaker 2: that's happening. But the other thing I like to talk
Speaker 2: about is the change in Really it's simply our language.
Speaker 2: They are really interesting studies done by a woman named
Speaker 2: Sarah Jane Leslie at Princeton and Andre Chimpion who's at NYU.
Speaker 2: They have looked at the language around genius and the
Speaker 2: language around when we talk about science and math in particular,
Speaker 2: and who goes into those fields. What they have found
Speaker 2: is that people tend to associate the idea of genius
Speaker 2: or the word genius with men. They also tend to
Speaker 2: think that for scientific fields, and particularly for fields that
Speaker 2: rely a lot on numbers, so pure math, theoretical physics,
Speaker 2: that to go into those fields you have to be
Speaker 2: a genius, you have to have some kind of row brilliance.
Speaker 2: The ultimate result of this is that women think oh,
Speaker 2: to go into that field, I have to be a genius.
Speaker 2: I can't do that. That's not me. But if you
Speaker 2: say to those women, this is a field that requires
Speaker 2: hard work, they're like, oh, I can do that. So
Speaker 2: to me, I think just changing our language begins to
Speaker 2: change the problem. And I again go back to a
Speaker 2: story about Nancy for this. So, of course I met
Speaker 2: Nancy in nineteen ninety nine and one of the first
Speaker 2: things I noticed about her, which is one of the
Speaker 2: first things that many people notice about her, is that
Speaker 2: she has this very slight English accent, and it's because
Speaker 2: she grew up living close to her grandmother who was
Speaker 2: from England. But in twenty eighteen I started, you know,
Speaker 2: I came back to this idea. I was being able
Speaker 2: to explore the idea of doing this as a book,
Speaker 2: and I noticed that Nancy using the word brilliant a lot,
Speaker 2: and I thought it was sort of like in the
Speaker 2: way British people, you know, like, oh, that scone is brilliant,
Speaker 2: the tea is brilliant, it's a brilliant play whatever. So
Speaker 2: I noticed that she kept she would talk about these women,
Speaker 2: and she kept saying, oh, she's brilliant, you know, she's brilliant.
Speaker 2: She's brilliant, and I thought it was this britishism, So
Speaker 2: I asked her about it, and she said, oh, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: that's not it at all, she said, I just started
Speaker 2: to notice that everyone always referras to the men as brilliant,
Speaker 2: and no one ever says that about the women. So
Speaker 2: I just decided that I was going to change this,
Speaker 2: and I was going to start referring to the women
Speaker 2: as brilliant. And I thought, that's kind of brilliant. So,
Speaker 2: you know, I've done this a little bit when I've
Speaker 2: talked about the book over the past year or so.
Speaker 2: I'll just go to a bookstore and I'll have people
Speaker 2: kind of shift their frame of mind and say, like,
Speaker 2: look at the person next to you, look at the
Speaker 2: woman next to you. Just tell yourself she's brilliant. Like,
Speaker 2: imagine how that changes your perspective. So a lot of
Speaker 2: this I think can be solved by a kind of
Speaker 2: very basic thought experiment. And I don't think it just
Speaker 2: applies to science. I think it applies to the question
Speaker 2: of like, why have we never had a female president
Speaker 2: in this country?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Like why are most of the women who are leaders
Speaker 2: in this country Why do they tend to be in
Speaker 2: the legislature, not in the governor's chair, not in the
Speaker 2: oval office. Why are despite the fact that more than
Speaker 2: half the law students in this country are women, why
Speaker 2: are there so few women at the highest levels of law?
Speaker 2: All those questions, and I think, again, it is this
Speaker 2: subtle frame switch that we have to do in our
Speaker 2: own minds. We have to start thinking, when I listen
Speaker 2: to this person speak, am I valuing what they say
Speaker 2: more because it's a man. If as I listened to
Speaker 2: this woman speak, if she were a man, would I
Speaker 2: be taking what she said more seriously? Would I'd be
Speaker 2: thinking this person's a genius. They should do something really extraordinary.
Speaker 2: They're going to do something really extraordinary. So again, I
Speaker 2: think ultimately the answer is to get women into these roles,
Speaker 2: to have people see the difference and not just the exception,
Speaker 2: not just one woman, not just one woman who's made it,
Speaker 2: but many, many women. And that of course means that
Speaker 2: not only do we see that women can succeed, but
Speaker 2: that women can fail just as men do. And it's
Speaker 2: not the end of the world. It doesn't mean that
Speaker 2: no woman will ever be successful. So I think we
Speaker 2: need more numbers, but I also think it's a matter
Speaker 2: of shit, the way we look at women and what
Speaker 2: we think they're capable of.
Speaker 1: I was curious, what sort of reactions you have gotten
Speaker 1: from this book from you know, women who are in science,
Speaker 1: women who are not in science, older women in science,
Speaker 1: younger women in science, Like, what kind of what's the
Speaker 1: range of reactions.
Speaker 2: That you get. Well, I often feel like I have
Speaker 2: to apologize to people for the reactions to my book,
Speaker 2: because women, particularly older women, will say to me, be like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, it was so you know, so familiar,
Speaker 2: and I had to take pauses in between chapters because
Speaker 2: it's so it felt like my life all over again,
Speaker 2: and I'm just like and then they're like, I love
Speaker 2: your book, and I'm like sorry. So I would say that,
Speaker 2: you know, in the same way the story resonated for
Speaker 2: me at the time I was thirty when I first
Speaker 2: reported the story for The Globe, in the same way
Speaker 2: that the story resonated for me not a scientist, it
Speaker 2: has resonated for for other women in other fields. As
Speaker 2: I knew it would be. I joke when we were
Speaker 2: talking about the subtitle for the book, you know, maybe
Speaker 2: it should be the exceptions of universe story, because I
Speaker 2: think as much as everyone thinks like, oh no, this
Speaker 2: just happened to me, it's really happening to many many,
Speaker 2: many of us. Young women have been interesting.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: I think some young women do have this recognition of
Speaker 2: how self doubt is grinding them down, and they see
Speaker 2: what happened to Nancy, and they want to change things.
Speaker 2: Other young women think there's been no progress. Why you know,
Speaker 2: they're angry. You know, how can you talk about like
Speaker 2: how are you? How can you celebrate the progress, which
Speaker 2: the book does to some degree, like in fact, this
Speaker 2: didn't change anything. I don't think that's true that it
Speaker 2: didn't change anything. One of the things I'll say is
Speaker 2: that Nancy in particular has been most struck by the
Speaker 2: reactions of men who come to her, and most often
Speaker 2: they're like, oh my god, I had no idea this
Speaker 2: was happening. And so these men are which you know,
Speaker 2: you can laugh at, but you can also say, well,
Speaker 2: good for them, like they're now changing their perspective. And
Speaker 2: so I think she has had emails and conversations with
Speaker 2: many men who really now have sort of the zeal
Speaker 2: of a convert around this, and they really do think
Speaker 2: this is an important problem to solve. I think for
Speaker 2: women in science, I think the problem is still partially acute.
Speaker 2: I think we have changed many of the structural issues,
Speaker 2: like as I mentioned, there was no daycare at the time.
Speaker 2: So many of those problems we can fix. It's the
Speaker 2: problems that you can't measure. It's the things that you
Speaker 2: can't take a tape measure to. Those are the problems
Speaker 2: that are harder. It is the slight, you know. It
Speaker 2: is the way people talk to you, the way they
Speaker 2: assume that you're not as smart, the way that they
Speaker 2: don't expect you to belong in a lab. That's that's
Speaker 2: the hardest problem to solve.
Speaker 1: Kate, thank you so much for taking the time to
Speaker 1: chat with me today, and for writing this book and
Speaker 1: for breaking this story back in eighteen ninety nine. Since
Speaker 1: learning about this story and reading this book, I don't
Speaker 1: think a day has gone by without me telling someone
Speaker 1: about it or sharing some outrageous tidbit from it. And
Speaker 1: if you would also like to have this story preoccupy
Speaker 1: your thoughts forever, and trust me you do, check out
Speaker 1: our website this podcast will kill You dot com, or
Speaker 1: I'll post a link to where you can find the exceptions,
Speaker 1: Nancy Hopkins MIT and the Fight for Women in Science,
Speaker 1: as well as a.
Speaker 3: Link to Kate's website.
Speaker 1: And don't forget you can check out our website for
Speaker 1: all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
Speaker 1: quarantining and placeib reader recipes, show notes and references for
Speaker 1: all of our episodes, links to merch our bookshop dot Org,
Speaker 1: affiliate account, our Goodreads list, first hand account form, and
Speaker 1: music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile
Speaker 1: for providing the music for this episode and all of
Speaker 1: our episodes. Thank you to Leana Squalacci and Tom Bryfogel
Speaker 1: for our audio mix, and thanks to you listeners for listening.
Speaker 1: I really hope that you liked this bonus episode and
Speaker 1: are enjoying being part of the TPWKY book Club.
Speaker 3: And a special thank.
Speaker 1: You, as always to our generous patrons. We appreciate your
Speaker 1: support so very much. Well, until next time, keep washing
Speaker 1: those hands