Special Episode: Kate Zernike & The Exceptions

When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted in 1999 that they had discriminated against women on its faculty, it sent shockwaves throughout institutions of higher learning across the country. In this TPWKY book club episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kate Zernike joins us to discuss her book The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science, which details the sequence of events that led sixteen scientists to demand the equality that had been denied to them for so long. Zernike, who was one of the reporters to break the story in 1999, centers this story on molecular biologist Dr. Nancy Hopkins, who, armed with a tape measure, brought this history of marginalization to light. Simultaneously personal and panoramic, The Exceptions carefully illustrates the sexism entrenched in higher education and academia and sends an important message: this problem is far from solved. Tune in for a fascinating discussion about an infuriating topic.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this Podcast Will
Kill You. Welcome everyone to the latest episode in our
tp w k Y book Club series, where we get
to expand our minds and our bookshelves as we read
fast books in science and medicine, covering a wide range
of topics, from the origins of American gynecology to the

(01:08):
plant and animal derived substances we used to harm and
heal from a post pandemic COVID playbook to the impacts
roads have on ecosystem and human health. We've covered so
much ground in this series, and if you'd like to
check out the full list of books we've covered or
are going to cover this season, head on over to

(01:29):
our website This Podcast Will Kill You dot Com, where
you can find a link to our bookshop dot Org
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page you'll find various TPWKY booklists, including one for our
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(01:50):
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It really does help us out. Okay, let's get into

(02:12):
the book of the Week. Pullitzer Prize winning journalist reporter
for the New York Times since two thousand and author
Kate Zernike joins me to discuss her recent book, The Exceptions,
Nancy Hopkins, MIT and the Fight for Women in Science.
In nineteen ninety nine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT

(02:33):
made an extraordinary admission that they had discriminated against women
on its faculty, confirming a suspicion held by many for
many years and prompting a reckoning for institutions of higher
education across the country. In The Exceptions, Zernichi, who was
one of the reporters at the Boston Globe to break

(02:56):
this story in nineteen ninety nine, revisits the sequence of
events that led to sixteen women on the faculty of
MIT coming together to demand a seat at the table
that had for so long been denied. Zernike centers this
story on groundbreaking molecular biologist doctor Nancy Hopkins, taking readers

(03:16):
through Nancy's educational and career journeys, and culminating with the
story of how armed with a tape measure and Nancy
began to quantify the marginalization that women faculty at MIT faced.
By taking this panoramic approach, Zernichie paints a vivid picture
of how gender equality in higher education evolved over the

(03:38):
twentieth century, starting with more overt or explicit gender discrimination,
such as denying women students access to the library on campus,
and shifting to be more subtle, more insidious, like senior
faculty men of course, lying about how much lab space
women faculty have compared to the men. Spoiler, women actually

(04:02):
had much less.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
But you probably could.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
Have guessed that.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Zernike's thoughtful storytelling places these events in the broader context
of changing gender roles and popular discourse on whether women
could or should be scientists.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
In the twentieth century.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
What results is an enlightening, infuriating, but ultimately inspiring book
that everyone should add to their to read lists. When
this story broke in nineteen ninety nine, it was at
a time when the problem of sexual discrimination in higher
education was kind of thought to have been solved, at

(04:39):
least for the most part. Nancy Hopkins and the other
women faculty across the MIT campus who brought this marginalization
to light showed that that was far from the truth,
and being scientists, they quantified this marginalization and minimization clearly
demonstrating that their experiences were not just one offs, that

(05:01):
it was not just the attitude of one particular department,
that it was not about scientific achievement or not being
a team player. That the discrimination they faced was systemic
and actively discouraged women from remaining in science in academic institutions.
This story resonated with me so much to learn about

(05:24):
these amazing women and how they refuse to be ignored,
how through their tireless efforts they made higher education a better,
more welcoming place for women in science today. I am
so grateful. At the same time, I think this book
resonated to such a degree because parts of this story

(05:45):
feel painfully familiar. It serves as a reminder that the
problem of marginalization in academia is not close to being solved,
but we are a whole lot closer now than we
would be without the efforts of Nancy Hopkins and the
other women faculty at MIT featured in Kate Zernike's amazing book,

(06:07):
The Exceptions. So let's take a quick break here and
then get into some questions. Kate, thank you so much

(06:38):
for joining me today. I am thrilled to chat with
you about your incredible and incredibly infuriating book, The Exceptions.
Can you tell me about the title of your book?
Who are the Exceptions? Where did this title come from?

Speaker 3 (06:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (06:55):
Well, first of all, I'm so excited to be here,
thank you for having me. You know, it's really a
question of not just two are the exceptions, but what
are the exceptions? And I started out this book and
I knew exactly what the story was. I knew the
arc of the story, but I didn't know the title.
And I would say about halfway through the reporting, it
became clear to me that like, there was no other title,

(07:16):
there was nothing else that I could call this book.
Because every time I talk to people so often in
conversation or as I was reading something, I would stumble
on this word, which was like exceptions, or it was
the exception, or she was exceptional, and so on some
level it was like, well, historically, like why are these
women so exceptional? Why is it so exceptional that women
can succeed in science, you know, do you have to

(07:37):
be exceptional in the sense of being exceptionally smart? Like
is there something genius or unique about you? But it
was also you know as women. As I talked to
these women and ask them about their story or their stories,
they would say to me, well, you know, this thing
happened to me, but I thought it was the exception,
or I thought I was the exception, or I thought
it was just the circumstances. You know, it was really

(07:58):
just the exception. And this just as it accumulates, you
start to thinking, well, actually, no, that's not exceptional, like
this is actually very common, and you know, the exception
starts to look more like the rule. So for some women,
this manner of dealing, you know, telling yourself this was
the exception, this was just the circumstances. That was a

(08:18):
way of coping, and it actually allowed them to be successful.
Like they just put blinders on and said, you know,
if I get distracted by this stuff, I'm going to
go off the rails and I can't do that. But
for other women it was it became very demeaning and
very crippling in a way because they kept something would
happen to them, and they would say, oh, well, I
must be the problem here, and so it stopped them

(08:38):
from succeeding. So it was just this sort of interesting
you know. It was this idea of how seeing these
things as the exceptions can help and can hurt. But
also these women really were, on the most fundamental level,
they were exceptional because they were able to get jobs
in science at a time when women couldn't. They were
exceptionally right, they were exceptionally accomplished. But this whole idea
of being the exception was in some way holding them back.

(09:00):
Even just what Mit did here, which was to admit,
as a result of all the work, of all the
research that these women did, that it had discriminated against
the women on its faculty, that in itself was an
exceptional move. And really it wasn't just the women who
were affected and sort of influenced by this idea of
things being exceptional, of circumstances being exceptional. It was the men.

(09:23):
One of the men who became an early ally to
these women talked about how he knew all of their
stories and he understood, you know, he thought he understood
what was happening in their lives. But there's a point
in the book where all these women are in his office.
There's six women in his office, six of the total
sixteen of the story, and one after another they tell
their stories and they tell their experiences, and he says

(09:45):
later that this was he compares it later to one
of the greatest scientific epiphanies he's ever had, like a
real Eureka moment, and he said, you know, had any
of these women come to me one on one, I
would have said, oh, her problem is this. Her problem
is that it's the exception, it's not the rule. Seeing
as women and hearing their stories one after another, he
was like, oh, we have a problem. And that's what
really started the whole series of events in motion that

(10:07):
did ultimately result in MIT acknowledging it had discriminated against
the women on its faculty.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
Let's talk a little bit about that incredible, extraordinary admission.
So this is kind of jumping to the end of
your book chronologically, but can you tell me how you
first came across this story of Nancy Hopkins and the
other women faculty at MIT that faced this like decades
of sexual harassment and discrimination. And then finally we're able

(10:35):
to get that acknowledged.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
I started covering higher education for the Boston Globe in
September of nineteen ninety eight, and my father, who was
a physicist, said to me at the time, Oh, you
should look into the work this woman named Millie dressel
House is doing to get more women into physics. And
Millie was this incredible when we talk about exceptional, she
was amazing. She had four children. The story was that
she had taken a total of five days maternity leave

(10:58):
because two of the kids im born on weekends and
one on a snow day. I mean, it was really
she's extraordinary, She's exceptional. So my father says it to me,
and I think, well, that is the worst idea ever, Like, what,
what's the action there? What's actually happening in that story.
It's going to be some story about, like, you know,
some good program trying to solve a long standing problem.
Six months later, I got a tip from someone in
the newsroom that there was something going on with women

(11:20):
in discrimination and MIT. And the only thing I had
was the name of this woman, Nancy Hopkins, and her
phone number, and so I called her and she told
me that in fact, MIT was going to admit that
to discriminated against the women on its faculty. And I
was like, oh, well, there's definitely a verb in that story.
There's you know, there's action there. And that was really
striking to me. And this was not something in nineteen

(11:40):
ninety eight you thought was going to happen. I thought
when I heard about women in discrimination MIT, I thought, oh,
someone's file of the lawsuit, right, and it'll be like this,
he said, she said story. Then she tells me that
the reason MIT is admitting this is because this group
of women, including her, led by her, had gathered the
data to show how women were discriminated against. So it
was salary and lab space, and you know the amount

(12:03):
of work that they did outside of their you know,
their their usual job roles, you know, speeches and appearing
on committees. That work was generally done for free. All
of the ways in which women were disadvantaged compared to men.
So that to me just struck me as kind of like,
there's this traditioner on MIT of hacks right where they
sort of you know, before we heard hackers, it was
MIT hacks, and they would do things like clever scientists.

(12:24):
They would do things like take a part a cop
car and put it up, you know, reassemble it on
top of the Great Dome and mit. But what these
women had done struck me as that kind of hack,
you know, like they had leaned into their science to
prove their case. So I sort of love that aspect
of it. So I went and I met with Nancy
in her office, and she talked to me about really
what I was so striking to me at the time.

(12:45):
And again we have to remember this as March of
nineteen ninety nine, but she talked about that this wasn't
discrimination the way we tend to think of it, right,
It wasn't like I mean, there was there was some
overcases of that, right, like salaries were lower, but the
way they described it was marginalation. And it was really
just the sort of pushing with the gradual pushing aside
of women across the arc of their careers, across the

(13:06):
you know, as they got older. The problem wasn't as
they were junior faculty members. It was really you know,
as they advanced in their career, they were gradually sort
of pushed aside what they described as marginalization. And again
they said, like this was not what we thought discrimination
looked like we thought discrimination was the door closed on
you someone telling you they have to say I'm not
hiring you because you're a woman. In fact, it was

(13:27):
much more subtle than that. And now when we look back,
they used this word at the time, and it was
a fresh word at the time. What they were talking
about was unconscious bias, which of course now we're so
familiar with, But at the time that was really a
new idea. And so I really do credit these women
in MIT with making that concept, with popularizing that concept
and making people understand just what it looks like.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
One of the most kind of compelling aspects of this
is that were the most shocking aspects is that MIT
acknowledged that this is what had happened over years. So
what was so extraordinary about this admission and kind of like,
what were some of the changes immediately that resulted from

(14:08):
this acknowledgment.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
The admission by MIT is in nineteen ninety nine, but
the women first came together in the summer of nineteen
ninety four, and for many twists and turns that I
tell in the book, it took an incredible four and
a half years for this to happen, for this to
become public. So MIT started fixing issues for the women
pretty much almost as soon as they started coming together.
The women come together, they ask for this committee to

(14:32):
sort of outline the problems, to look into the problems,
and the dean who was their great ally, starts beginning
to address them. What happened in nineteen ninety nine that
was really striking was the story. So my story ran
on the front page of the Boston Globe on a Sunday.
The women at MIT and I did not think we
understood that this was really an incredible story and something amazing.
But I think we all thought, maybe this is just

(14:53):
an MIT story, or maybe just a story of women
in science. What happens when the story appears the next morning,
a Monday, the en of science. They're this man who
was their great ally, the Dena of Science, shows up
at his office and there's a news crew from CBS
Evening News outside his office. That Tuesday, the New York
Times runs the story and it's front page and suddenly, really,
you know this again. This is like sort of it's

(15:14):
an early Internet era, so things don't really go viral
as much as they do now, but as much as
they did then. It really did go viral, and women
across the country and across the world started saying, like really,
writing into Nancy and to all these other women and saying,
I thought I was the only one who had this problem,
but this is my problem too. So what MIT really
did was acknowledge a problem that women thought that they

(15:35):
had been suffering alone. It put the problem on the map.
It made it a problem that other universities had to discuss.
One of the things that the MIT women like to
point out is that other universities initially said like, oh no,
this isn't a problem we have, like Harvard was. You know,
there's a great quote in the Harvard Crimson, like, oh no,
this isn't an issue for Harvard. Well, of course, it
had been an issue for Harvard for many, many years.
Harvard had had, you know, a committee on the Status

(15:56):
of Women. They've been doing reports on the status of
women for years. The sorts would be issued, be printed,
someone would put it on a shelf, no one would
notice it. So I think, really, what was so extraordinary
was that the president of MIT, Chuck Best, put his
name to this, and he had this great quote that
was repeated in every in every newspaper story, every editorial
about this and what he said. I'm probably going to

(16:17):
get the words a little bit wrong, but I think
I can remember it pretty much word for word. Was
I've always thought that gender discrimination in higher education was
part perception, part reality true, but I now understand that
it is that reality is the greater part of the balance.
And for him to say that, I mean that was
like Nancy Hopkins really, you know, almost fell off her
chair the minute she read that phrase. And I think,

(16:39):
you know, the fact that it was MIT, the fact
that it was this prestigious institution, really helped. But it
really did just put the discussion on the map. So
in many concrete ways there were changes. You know, the
Ford Foundation gave a million dollars for other universities, for
MIT and other universities to work out the problem, to
do the sort of analysis that these women had done
at MIT, looking at resources for men and for women.

(17:00):
They gave those that money went to help other universities
do the same thing. Suddenly you really saw there was
really an acceleration in the number of women at being
asked to lead. By two thousand and two, you had
three women as presidents in the Ivy League. You had
a president of MIT, who's a woman, very soon after.
So I really do think like this put that conversation
on the map. It made women in science the question

(17:21):
of why do we have so few women at the
highest levels of math and science. It put that question
on the map.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
And that question has deep, deep roots. And as someone
who went to grad school in the twenty tens, it's
really too easy to forget how different things are in
higher education today compared to not just like the late
nineteen nineties, but also the mid especially the mid twentieth century.
Like I knew about pay differences, I knew about tenure

(17:51):
being withheld or just not being hired in the first place.
But when I was reading your book, it was the
little things that really stood out to me, like these
mon dane acts of discrimination, like not being able to
buy faculty football tickets, or these like gender dining hall restrictions.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
No love room for you, little girl, Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
And I was wondering if you could sort of paint
a picture of what it was like to be a
female student or a female faculty member at Radcliffe around
the time that Nancy Hopkins then Nancy Doe was at
school there.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Yeah, so Nancy graduates from Radcliffe in nineteen sixty four,
and that was I think the first or second year
that Radcliffe and Harvard actually had a joint graduation, so
women still got separate diplomas, which is kind of amazing.
I mean, just to go to your point, I'll get
back to that, but like to go to your point
about being in the twenty tens, we forget that in
even nineteen ninety nine there was no daycare on campus.

(18:46):
Like that was I mean, that alone is it's just
an extraordinary change. But Radcliffe, Harvard and Radcliffe in nineteen
sixty so in nineteen sixty to nine sixty four. This
was some of my really favorite part of the book
to research because first of all, you write about universities,
and they remember everything, they memorialize everything, so there's just
a ton of archival work that you can look into.

(19:08):
So that's really wonderful. But it is, as you say,
it's so striking how different it was. You know, so
there were you know, Radcliffe existed, that was where the
quote unquot girls. There were men of Harvard and girls
of Radcliffe. That was where the girls were educated. But
of course there were no women on the faculty. Right,
So if you were a young woman at Radcliffe, you
were learning from men. You were not allowed to wear
pants downstairs in the dorms at Radcliffe, you had to

(19:30):
wear skirts. You were not allowed in the main library
on the Harvard campus because there was some fear that
you would be a distraction to the men. You know,
you were in the same classrooms with men. But that
was really only since World War Two. And the reason
that Harvard made this accommodation was that during World War Two,
of course, so many men left to be on the battlefield,
so they needed the tuition from women. You know, you

(19:51):
couldn't stay out past midnight. And what was so striking
to me though about those years is I think we
tend to think of, you know, maybe nineteen sixty, right,
which is when the National Organization for Women is founded.
We tend to think of that as kind of the
beginning of the women's movement. But when you look at
this class of you know, they arrive in nineteen sixty
they graduate in nineteen sixty four, it really became clear

(20:13):
to me that this was a generation very much on
the cusp, right, like they're not quite that you know,
full push of the second wave feminism. But they're starting
to change, right, So they're starting to push for, Hey,
we don't think we need to be checking into the
dorm by midnight every night or eleven o'clock every night.
We don't think we need that kind of babysitting. More
women were starting to major in things like biology rather

(20:35):
than the traditional fields of English and history, right Like,
they were starting to imagine a more professional future for themselves.
But they were also this was so you know, it
was amazing to me reading their yearbook because there are
these essays by these young women who are graduating and
they talk about themselves as a generation of culturally induced schizophrenics.
And the schizophrenia for them is they believe that they

(20:57):
are going to be able. They're going to be the
first generation that is going to be able to really
have a career and to have a family, and they
won't have to make the choices that women have had
to make for so long. And they're being encouraged in
this by the president of Radcliffe, a woman named Polly Bunting,
who is herself a scientist. But they're sort of, you know,
they're struggling with this idea, right Like, they think that
the men of Harvard are going to treat them as equals,

(21:18):
but they're not really sure yet, and they're still waiting
to see. I talked to, you know, some of Nancy's
friends who ultimately did not have careers and went on
to have children. They say, well, I always felt inadequate
because I wasn't choosing to have a career. And of
course Nancy struggles with, you know, well, I'm not really
sure I want children. I really want a career. So
whatever you were doing, and I do think again, this

(21:39):
is a struggle that women still are working on. Whatever
you're doing, you're feeling inadequate, You're thinking I can't possibly
do both things and do them both well. Going back
to this whole idea of the exceptions, and the woman
Millie dressel House I mentioned right with the four kids.
She was an amazing semiconductor physicist. She had many twists
and turns in her careers, and also an extremely supportive husband.
So there are many things to explain her success. But

(22:02):
really what the leadership of MIT did for decades was
say to women, well, why can't you be like MILLI?
And so the women themselves were like, oh, oh, I have
to be like Milli, And so, you know, I talked
to this one woman, one of the women in my
story Wonderful Woe, named Penny Chisholm, who's a National Medal
of Science winner. Now she's a marine biologist, but she
was in the School of engineering because I kind of
didn't know what to do with her when she arrived
in the seventies. And she says that, you know, in

(22:23):
her in her reviews and her discussions about her career,
men would compare her to Milli, and she would say,
how exactly does my work as a marine biologist compare
to Milly as a semiconductor physicist, And really there was
no way except that they were both women. But so
there was That's another way in which this whole idea
of the exceptions kind of inhibits women because they're being told, well,
you know, you can do it. And you know, Mit

(22:46):
was able to point to these exceptions and say, well,
what's our problem with women?

Speaker 1 (22:49):
We have Milli, And it's like it doesn't really send
the message that it's okay if you don't want that,
whatever that is. I think that that is something that
really stood out to me too, is you know, when
Nancy was deciding what to do postgraduation, and these sort
of these different paths that at the time were kind

(23:10):
of still split with like maybe a very narrow like
route right down the middle. Some people could both you know,
wanted to have a career in science as well as
having children and like raising those children. How did that
influence Nancy's choices?

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, in an incredible way. You know. Nancy, like many
of us, I think as a planner. And so if
you consider the culture that she was entering, women tended
to have three children. They had the last of those
by age thirty, which is you know, in our like
looking back at that, that's kind of extraordinary. A lot
of women don't start having children now until thirty. So
Nancy thinks she's nineteen, graduated from college, and she's thinking, okay,

(23:50):
I have she's got one year until graduation when we
first meet her, and she's like, I have this one
year to figure out what I'm going to do with
the next ten years of my life, because I only
have ten years to have this incredible career, because then
I have to get married and have kids. Like she
understood she had to do it all, and she understood
that her time was very limited, so she ultimately she
goes to grad school, but she does it really only

(24:13):
because her mentor, James Watson, tells her she should do this.
But she doesn't really want to go to grad school
because she's like, why would I need a PhD when
I'm just going to drop out of science by thirty.
So initially it really shapes her early career choices, but
ultimately she gets very lucky because she not only does
she have Jim Watson as her mentor, but she decides
to drop out of graduate school to go do this

(24:33):
big experiment that she's really really curious about, and she thinks, like,
I don't care if I have a PhD. The experiment
turns out to be enough of a success that she's
able to get her PhD by doing that experiment, and
then at that point she says, oh, okay, I'm going
to keep doing this, but again, I'll stop doing it
when I'm thirty. She ultimately does. She marries her boyfriend,
she anticipates having children, but it really produces this incredible

(24:53):
tension with her and her now husband Brooke, and I
describe it, as Nancy does, as kind of the love triangle, right,
like she knows she wants to be married to her husband,
but she really loves science. She doesn't want to give
it up. She knows just based on seeing the women
around her. You know, the women around her, if they're
successful scientists, it's because they don't have kids. There aren't

(25:14):
many of them for the most part. The women around
her that she sees have children, and they're not running
their own labs. They're working in the labs of their husbands,
and so she thinks that that's what she has to do.
So she marries very briefly, she drops out of science
because she's like, I just can't do this. I cannot
have children in this marriage and also have science. Ultimately,

(25:35):
you know, the other tension that's interesting here, and I
think maybe still also common, is that she has the
struggle with her husband because he sees that she is
more successful than he is. He's struggling to get published,
he's struggling to get a job as a professor of English,
and so ultimately he leaves her. Nancy is again lucky
enough that she has this training and she can get
a job, and she at this point has to work.
She gets these job offers from MIT and Harvard, takes

(25:58):
the job offer from MIT, but she tells herself like,
I'm not going to get married ever again, and I
will not have children. That is the choice that she makes,
and she thinks that she is making a choice for science,
and that is it's the only logical choice. And what's
really striking to me about all of the sixteen women
who are involved in this story, is it really I
think it's only half of them had children, so that's

(26:18):
you know, it just shows the constraints against women at
that time. If they wanted to be successful in science,
they recognize that they could not also have a family.

Speaker 1 (26:27):
Let's take a quick break. We'll be back in just
a few Welcome back everyone. I've been chatting with Kate

(26:50):
Zernike about her book The Exceptions Nancy Hopkins, MIT and
the Fight for Women in Science. Let's get back into
things earlier. We kind of talked about how this generation
that Nancy Hopkins was part of graduating from Radcliffe in
nineteen sixty four was sort of this cusp generation. And

(27:10):
in your book, I remember reading that in the nineteen seventies,
the proportions of doctorates earned by women and tenure track
faculty positions held by women at universities in the US,
those proportions were actually lower in many cases in the
seventies than at the turn of the century. What were
some of the drivers for this sort of downturn and

(27:34):
how was this is sort of a two parter, but
how was this new, more subtle discrimination different than in
past decades where it was just like a sign on
the door, do not enter the library.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah, you know again, one of the extraordinary things about
this whole mit story in nineteen ninety nine was that
I think there still was a subtle, maybe unexpressed bias
that the reason there weren't a lot of women in
math and science is because either women didn't want to
do math and science or that they actually weren't that
good at math and science. But it really gave the
great lie to that whole idea because there were women

(28:07):
at that point, There were women as undergraduates, whours who
were who wanted to get into science. The problem was
really at the faculty level. So something was happening. It
wasn't that, you know, for many many years we thought, oh,
we just need to fill the pipeline and get more
women into science, and then they will organically become faculty members.
So that story gave the lie to it. But as
you say, you know, when I went to do the
work expanding this from a newspaper story twenty years ago

(28:30):
into a book and you look at the numbers in
the early twentieth century, you see that again, like, it's
not that women weren't good at this or weren't interested
in this. It really was something culturally that was happening.
And the period that I really am struck by is
during World War Two. So again you know, as men leave,
as men go join the fight, the number of women
who became professors actually really rises quite substantially. What happens, though,

(28:53):
is the men come back from the front, and colleges
and universities, including by the way, women's colleges, decided that
it was actually there was more prestigion having men among
your professors, men as college presidents. So the number of
women as professors begins to go down. Women's colleges begin
having male college presidents. Again. I mean, it's just this
whole shift. I think it really was this idea in

(29:15):
the fifties that women's place really was to have a family,
to be at home, right, that was the whole that
was the image that they thought that they were fulfilling.
So one of the things that we see after World
War Two is that universities begin adopting anti nepotism policies,
so they won't hire a husband and wife together, and
of course, who are they going to hire the husband
or the wife. They're going to hire the husband. The

(29:37):
only way that a wife who has perhaps met her
husband when they are both PhD students as scientists, the
only way she can get a job at the same
university in most cases is that she could work in
his lab, because then she will get money not from
the university but from outside out, from external funding. So
you see a lot of women who go to work
not as lab heads in their own right, but they

(29:58):
go to the work in their husband's labs. So that
was really the pattern up until about the seventies.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
And then in the seventies people began to realize that
maybe this narrative that had been pushed for so long
about how well, women just don't like science, they're just
not good at science and they want to stay home
with the kids like that might not actually be what's
happening here. That it might be that in the workplace
they're either facing extreme discrimination, harassment, marginalization, or just being

(30:27):
actively discouraged from seeking training in science. Can you talk
about this like shift.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
And how it was received by the public.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, you know, the sixties was such a time of ferment,
and one of the things that was most interesting to
me was reading about the early sixties and President Kennedy's
Commission on the Status of Women, and that in itself
was sort of a separate and long story. But what's
so striking is that this commission identified a lot of
the things that we're still talking about today and a
lot of things that didn't get resolved or really addressed

(30:59):
their years, so family leave, you know, maternity leave, daycare,
universal childcare, all of these things. You know, they proposed
a universal basic income, which today is like, you know,
still considered a pretty fringe idea. But I think that
was really that was a group of women who and
their report became a best seller, by the way, which
is really again very striking. I mean, it was sort
of like, you know, we think about maybe the nine

(31:20):
to eleven Report or something that becomes the best seller.
This was a major event in American society, but it
really was this this discussion about you know, well, why
is it that women aren't succeeding in science? And maybe
it's because you know, if you read some of the
early newspapers at MIT, when when women start to become
a greater percentage of the students, it's still like, well,
but they're not very attractive. You know, you have to

(31:42):
you got to go to Wellesley to find the really
good looking girls. And you know, there was this idea that, well,
we don't want women in the labs because, as one
person says, like they're going to spill their nail polished.
I mean, it's really silly, petty stuff. What happens in
the seventies, That's that's interesting, And I think, you know,
we have to remember that laws can't fix everything, but
they do they can signal a culture shift. So after

(32:03):
the President's Commission on the Status of Women in nineteen
makes its report, in nineteen sixty three, President Kennedy signs
the Equal Pay Act, and there is just sort of this,
There are laws passed, Anti discrimination laws begin to be passed.
Of course, the sixties was a wave of antidiscrimination laws
in many respects against many different marginalized groups. But so
universities recognize that they could no longer discriminate. Then, of

(32:25):
course comes Title nine in nineteen seventy two, and there
really was pressure. There was a way for women to
say to universities, you have to hire us because you
are getting federal funding and discrimination against women is against
federal law. So universities recognize that they had to hire
more women. The other interesting thing that's happening at the
end of the sixties is that men on campuses are

(32:46):
suddenly saying that, well, we don't want to be on
all male campuses, like we don't want Harvard to be
single sex anymore. So men are demanding, you know, they
want co education, and that happens, and really in the
seventies there was a push for more women on the
fact culty, but the real push was to get more
women into higher education for co education. That's when you
see the Ivy's going co ed. Vassar starts taking men,

(33:09):
of course, and there really is this idea that we're
going to educate both and again organically like this will time,
time will fix this problem. Right. So to go back
to Millie dressl House, who does this report at MIT
in nineteen seventy two. One of the things she notices
is that there's some sort of obvious, more obvious ways
in which women are discriminated against, Like there are no

(33:29):
women's bathrooms near the near the halls where women take exams,
so they have to like run twenty minutes back to
find a bathroom. So things like that are addressed, but
it's also, you know, the comments that people are making
about women not belonging here. Millie has this idea in
the early seventies that it's hard for women to speak
up in class, but if every class has at least
two women in it, those two women will feel less

(33:52):
shy about raising your hand. I mean, imagine that just
for a moment that there's there are classes where there
is only one woman and like whatever, you know, forty
one hundred men. And so Millie says, she does this
kind of back of the envelope calculation, and she says, Okay,
if we can just get fifteen percent women in all
of our departments, every class will have at least to women,
and that will help women feel stronger, feel more confident

(34:13):
raising their hand and speaking up in class. And that
will be one change. And I do think that MIT
does first in the seventies and then again in the eighties,
because of a real push from the male president, does
begin to get more female students, but the percentage of
women is faculty at MIT. There's a big bump in
the early seventies because of affirmative action. Suddenly, lo and
behold nineteen ninety four. This group of women gets together

(34:35):
and they're like, oh wow, in fact, the percentage of
women on the faculty has not changed this whole idea.
You know, women are now fifty percent students in many departments,
even more than that in a couple of departments, but
we're not getting the women aren't ending up as faculty.
So what is going on here? And ultimately, as I said,
it's the pipeline leaking. And you have to think, why
is the pipeline leaking? And it's the same problem that

(34:56):
had begun to be identified in the early sixties, which
woul the institutions were just sort of built by men
for men, that women weren't really welcomed there. They were tolerated,
but not welcomed, and so many women, frustrated, decided to
kind of give up and leave. No, we call it
opting out now, they didn't call it that back then,
but that's what they were doing. They ultimately decided my

(35:17):
family needs me, My family appreciates me more than the
people at work to so I'll just go back to
my family.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
Was it also around this time that the term minutia
of sexism was kind of introduced? Can you explain what
this term is? Because I mean, I love and hate
this term.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
So I was like, oh, yes, that's yep, still around today.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
But yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a
bit about that.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah. There's a woman in the book named Mary Rowe
who is the ombudsman at MIT in the early seventies,
and she called it Saturn's rings, right, Like, so all
of this dust and debris that you can't and when
you're in it, you don't really notice that it's dust
and debris, but you step outside you're like, oh God,
look at that. That's really noticeable. So the manute of sexism,
as Mary describes it, is not these are the problems

(36:04):
that like, none of us would raise our hand and
complain about, right because who wants to sort of who
wants to fight all the time? These are things that
you notice and you know, let it slide again. It's
sort of like the exception right, But it's the very
small exceptions, so you're not included in a meeting. Well,
I don't know. Was that a snub or was it
just like those guys are friends and that's why they
ended up deciding to go into this venture together. It's

(36:25):
the very small things that none of us would raise
our hand and complain about, but ultimately it does end
up in women being pushed aside. The women at MIT
in nineteen ninety nine use this phrase marginalization, and I
guess I love that in the same way you do
the manutiae of sexism, because to me, it implies like
this sort of subtle pushing aside. It's not anything again

(36:46):
that like you can complain about there's no law to
prevent this, but you sort of have the sense that
it's happening. And then on top of that, because you
have to spend all this energy and time, or because
you end up spending all this energy and time thinking
about huh, was that a snub or was that just me?
Is that just Is that the exception or is that
the rule that adds to the level of discrimination, because

(37:07):
of course you're spending your time doing that rather than
you know on the job that you're there to do.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
It's also one of those things where, especially before the
terms like marginalization or even before like the minutia of
sexism was introduced, it's I think difficult to see those
types of things in yourself, just like you said, like,
am I imagining this? Am I not? And so I
think that that can make it really difficult to identify
larger patterns. And you talk about this in your book too.

(37:36):
And the introduction of the term sexual harassment helped many
people put words to, you know, be able to articulate
what they had experienced for years and it was like, oh.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
There's a word for that.

Speaker 1 (37:48):
But in other cases, I feel like there is some
resistance to apply the term to themselves because what they
experienced wasn't what they thought discrimination looked like. Do you
think that this played a role in the efforts to
hold universities accountable for these unfair practices, just like the
disconnect between here's this term that sounds very serious and like, oh,

(38:12):
but my experience is I'm used to this, like this
happens all the time.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
I think that's definitely true. You know, Nancy Hopkins will
say Nancy says, now you know it took me twenty
years to recognize the problem. It took me fifteen years
to recognize that it was happening to other women and
another five to realize what was happening to me. And
that that idea of sexual harassment and being a you know,
not wanting to mention that phrase, not really accepting that
that's what's happening to you, that definitely played for her,

(38:37):
because for Nancy, sexual harassment meant there had to be sex, right,
someone had to make a move on you and then
deny you a job because they you know, you hadn't accepted,
You hadn't you hadn't given in. So I think there
was real confusion. I think to your point, it probably
insulated universities to a degree because women weren't going to

(38:58):
bring it up, and so they didn't have to deal that,
they didn't have to mention it. Sometimes, when I've been
talking about this book over the last year or so,
you know, it's like I'm like, oh God, I hate
talking about this because there is now it's so hard
looking back now when you know, we talk about unconscious bias,
now we talk about sexual harassment. And I think there's
there's really an eye roll element to it. People are like, oh, yeah,

(39:19):
I had like I had the training on that it's
not a real thing. I don't have that, or it's overhyped,
you know. There's like this sense that there's just like
an excess of wokeism. But what I tried to do
in the book was really explain really because of that,
because I was worried that people kind of roll their
eyes and be like, yeah, whatever, stop you're complaining. What
I wanted to do in the book was just show

(39:41):
how this day in and day out, that these how
this the minutia of sexism, the sort of slow grinding
of this really sort of wears down Nancy, wears her
down over a period of years, to the point that
she finally feels like she has no she has no
option but to mention it because otherwise she's just going
to leave science. And I think the pattern probably was
more often that women did leave science. So I think

(40:04):
the fact that women were reluctant to talk about sexual
harassment actually ends up insulating universities because they didn't have
to deal that, they didn't have to respond to the complaints.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
Many of the scientists that you write about, including Nancy Hopkins,
like we've talked about attributed their own mistreatment and the
discrimination they faced to their own personalities or the personalities
of those around them, like Oh, that's just the attitude
on the fifth floor, or like oh, I shouldn't have
been so forceful in that meeting, so shrill for Nancy,
how did this internalization and also especially the myth of

(40:38):
meritocracy in science eventually give way to the growing awareness
that this was not just an exception, this was a
systemic issue.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
So this for me was in many ways the hardest
part of the story to report and convey and the writing,
but also the most fascinating and compelling. She starts out, really,
I mean, she's not she's not an activist, she's not
a feminist, and she really hates feminists right like, she
thinks feminists are the problem. There are these women who

(41:09):
are whining about everything. They're the women who complain about
every little thing. She doesn't want to be that person.
And she thinks science is a meritocracy. Lucky me, I'm
incredibly well trained. I'm in this field that is a meritocracy.
All I have to do is do my work, get
good results, and I can win an Amoil prize. That's
what she thinks, and you know, I like to say
the next twenty years is her schooling, right, But so

(41:32):
I had to figure out, you know, when, because this
is something you know, you're not going to find in
the archives at Harvard, even necessarily in her diaries or
which some of which I had. Was this whole idea
like when did she change? When did when did kind
of the light begin to go on in her head?
And it really was when she I think the start
of that is when she reads a biography of Roslin Franklin, who,
of course was with James Watson, Nancy's mentor, Francis Krek,

(41:55):
and Maurice Wilkins. Roslin Franklin contributed to understanding the structure
of and Roslin Franklin died tragically young. She died before
the three men who she had worked with were awarded
the Nobel Prize for this discovery. We now understand that
Roslin Franklin actually did play a real, very important role
in this, but that was not known at the time.

(42:16):
But Nancy reads this biography of Roslin Franklin, and not
only does she realize that Roslyn played this huge role
in decoding the structure of DNA, but more importantly, she
sees how the men viewed Roslin. And this book is
written by a friend of Roslin's, and it really describes
Rosalind as much more of a human, much more of
a well rounded person. And Nancy realizes that like her,

(42:36):
Like Nancy, Roslin was very passionate about her science, very driven.
You know, she chose not to have children because she
was so in love with science. And Nancy reads this
book and she thinks, oh, this is my life, and
she begins to see how the same way that Rosin
was viewed, many of the men around her are viewing
her this way. And that's where she kind of, you know,
it's not that she has this total epiphany, but she

(42:57):
begins to notice different things. Think she thinks is, oh,
I'm on this fifth floor at MIT, if the cancer
center at MIT. It's very competitive. It's just that it's
too competitive. I have to leave the fifth floor, so
she goes to the third floor. Then she discovers that
men from outside MIT are taking credit for her work,
which is of course the same exact thing that happened
to Roslyn Franklin. And so it really is it's this,
you know, one of the ways someone describes it about

(43:19):
Franklin was this slow robbery right like it's things are
slowly being taken from her, and Nancy ultimately leaves her field.
She leaves the field of cancer research and goes into
a new field. And that's when she goes into studying
zebrafish and she tries to get more space for her
zebra fish tanks, and she realizes she can't get more space,
but all the men have the space they need, so

(43:40):
she literally takes out her tape measure and goes around
the building and measures all the lab space, all the
office space, discovers that she is a fully tenured professor
at MIT has less space than men without tenure, and
she begins to complain about it. Then she discovers that
her salary is lower. And then there's the final straw
that breaks the camel's back is that she co develops
this class with a younger man, and suddenly her department

(44:03):
head informs her that she's no longer going to be
teaching that class because the younger man wants to teach
it with another guy. And then she discovers that these
men are going to form a company around this course,
and as they tell her, they intend to make millions.
So it's like this again, it's this gradual edging out.
So this course is taken away from her, and she thinks, well, again,
her default is this must be my fault, this must

(44:24):
be my problem. But then she looks at her teaching
evaluations and she realizes no, in fact, I get some
of the highest teaching ratings in this entire department. There
is no way that I'm being pushed out for this reason.
It's not a matter of meritocracy. That science, like so
many other fields, like life, depends on the relationships you have,
depends on who's conferring the merit. You know, we have

(44:45):
this idea I think that merit is like gravity. You know,
there's some equation that determines it. But of course merit
depends on many things. It depends on the context, depends
on who's awarding the merit right, it depends on many
different things. So I think one of the great lessons
from this whole, from the book and from the whole experience,
is that there is no such thing as pure meritocracy,

(45:06):
because if there were going to be one, it would
be science. And science is not it.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
Like I said, I've I went to grad school in
the twenty tens, and we have come a long way
in academia since this story broke in nineteen ninety nine,
but the problem of discrimination, marginalization, sexual harassment, it's still
very much present across all parts of academia. And I
think that one of the biggest issues is that there

(45:33):
are rarely formal channels to share feedback about professors or
potential advisors without fear of retaliation. That combined with the
fact that professors don't get training in mentorship often at
least like that seems to be the general rule in EEB.
What are some of the ways you think we can
do better or what are some of the biggest problems

(45:55):
that still exist.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
One of the reasons that we think of science as
a meritocracy is because we do have the sense of like, oh,
it's all about data. It's all about numbers, right, And
then our in our data loving society, there's this whole
idea that we can like optimize things, right, and so
like there is this optimal number and that's that's the
meritocracy when when you reach that number. So I do
think that I think we have to think about numbers,
but in a different way. So the way that I

(46:19):
think about numbers and how it solves, how it helps
to solve this problem is you just need more women.
You just need to keep hiring women. What tends to
happen is what happened at MIT in the early two thousands,
which is that, again, as as had happened in the
early seventies, there was a wave of new hiring of
women in MIT. Then the dean, who had been sort
of very much behind that idea, hire, you know, hire

(46:41):
more female scientists. He leaves, and again the number sort
of plateaus again. So you need people who are we
need to continue pushing further to be more women, because
we just have to change the perception of who belongs
right like. So there's a documentary in which Nancy features,
which some of your listeners may have heard about, called
Picture a Scientist, And the title from that documentary is

(47:01):
taken from this idea that when you ask children to
draw a scientist or to picture a scientist, picture a genius,
they draw a man. Right when you ask someone to
draw a leader, they draw a man holding a briefcase.
That's our traditional picture. I will say, I think that
is beginning to change a little bit and again, one
of the ways we change that is just to change

(47:23):
the numbers. What happens now is that women come into
a field, and because most of the prestigious fields in
this country have been dominated by men, our picture of
who belongs in that field is still a man. So
you need to have the numbers so that our picture
of that begins to change. And I do think that
that's happening. But the other thing I like to talk
about is the change in Really it's simply our language.

(47:44):
They are really interesting studies done by a woman named
Sarah Jane Leslie at Princeton and Andre Chimpion who's at NYU.
They have looked at the language around genius and the
language around when we talk about science and math in particular,
and who goes into those fields. What they have found
is that people tend to associate the idea of genius

(48:04):
or the word genius with men. They also tend to
think that for scientific fields, and particularly for fields that
rely a lot on numbers, so pure math, theoretical physics,
that to go into those fields you have to be
a genius, you have to have some kind of row brilliance.
The ultimate result of this is that women think oh,
to go into that field, I have to be a genius.

(48:25):
I can't do that. That's not me. But if you
say to those women, this is a field that requires
hard work, they're like, oh, I can do that. So
to me, I think just changing our language begins to
change the problem. And I again go back to a
story about Nancy for this. So, of course I met
Nancy in nineteen ninety nine and one of the first
things I noticed about her, which is one of the
first things that many people notice about her, is that

(48:46):
she has this very slight English accent, and it's because
she grew up living close to her grandmother who was
from England. But in twenty eighteen I started, you know,
I came back to this idea. I was being able
to explore the idea of doing this as a book,
and I noticed that Nancy using the word brilliant a lot,
and I thought it was sort of like in the
way British people, you know, like, oh, that scone is brilliant,
the tea is brilliant, it's a brilliant play whatever. So

(49:08):
I noticed that she kept she would talk about these women,
and she kept saying, oh, she's brilliant, you know, she's brilliant.
She's brilliant, and I thought it was this britishism, So
I asked her about it, and she said, oh, no, no, no,
that's not it at all, she said, I just started
to notice that everyone always referras to the men as brilliant,
and no one ever says that about the women. So
I just decided that I was going to change this,
and I was going to start referring to the women
as brilliant. And I thought, that's kind of brilliant. So,

(49:30):
you know, I've done this a little bit when I've
talked about the book over the past year or so.
I'll just go to a bookstore and I'll have people
kind of shift their frame of mind and say, like,
look at the person next to you, look at the
woman next to you. Just tell yourself she's brilliant. Like,
imagine how that changes your perspective. So a lot of
this I think can be solved by a kind of
very basic thought experiment. And I don't think it just

(49:51):
applies to science. I think it applies to the question
of like, why have we never had a female president
in this country?

Speaker 3 (49:56):
Right?

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Like why are most of the women who are leaders
in this country Why do they tend to be in
the legislature, not in the governor's chair, not in the
oval office. Why are despite the fact that more than
half the law students in this country are women, why
are there so few women at the highest levels of law?
All those questions, and I think, again, it is this
subtle frame switch that we have to do in our

(50:16):
own minds. We have to start thinking, when I listen
to this person speak, am I valuing what they say
more because it's a man. If as I listened to
this woman speak, if she were a man, would I
be taking what she said more seriously? Would I'd be
thinking this person's a genius. They should do something really extraordinary.
They're going to do something really extraordinary. So again, I
think ultimately the answer is to get women into these roles,

(50:39):
to have people see the difference and not just the exception,
not just one woman, not just one woman who's made it,
but many, many women. And that of course means that
not only do we see that women can succeed, but
that women can fail just as men do. And it's
not the end of the world. It doesn't mean that
no woman will ever be successful. So I think we
need more numbers, but I also think it's a matter
of shit, the way we look at women and what

(51:01):
we think they're capable of.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
I was curious, what sort of reactions you have gotten
from this book from you know, women who are in science,
women who are not in science, older women in science,
younger women in science, Like, what kind of what's the
range of reactions.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
That you get. Well, I often feel like I have
to apologize to people for the reactions to my book,
because women, particularly older women, will say to me, be like,
oh my god, it was so you know, so familiar,
and I had to take pauses in between chapters because
it's so it felt like my life all over again,
and I'm just like and then they're like, I love
your book, and I'm like sorry. So I would say that,

(51:40):
you know, in the same way the story resonated for
me at the time I was thirty when I first
reported the story for The Globe, in the same way
that the story resonated for me not a scientist, it
has resonated for for other women in other fields. As
I knew it would be. I joke when we were
talking about the subtitle for the book, you know, maybe
it should be the exceptions of universe story, because I

(52:01):
think as much as everyone thinks like, oh no, this
just happened to me, it's really happening to many many,
many of us. Young women have been interesting.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
You know.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
I think some young women do have this recognition of
how self doubt is grinding them down, and they see
what happened to Nancy, and they want to change things.
Other young women think there's been no progress. Why you know,
they're angry. You know, how can you talk about like
how are you? How can you celebrate the progress, which
the book does to some degree, like in fact, this

(52:28):
didn't change anything. I don't think that's true that it
didn't change anything. One of the things I'll say is
that Nancy in particular has been most struck by the
reactions of men who come to her, and most often
they're like, oh my god, I had no idea this
was happening. And so these men are which you know,
you can laugh at, but you can also say, well,
good for them, like they're now changing their perspective. And

(52:50):
so I think she has had emails and conversations with
many men who really now have sort of the zeal
of a convert around this, and they really do think
this is an important problem to solve. I think for
women in science, I think the problem is still partially acute.
I think we have changed many of the structural issues,

(53:11):
like as I mentioned, there was no daycare at the time.
So many of those problems we can fix. It's the
problems that you can't measure. It's the things that you
can't take a tape measure to. Those are the problems
that are harder. It is the slight, you know. It
is the way people talk to you, the way they
assume that you're not as smart, the way that they
don't expect you to belong in a lab. That's that's

(53:31):
the hardest problem to solve.

Speaker 1 (53:52):
Kate, thank you so much for taking the time to
chat with me today, and for writing this book and
for breaking this story back in eighteen ninety nine. Since
learning about this story and reading this book, I don't
think a day has gone by without me telling someone
about it or sharing some outrageous tidbit from it. And
if you would also like to have this story preoccupy

(54:15):
your thoughts forever, and trust me you do, check out
our website this podcast will kill You dot com, or
I'll post a link to where you can find the exceptions,
Nancy Hopkins MIT and the Fight for Women in Science,
as well as a.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
Link to Kate's website.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
And don't forget you can check out our website for
all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
quarantining and placeib reader recipes, show notes and references for
all of our episodes, links to merch our bookshop dot Org,
affiliate account, our Goodreads list, first hand account form, and
music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile

(54:51):
for providing the music for this episode and all of
our episodes. Thank you to Leana Squalacci and Tom Bryfogel
for our audio mix, and thanks to you listeners for listening.
I really hope that you liked this bonus episode and
are enjoying being part of the TPWKY book Club.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
And a special thank.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
You, as always to our generous patrons. We appreciate your
support so very much. Well, until next time, keep washing
those hands