Special Episode: Kate Zernike & The Exceptions

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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 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 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 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 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 had much less.

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 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 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

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

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?

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 did ultimately result in MIT acknowledging it had discriminated against the women on its faculty.

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

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

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 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. 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. 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 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 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.

The women come together, they ask for this committee to 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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.

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 of why do we have so few women at the

highest levels of math and science. It put that question on the map.

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.

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. 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

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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 was able to point to these exceptions and say, well, what's our problem with women?

having children and like raising those children. How did that influence Nancy's choices?

of women don't start having children now until thirty. So Nancy thinks she's nineteen, graduated from college, and she's thinking, okay, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

nineteen sixty four was sort of this cusp generation. And 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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

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

actively discouraged from seeking training in science. Can you talk about this like shift.

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

look at that. That's really noticeable. So the manute of sexism, as Mary describes it, is not these are the problems 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 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 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 of course you're spending your time doing that rather than you know on the job that you're there to do.

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.

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, 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 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, 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 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 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.

that this was not just an exception, this was a systemic issue.

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 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, 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. 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, because if there were going to be one, it would be science. And science is not it.

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 that still exist.

but in a different way. So the way that I 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

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 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 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. 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

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

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, 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 we think they're capable of.

your book, and I'm like sorry. So I would say that, 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 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.

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 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, 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 the hardest problem to solve.

about it or sharing some outrageous tidbit from it. And if you would also like to have this story preoccupy 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.

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.