0:44

Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this

0:46

is this Podcast Will Kill You. Welcome

0:49

everyone to the latest episode

0:52

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0:54

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0:57

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0:59

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1:01

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1:03

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the plant and animal derived substances

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1:22

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It really does help us out. Okay,

2:11

let's get into the book of the Week. Pullitzer

2:14

Prize winning journalist reporter for the

2:16

New York Times since two thousand and

2:18

author Kate Zernike joins

2:21

me to discuss her recent book, The

2:23

Exceptions, Nancy Hopkins,

2:25

MIT and the Fight for Women in Science.

2:28

In nineteen ninety nine, the Massachusetts

2:31

Institute of Technology MIT made

2:34

an extraordinary admission that

2:36

they had discriminated against women

2:38

on its faculty, confirming

2:41

a suspicion held by many

2:43

for many years and prompting

2:46

a reckoning for institutions of higher

2:48

education across the country.

2:50

In The Exceptions, Zernichi,

2:53

who was one of the reporters at the Boston

2:55

Globe to break this story in nineteen ninety

2:57

nine, revisits the sequence

2:59

of events that led to sixteen women

3:01

on the faculty of MIT coming

3:04

together to demand a seat at

3:06

the table that had for so long

3:08

been denied. Zernike centers

3:10

this story on groundbreaking molecular

3:13

biologist doctor Nancy Hopkins,

3:15

taking readers through Nancy's educational

3:18

and career journeys, and culminating

3:20

with the story of how armed

3:22

with a tape measure and Nancy began to

3:25

quantify the marginalization that

3:27

women faculty at MIT faced.

3:30

By taking this panoramic approach, Zernichie

3:33

paints a vivid picture of how gender

3:35

equality in higher education evolved

3:38

over the twentieth century, starting

3:40

with more overt or explicit

3:42

gender discrimination, such as denying

3:44

women students access to the library

3:47

on campus, and shifting

3:49

to be more subtle, more insidious,

3:52

like senior faculty men

3:55

of course, lying about how

3:57

much lab space women faculty have

3:59

compared to the men. Spoiler,

4:02

women actually had much less.

4:03

But you probably could.

4:04

Have guessed that.

4:05

Zernike's thoughtful storytelling places

4:08

these events in the broader context

4:10

of changing gender roles and

4:12

popular discourse on whether women could

4:15

or should be scientists.

4:17

In the twentieth century.

4:18

What results is an enlightening,

4:21

infuriating, but ultimately

4:24

inspiring book that everyone

4:26

should add to their to read lists. When

4:29

this story broke in nineteen ninety nine,

4:31

it was at a time when the problem

4:33

of sexual discrimination in higher education

4:36

was kind of thought to have been solved,

4:39

at least for the most part. Nancy

4:41

Hopkins and the other women faculty across

4:43

the MIT campus who brought this

4:46

marginalization to light showed

4:48

that that was far from the truth,

4:51

and being scientists, they

4:53

quantified this marginalization and

4:55

minimization clearly demonstrating

4:58

that their experiences were not just

5:00

one offs, that it was not just the

5:02

attitude of one particular department,

5:05

that it was not about scientific achievement

5:07

or not being a team player. That

5:10

the discrimination they faced was

5:12

systemic and actively

5:14

discouraged women from remaining

5:17

in science in academic institutions.

5:20

This story resonated with me so

5:23

much to learn about these

5:25

amazing women and how they refuse

5:27

to be ignored, how through their

5:29

tireless efforts they made higher

5:32

education a better, more welcoming

5:34

place for women in science today. I

5:37

am so grateful. At the same

5:40

time, I think this book resonated

5:42

to such a degree because parts

5:44

of this story feel painfully

5:47

familiar. It serves as

5:49

a reminder that the problem of marginalization

5:52

in academia is not close to being

5:54

solved, but we

5:56

are a whole lot closer now

5:58

than we would be without the efforts

6:01

of Nancy Hopkins and the other women

6:03

faculty at MIT featured

6:05

in Kate Zernike's amazing book, The

6:08

Exceptions. So let's take

6:10

a quick break here and then get into some questions.

6:37

Kate, thank you so much for joining me today.

6:40

I am thrilled to chat

6:42

with you about your incredible and

6:44

incredibly infuriating book,

6:47

The Exceptions. Can you

6:49

tell me about the title of your book? Who

6:51

are the Exceptions? Where did this title come

6:53

from?

6:55

Yeah?

6:55

Well, first of all, I'm so excited to be here, thank you for

6:57

having me. You know, it's

6:59

really a question of not just two are

7:02

the exceptions, but what are the exceptions? And

7:05

I started out this book and I

7:07

knew exactly what the story was. I knew the arc of the story,

7:10

but I didn't know the title. And I

7:12

would say about halfway through the reporting, it became

7:14

clear to me that like, there was no other title,

7:16

there was nothing else that I could call this book.

7:19

Because every time I talk to people so often

7:21

in conversation or as I was reading something,

7:23

I would stumble on this word, which was like exceptions,

7:26

or it was the exception, or she was exceptional,

7:29

and so on some level it was like, well, historically,

7:32

like why are these women so exceptional? Why is it

7:34

so exceptional that women can succeed in science,

7:37

you know, do you have to be exceptional in the sense of being

7:39

exceptionally smart? Like is there something genius

7:41

or unique about you? But it was also

7:44

you know as women. As I talked to these women

7:46

and ask them about their story or

7:49

their stories, they would say to me, well,

7:51

you know, this thing happened to me, but I thought it

7:53

was the exception, or I thought I was the exception, or

7:56

I thought it was just the circumstances. You know, it was really

7:58

just the exception. And this

8:01

just as it accumulates, you start to thinking, well, actually, no,

8:03

that's not exceptional, like this is actually very common,

8:06

and you know, the exception starts to look

8:08

more like the rule. So for some

8:10

women, this

8:13

manner of dealing, you know, telling

8:15

yourself this was the exception, this was just the circumstances.

8:18

That was a way of coping, and it actually allowed

8:20

them to be successful. Like they just put blinders

8:22

on and said, you know, if I get distracted by this stuff,

8:24

I'm going to go off the rails and I can't do

8:26

that. But for other women it was

8:28

it became very demeaning

8:31

and very crippling in a way because they kept something

8:33

would happen to them, and they would say, oh, well,

8:35

I must be the problem here, and so

8:38

it stopped them from succeeding. So it was just this sort

8:40

of interesting you know. It was this idea of how

8:43

seeing these things as the exceptions can help and can

8:45

hurt. But also these women really were, on

8:47

the most fundamental level, they were exceptional

8:50

because they were able to get jobs in science at a time when

8:52

women couldn't. They were exceptionally right,

8:54

they were exceptionally accomplished. But

8:56

this whole idea of being the exception was in

8:58

some way holding them back. Even just

9:00

what Mit did here, which was

9:03

to admit, as a result of all the work,

9:06

of all the research that these women did, that

9:08

it had discriminated against the women on its faculty,

9:11

that in itself was an exceptional move. And

9:14

really it wasn't just the women who were affected

9:16

and sort of influenced by this idea of

9:19

things being exceptional, of circumstances being exceptional.

9:22

It was the men. One of the men who became

9:24

an early ally to these women talked

9:27

about how he knew all of their stories and

9:29

he understood, you know, he thought he understood what

9:31

was happening in their lives. But there's a point

9:33

in the book where all these women are in

9:35

his office. There's six women in his office, six

9:37

of the total sixteen of the story, and

9:40

one after another they tell their stories

9:42

and they tell their experiences, and he

9:44

says later that this was he compares

9:47

it later to one of the greatest scientific epiphanies

9:49

he's ever had, like a real Eureka moment, and he said,

9:51

you know, had any of these women come to

9:53

me one on one, I would have said, oh, her problem is

9:55

this. Her problem is that it's the exception, it's

9:58

not the rule. Seeing as women and hearing

10:00

their stories one after another, he was like, oh,

10:03

we have a problem. And that's what really

10:05

started the whole series of events in motion that did

10:07

ultimately result in MIT acknowledging it had discriminated

10:10

against the women on its faculty.

10:12

Let's talk a little bit about

10:15

that incredible, extraordinary

10:17

admission. So this is kind of jumping

10:19

to the end of your book chronologically,

10:22

but can you tell me how you first came across

10:24

this story of Nancy Hopkins and the

10:26

other women faculty at MIT

10:29

that faced this like decades

10:31

of sexual harassment and discrimination. And

10:34

then finally we're able to get that acknowledged.

10:37

I started covering higher education for

10:39

the Boston Globe in September of nineteen ninety eight, and

10:42

my father, who was a physicist, said to me at

10:44

the time, Oh, you should look into the work this

10:46

woman named Millie dressel House is doing to

10:49

get more women into physics. And Millie was this

10:51

incredible when we talk about exceptional, she was amazing.

10:53

She had four children. The

10:55

story was that she had taken a total of five days

10:57

maternity leave because two of the kids im

10:59

born on weekends and one on a snow day.

11:01

I mean, it was really she's extraordinary, She's exceptional.

11:04

So my father says it to me, and I think, well, that is the

11:06

worst idea ever, Like, what, what's the action

11:09

there? What's actually happening in that story. It's going to

11:11

be some story about, like, you know, some good

11:13

program trying to solve a long standing problem.

11:16

Six months later, I got a tip from someone

11:18

in the newsroom that there was something going on with women in

11:20

discrimination and MIT. And

11:22

the only thing I had was the name of this woman, Nancy

11:24

Hopkins, and her phone number, and so I called

11:26

her and she told me that in

11:28

fact, MIT was going to admit

11:31

that to discriminated against the women on its faculty. And

11:34

I was like, oh, well, there's definitely a verb

11:36

in that story. There's you know, there's action there. And that was

11:38

really striking to me. And this was not something in nineteen

11:40

ninety eight you thought was going to happen. I thought

11:42

when I heard about women in discrimination MIT, I

11:45

thought, oh, someone's file of the lawsuit, right, and it'll

11:47

be like this, he said, she said story.

11:49

Then she tells me that the reason

11:51

MIT is admitting this is because this group

11:54

of women, including her, led by her,

11:56

had gathered the data to show how

11:58

women were discriminated against. So it was salary

12:00

and lab space, and you know the

12:03

amount of work that they did outside of

12:05

their you know, their their usual

12:07

job roles, you know, speeches and appearing on

12:09

committees. That work was generally done for

12:11

free. All of the ways in which women were disadvantaged

12:14

compared to men. So that to me

12:16

just struck me as kind of like, there's

12:18

this traditioner on MIT of hacks right where they

12:20

sort of you know, before we heard hackers, it was MIT hacks,

12:22

and they would do things like clever scientists.

12:24

They would do things like take a part a cop car

12:27

and put it up, you know, reassemble it on top of the Great

12:29

Dome and mit. But what these women

12:31

had done struck me as that kind of hack,

12:33

you know, like they had leaned into their

12:35

science to prove their case. So I sort of love that

12:38

aspect of it. So I went and I met with Nancy

12:40

in her office, and she talked

12:42

to me about really what I was

12:44

so striking to me at the time. And again we have to remember this

12:46

as March of nineteen ninety nine, but she

12:48

talked about that this wasn't discrimination

12:51

the way we tend to think of it, right, It wasn't like

12:53

I mean, there was there was some overcases of

12:55

that, right, like salaries were lower, but

12:58

the way they described it was marginalation. And it

13:00

was really just the sort of pushing with the gradual

13:03

pushing aside of women across the arc of their

13:05

careers, across the you know, as they got older. The

13:07

problem wasn't as they were junior faculty members.

13:09

It was really you know, as they advanced

13:11

in their career, they were gradually sort of pushed aside

13:13

what they described as marginalization. And

13:16

again they said, like this was not what we thought

13:18

discrimination looked like we thought discrimination

13:20

was the door closed on you someone

13:23

telling you they have to say I'm not hiring you because

13:25

you're a woman. In fact, it was much more subtle

13:27

than that. And now when we look back,

13:30

they used this word at the time, and it was a fresh word

13:32

at the time. What they were talking about was unconscious

13:34

bias, which of course now we're so familiar with,

13:36

But at the time that was really a new idea. And

13:39

so I really do credit these women in MIT with making

13:41

that concept, with popularizing that concept

13:43

and making people understand just what it looks

13:45

like.

13:47

One of the most kind of

13:49

compelling aspects of this is

13:51

that were the most shocking aspects is that MIT

13:54

acknowledged that this

13:57

is what had happened over years.

13:59

So what was so extraordinary

14:02

about this admission and kind of

14:04

like, what were some of the changes immediately

14:06

that resulted from this

14:09

acknowledgment.

14:11

The admission by MIT is in nineteen ninety nine,

14:13

but the women first came together in the summer of nineteen

14:15

ninety four, and for many twists

14:17

and turns that I tell in the book, it took

14:20

an incredible four and a half years for this to happen,

14:22

for this to become public. So

14:25

MIT started fixing issues

14:27

for the women pretty much almost as soon as they

14:29

started coming together. The women come together, they ask

14:31

for this committee to sort of outline the problems, to

14:33

look into the problems, and the dean who was their

14:35

great ally, starts beginning to

14:38

address them. What happened in nineteen

14:40

ninety nine that was really striking was the story.

14:42

So my story ran on the front page of the Boston

14:44

Globe on a Sunday. The women at

14:46

MIT and I did not think we understood

14:49

that this was really an incredible story and something

14:51

amazing. But I think we all thought, maybe this

14:53

is just an MIT story, or maybe just a story

14:55

of women in science. What happens

14:57

when the story appears the next morning, a Monday,

14:59

the en of science. They're this man who was

15:01

their great ally, the Dena of Science, shows up at his office

15:04

and there's a news crew from CBS Evening News

15:06

outside his office. That Tuesday,

15:08

the New York Times runs the story and it's front page

15:11

and suddenly, really, you know this again. This is

15:13

like sort of it's an early Internet era, so things

15:15

don't really go viral as much as they do now, but

15:17

as much as they did then. It really did go viral,

15:20

and women across the country and across the world

15:22

started saying, like really, writing into

15:24

Nancy and to all these other women and saying, I

15:26

thought I was the only one who had this problem, but

15:28

this is my problem too. So what

15:31

MIT really did was acknowledge

15:34

a problem that women thought that they had been suffering

15:36

alone. It put the problem on the map.

15:38

It made it a problem that other universities had

15:40

to discuss. One of the things that the MIT

15:42

women like to point out is that other universities initially

15:45

said like, oh no, this isn't a problem we have, like Harvard

15:47

was. You know, there's a great quote in the Harvard Crimson, like, oh

15:49

no, this isn't an issue for Harvard. Well, of course, it had

15:51

been an issue for Harvard for many, many years.

15:54

Harvard had had, you know, a committee on the Status

15:56

of Women. They've been doing reports on the

15:58

status of women for years. The sorts

16:00

would be issued, be printed, someone would put

16:02

it on a shelf, no one would notice it. So

16:04

I think, really, what was so extraordinary was

16:06

that the president of MIT, Chuck Best,

16:09

put his name to this, and he had this great quote

16:11

that was repeated in every in every

16:14

newspaper story, every editorial about

16:16

this and what he said. I'm probably going to get the

16:18

words a little bit wrong, but I think I can remember it pretty

16:20

much word for word. Was I've always

16:22

thought that gender discrimination in higher education

16:25

was part perception, part reality

16:27

true, but I now understand that it is that reality

16:30

is the greater part of the balance. And for

16:32

him to say that, I mean that was like Nancy

16:34

Hopkins really, you know, almost fell off her chair the minute

16:36

she read that phrase. And I think, you

16:39

know, the fact that it was MIT, the fact that it was this prestigious

16:41

institution, really helped. But

16:44

it really did just put the discussion on the map. So

16:47

in many concrete ways there were changes.

16:49

You know, the Ford Foundation gave a million dollars

16:52

for other universities, for MIT and other universities

16:54

to work out the problem, to do the sort of analysis

16:56

that these women had done at MIT, looking at resources

16:59

for men and for women. They gave those

17:01

that money went to help other universities do the same

17:03

thing. Suddenly you really saw

17:05

there was really an acceleration in the number

17:08

of women at being asked to lead. By two

17:10

thousand and two, you had three women as presidents in

17:12

the Ivy League. You had a president

17:14

of MIT, who's a woman, very soon after.

17:16

So I really do think like this put that

17:18

conversation on the map. It made women in science

17:21

the question of why do we have so few women at

17:23

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

17:25

on the map.

17:27

And that question has deep,

17:29

deep roots. And as

17:31

someone who went to grad school in the twenty tens,

17:34

it's really too easy to forget

17:36

how different things are in higher education

17:39

today compared to not just

17:41

like the late nineteen nineties, but also

17:43

the mid especially the mid twentieth

17:45

century. Like I knew about

17:48

pay differences, I knew about

17:50

tenure being withheld or just not

17:53

being hired in the first place. But

17:55

when I was reading your book, it was the little

17:57

things that really stood out to me, like

17:59

these mon dane acts of discrimination,

18:02

like not being able to buy faculty football

18:04

tickets, or these like gender

18:07

dining hall restrictions.

18:09

No love room for you, little girl, Oh

18:11

my gosh.

18:12

And I was wondering if you could sort of

18:14

paint a picture of what it was like to be

18:16

a female student or a female faculty member

18:19

at Radcliffe around the time that

18:21

Nancy Hopkins then Nancy Doe

18:24

was at school there.

18:25

Yeah, so Nancy graduates from Radcliffe

18:27

in nineteen sixty four, and that

18:30

was I think the first or second year that

18:32

Radcliffe and Harvard actually had a joint

18:34

graduation, so women still got separate

18:36

diplomas, which is kind of amazing. I mean, just to go

18:39

to your point, I'll get back to that, but like

18:41

to go to your point about being in the twenty tens, we

18:43

forget that in even nineteen ninety nine there was

18:45

no daycare on campus. Like that was I mean, that

18:47

alone is it's just an extraordinary

18:49

change. But Radcliffe,

18:52

Harvard and Radcliffe in nineteen sixty so

18:54

in nineteen sixty to nine sixty four. This

18:56

was some of my really favorite part

18:59

of the book to research because

19:01

first of all, you write about universities, and they

19:03

remember everything, they memorialize everything,

19:05

so there's just a ton of archival work that you can

19:07

look into. So that's really wonderful. But it

19:10

is, as you say, it's so striking how different it

19:12

was. You know, so there were you know, Radcliffe existed,

19:14

that was where the quote unquot girls. There were men

19:16

of Harvard and girls of Radcliffe.

19:19

That was where the girls were educated. But of course there

19:21

were no women on the faculty. Right, So if you were a

19:24

young woman at Radcliffe, you were learning from

19:26

men. You were not allowed to wear pants

19:28

downstairs in the dorms at Radcliffe, you had to wear

19:30

skirts. You were not

19:32

allowed in the main library on the Harvard

19:34

campus because there was some fear that you would be a distraction

19:37

to the men. You know, you were in the same

19:39

classrooms with men. But that was really only

19:41

since World War Two. And the reason that

19:43

Harvard made this accommodation

19:45

was that during World War Two, of course, so many men left

19:48

to be on the battlefield, so they needed the tuition from

19:50

women. You know, you couldn't stay out past

19:52

midnight. And what was so striking to me

19:54

though about those years is I think we tend

19:57

to think of, you know, maybe

19:59

nineteen sixty, right, which is when the National

20:01

Organization for Women is founded. We tend to think

20:03

of that as kind of the beginning of the women's movement.

20:05

But when you look at this class of you

20:08

know, they arrive in nineteen sixty they graduate

20:10

in nineteen sixty four, it really became

20:12

clear to me that this was a generation very much on

20:15

the cusp, right, like they're not quite that you

20:17

know, full push of the second wave feminism.

20:20

But they're starting to change, right, So they're starting

20:22

to push for, Hey, we don't think we

20:24

need to be checking into the dorm

20:26

by midnight every night or eleven o'clock every night.

20:29

We don't think we need that kind of babysitting. More

20:32

women were starting to major in things like biology

20:34

rather than the traditional fields of English and history,

20:36

right Like, they were starting to imagine

20:39

a more professional future for themselves. But

20:42

they were also this was so you know, it was amazing

20:44

to me reading their yearbook because

20:46

there are these essays by these young women who are graduating

20:49

and they talk about themselves as a generation of

20:51

culturally induced schizophrenics. And

20:53

the schizophrenia for them is they

20:56

believe that they are going to be able. They're

20:58

going to be the first generation that is going to be able to really

21:01

have a career and to

21:03

have a family, and they won't have to make the choices

21:05

that women have had to make for so long. And they're

21:07

being encouraged in this by the president

21:09

of Radcliffe, a woman named Polly Bunting,

21:11

who is herself a scientist. But

21:13

they're sort of, you know, they're struggling with this idea, right Like,

21:16

they think that the men of Harvard are going to treat them as

21:18

equals, but they're not really sure yet, and they're still

21:20

waiting to see. I talked to, you

21:22

know, some of Nancy's friends who ultimately

21:25

did not have careers and went on to have children. They

21:27

say, well, I always felt inadequate

21:30

because I wasn't choosing to have a career. And

21:32

of course Nancy struggles with, you know, well,

21:35

I'm not really sure I want children. I really want a career.

21:37

So whatever you were doing, and I do think again,

21:39

this is a struggle that women still are

21:42

working on. Whatever you're doing, you're

21:44

feeling inadequate, You're thinking I can't possibly

21:46

do both things and do them both well. Going

21:48

back to this whole idea of the exceptions, and the woman Millie

21:50

dressel House I mentioned right with the four kids. She

21:53

was an amazing semiconductor physicist. She

21:55

had many twists and turns in her careers, and also

21:57

an extremely supportive husband. So

21:59

there are many things to explain her success. But really

22:02

what the leadership of MIT did for decades

22:05

was say to women, well, why can't you be like

22:07

MILLI? And so the women themselves were like, oh, oh, I

22:09

have to be like Milli, And so, you know, I talked to this

22:11

one woman, one of the women in my story Wonderful

22:13

Woe, named Penny Chisholm, who's a National Medal of Science

22:15

winner. Now she's a marine biologist,

22:18

but she was in the School of engineering because I kind of didn't

22:20

know what to do with her when she arrived in the seventies. And

22:22

she says that, you know, in her in her reviews and her

22:25

discussions about her career, men

22:27

would compare her to Milli, and she would say, how

22:29

exactly does my work as a marine biologist

22:31

compare to Milly as a semiconductor physicist,

22:34

And really there was no way except that they were both women.

22:36

But so there was That's another way in which

22:38

this whole idea of the exceptions kind of inhibits

22:41

women because they're being told,

22:43

well, you know, you can do it. And you

22:45

know, Mit was able to point to these exceptions

22:47

and say, well, what's our problem with women?

22:49

We have Milli, And

22:51

it's like it doesn't really send

22:53

the message that it's okay if you don't

22:55

want that, whatever that is.

22:58

I think that that is something that really

23:00

stood out to me too, is you

23:02

know, when Nancy was deciding

23:05

what to do postgraduation, and these sort of

23:07

these different paths that at the time were

23:09

kind of still split with like maybe

23:11

a very narrow like route

23:14

right down the middle. Some people could

23:16

both you know, wanted to have a career

23:18

in science as well as having

23:20

children and like raising those children.

23:23

How did that influence Nancy's

23:25

choices?

23:27

Yeah, in an incredible way. You know. Nancy,

23:29

like many of us, I think as a planner.

23:32

And so if you consider

23:34

the culture that she was entering, women

23:37

tended to have three children. They had the last of

23:39

those by age thirty, which is you know,

23:41

in our like looking back at that, that's kind of extraordinary.

23:43

A lot of women don't start having children now until thirty.

23:46

So Nancy thinks she's nineteen,

23:48

graduated from college, and she's thinking, okay,

23:50

I have she's got one

23:52

year until graduation when we first meet her, and

23:54

she's like, I have this one year to figure out what I'm

23:56

going to do with the next ten years of my life, because I

23:58

only have ten years to have

24:01

this incredible career, because then I have to get married

24:03

and have kids. Like she understood she had to do it

24:05

all, and she understood that her time was very

24:07

limited, so she ultimately she

24:10

goes to grad school, but she does

24:12

it really only because her mentor, James

24:14

Watson, tells her she should do this. But

24:16

she doesn't really want to go to grad school because she's like, why would

24:18

I need a PhD when I'm just going to drop out of science

24:21

by thirty. So initially it

24:23

really shapes her early career choices, but ultimately

24:26

she gets very lucky because she not only

24:28

does she have Jim Watson as her mentor, but she

24:31

decides to drop out of graduate school to go do

24:33

this big experiment that she's really really curious

24:35

about, and she thinks, like, I don't care if I have a PhD. The

24:37

experiment turns out to be enough of a success that she's

24:39

able to get her PhD by doing that experiment,

24:42

and then at that point she says, oh, okay, I'm

24:44

going to keep doing this, but again, I'll stop doing it when

24:46

I'm thirty. She ultimately does. She marries

24:49

her boyfriend, she anticipates having

24:51

children, but it really produces this incredible

24:53

tension with her and her now husband

24:56

Brooke, and I describe

24:58

it, as Nancy does, as kind of the love triangle,

25:00

right, like she knows she wants to be married

25:03

to her husband, but she really loves science. She doesn't

25:05

want to give it up. She knows just based

25:07

on seeing the women around her. You

25:09

know, the women around her, if they're successful

25:12

scientists, it's because they don't have kids.

25:14

There aren't many of them for the most part. The

25:16

women around her that she sees have children,

25:18

and they're not running their own labs. They're

25:20

working in the labs of their husbands, and

25:22

so she thinks that that's what she has to do. So

25:25

she marries very briefly, she

25:27

drops out of science because she's like, I just can't do

25:29

this. I cannot have children in this marriage

25:31

and also have science. Ultimately,

25:35

you know, the other tension that's interesting here,

25:37

and I think maybe still also common, is that she

25:39

has the struggle with her husband because he sees

25:41

that she is more successful than he is. He's

25:43

struggling to get published, he's struggling to get a job

25:46

as a professor of English, and so

25:48

ultimately he leaves her. Nancy is

25:50

again lucky enough that she has this training and

25:52

she can get a job, and she at this point has to

25:54

work. She gets these job offers from MIT

25:56

and Harvard, takes the job offer from MIT,

25:59

but she tells herself like, I'm not going to get married

26:01

ever again, and I will not have children. That is the choice

26:03

that she makes, and she thinks that she is making a

26:05

choice for science, and that is it's

26:07

the only logical choice. And what's

26:10

really striking to me about all of the sixteen

26:12

women who are involved in this story, is

26:14

it really I think it's only half of them

26:16

had children, so that's

26:18

you know, it just shows the constraints against

26:21

women at that time. If they wanted to be successful

26:23

in science, they recognize that they could not also

26:25

have a family.

26:27

Let's take a quick break. We'll be back

26:29

in just a few Welcome

26:47

back everyone. I've been chatting

26:49

with Kate Zernike about her book The

26:51

Exceptions Nancy Hopkins, MIT

26:54

and the Fight for Women in Science. Let's

26:56

get back into things earlier.

26:59

We kind of talked about how this

27:02

generation that Nancy Hopkins was part

27:04

of graduating from Radcliffe in nineteen

27:06

sixty four was sort of this cusp

27:08

generation. And in

27:10

your book, I remember reading that

27:13

in the nineteen seventies, the proportions

27:15

of doctorates earned by women and

27:18

tenure track faculty positions held

27:20

by women at universities in the US,

27:23

those proportions were actually lower

27:25

in many cases in the seventies than

27:27

at the turn of the century. What

27:30

were some of the drivers for this sort of

27:32

downturn and how

27:35

was this is sort of a two parter, but how was

27:37

this new, more subtle discrimination different

27:39

than in past decades where it was just like a

27:42

sign on the door, do not enter

27:44

the library.

27:45

Yeah, you know again, one of the extraordinary

27:48

things about this whole mit story in nineteen

27:50

ninety nine was that I think there

27:52

still was a subtle, maybe unexpressed

27:55

bias that the reason there weren't a lot of women in math

27:57

and science is because either women

27:59

didn't want to do math and science or that they actually

28:01

weren't that good at math and science. But

28:04

it really gave the great lie to that whole idea

28:06

because there were women at that point, There

28:08

were women as undergraduates, whours who

28:10

were who wanted to get into science. The problem

28:13

was really at the faculty level. So something was happening.

28:15

It wasn't that, you know, for many many years we thought, oh,

28:17

we just need to fill the pipeline and get more women

28:19

into science, and then they will organically

28:22

become faculty members. So that story

28:24

gave the lie to it. But as you say, you know, when

28:26

I went to do the work expanding this from a

28:28

newspaper story twenty years ago into a book

28:31

and you look at the numbers in the early twentieth

28:33

century, you see that again, like, it's not that women

28:35

weren't good at this or weren't interested in this. It

28:38

really was something culturally that was happening. And

28:40

the period that I really am struck by is

28:43

during World War Two. So again you know, as

28:45

men leave, as men go join the fight, the

28:47

number of women who became professors actually

28:50

really rises quite substantially. What

28:52

happens, though, is the men come back

28:54

from the front, and colleges

28:56

and universities, including by the way, women's colleges,

28:59

decided that it was actually there was more prestigion

29:01

having men among your professors, men as college

29:03

presidents. So the number of women

29:06

as professors begins to go down. Women's

29:08

colleges begin having male college presidents.

29:10

Again. I mean, it's just this whole shift.

29:13

I think it really was this idea in the

29:15

fifties that women's place

29:17

really was to have a family, to be at

29:19

home, right, that was the whole that

29:21

was the image that they thought that they were fulfilling.

29:24

So one of the things that we see after World War

29:26

Two is that universities begin adopting

29:28

anti nepotism policies, so they won't

29:30

hire a husband and wife together, and

29:33

of course, who are they going to hire the husband or the wife. They're

29:35

going to hire the husband. The only

29:37

way that a wife who has perhaps

29:39

met her husband when they are both PhD

29:41

students as scientists, the only way she

29:43

can get a job at the same university in most cases

29:46

is that she could work in his lab, because

29:48

then she will get money not from the university but from

29:50

outside out, from external funding. So

29:53

you see a lot of women who go to work

29:55

not as lab heads in their own

29:57

right, but they go to the work in their husband's labs.

30:00

So that was really the pattern up until about

30:02

the seventies.

30:03

And then in the seventies people

30:06

began to realize that maybe this narrative that

30:08

had been pushed for so long about

30:10

how well, women just don't like science,

30:12

they're just not good at science and they

30:15

want to stay home with the kids like that might

30:17

not actually be what's happening

30:19

here. That it might be that in the workplace

30:22

they're either facing extreme discrimination,

30:24

harassment, marginalization, or just

30:26

being actively discouraged from seeking

30:30

training in science. Can

30:32

you talk about this like shift.

30:34

And how it was received by the public.

30:37

Yeah, you know, the sixties was such a time of ferment,

30:40

and one of the things that was most interesting to me was reading

30:42

about the early sixties and President

30:44

Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, and

30:47

that in itself was sort of a separate and long

30:49

story. But what's so striking is

30:51

that this commission identified

30:54

a lot of the things that we're still talking about today and

30:56

a lot of things that didn't get resolved or

30:59

really addressed their years, so family

31:01

leave, you know, maternity leave, daycare,

31:04

universal childcare, all of these things. You know, they proposed

31:07

a universal basic income, which today is like,

31:09

you know, still considered a pretty fringe idea. But

31:12

I think that was really that was a group of women

31:14

who and their report became a best seller,

31:16

by the way, which is really again very striking. I mean,

31:18

it was sort of like, you know, we think about maybe the nine to eleven Report

31:21

or something that becomes the best seller. This was a major

31:23

event in American society, but

31:25

it really was this this discussion

31:28

about you know, well, why is it that women aren't

31:30

succeeding in science? And maybe it's because

31:33

you know, if you read some of the early newspapers

31:35

at MIT, when when women start to become

31:38

a greater percentage of the students, it's still like,

31:40

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.

31:44

And you know, there was this idea that, well, we don't

31:46

want women in the labs because, as one person says,

31:49

like they're going to spill their nail polished. I mean, it's

31:51

really silly, petty stuff. What

31:53

happens in the seventies, That's that's interesting, And I

31:55

think, you know, we have to remember that

31:58

laws can't fix everything, but they do

32:00

they can signal a culture shift.

32:02

So after the President's Commission on the Status

32:05

of Women in nineteen makes its report, in nineteen

32:07

sixty three, President Kennedy signs the

32:09

Equal Pay Act, and there is just sort

32:11

of this, There are laws passed,

32:13

Anti discrimination laws begin to be passed. Of course,

32:15

the sixties was a wave of antidiscrimination

32:17

laws in many respects against many different marginalized

32:20

groups. But so universities recognize

32:22

that they could no longer discriminate. Then,

32:25

of course comes Title nine in nineteen seventy two,

32:27

and there really was pressure. There was a way

32:29

for women to say

32:32

to universities, you have to hire us

32:34

because you are getting federal funding and discrimination

32:36

against women is against federal law. So

32:39

universities recognize that they had to hire more women.

32:42

The other interesting thing that's happening at the end of the

32:44

sixties is that men on campuses are

32:46

suddenly saying that, well, we don't want to be on all male

32:48

campuses, like we don't want Harvard to be single sex

32:50

anymore. So men

32:53

are demanding, you know, they want co education,

32:55

and that happens, and really in the seventies

32:58

there was a push for more women on the fact culty, but the

33:00

real push was to get more

33:02

women into higher education for co education.

33:05

That's when you see the Ivy's going co ed. Vassar

33:08

starts taking men, of course, and there

33:10

really is this idea that we're

33:12

going to educate both and again organically

33:14

like this will time, time will fix this problem.

33:17

Right. So to go back to Millie dressl House,

33:19

who does this report at MIT in

33:21

nineteen seventy two. One of the things

33:23

she notices is that there's some sort

33:25

of obvious, more obvious ways in which

33:27

women are discriminated against, Like there are no women's

33:30

bathrooms near the near the halls where women

33:32

take exams, so they have to like run twenty minutes

33:34

back to find a bathroom. So things like

33:36

that are addressed, but it's also, you know, the

33:38

comments that people are making about women not

33:41

belonging here. Millie has this idea

33:43

in the early seventies that it's hard for

33:45

women to speak up in class, but

33:47

if every class has at least two women

33:50

in it, those two women will feel

33:52

less shy about raising your hand. I mean, imagine

33:54

that just for a moment that there's there are classes where

33:56

there is only one woman and like whatever,

33:58

you know, forty one hundred men. And so

34:00

Millie says, she does this kind of back of the envelope

34:02

calculation, and she says, Okay, if we can just get

34:05

fifteen percent women in all of our departments,

34:07

every class will have at least to women, and that

34:09

will help women feel stronger,

34:11

feel more confident raising their

34:13

hand and speaking up in class. And that will be one change.

34:16

And I do think that MIT does first

34:19

in the seventies and then again in the eighties, because

34:21

of a real push from the male president,

34:24

does begin to get more female students, but

34:27

the percentage of women is faculty at MIT.

34:29

There's a big bump in the early seventies because of affirmative

34:31

action. Suddenly, lo and behold nineteen

34:34

ninety four. This group of women gets together and they're like, oh

34:36

wow, in fact, the percentage of women

34:38

on the faculty has not changed this whole

34:40

idea. You know, women are now fifty percent students

34:42

in many departments, even more than that in

34:45

a couple of departments, but we're not getting

34:47

the women aren't ending up as faculty. So what is going

34:49

on here? And ultimately, as I said, it's

34:51

the pipeline leaking. And you have to think,

34:54

why is the pipeline leaking? And it's the

34:56

same problem that had begun to be identified

34:58

in the early sixties, which woul the institutions

35:00

were just sort of built by

35:02

men for men, that women weren't

35:05

really welcomed there. They were tolerated, but not welcomed,

35:07

and so many women, frustrated,

35:10

decided to kind of give up and leave. No, we

35:12

call it opting out now, they didn't call it

35:14

that back then, but that's what they were doing. They ultimately

35:16

decided my family needs me, My

35:19

family appreciates me more than the people at work

35:21

to so I'll just go back to my family.

35:24

Was it also around this time that

35:26

the term minutia of sexism was

35:29

kind of introduced? Can you explain

35:31

what this term is? Because I mean,

35:33

I love and hate this term.

35:34

I love it.

35:35

So I was like, oh, yes, that's

35:38

yep, still around today.

35:40

But yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that.

35:42

Yeah. There's a woman in the book named Mary Rowe

35:44

who is the ombudsman at MIT in

35:47

the early seventies, and she called

35:49

it Saturn's rings, right, Like, so all of this dust

35:51

and debris that you can't and when you're in it, you don't really

35:54

notice that it's dust and debris, but you step outside you're

35:56

like, oh God, look at that. That's

35:58

really noticeable. So the manute

36:00

of sexism, as Mary describes it,

36:02

is not these are the problems that like,

36:04

none of us would raise our hand and complain about, right

36:07

because who wants to sort of who wants

36:09

to fight all the time? These are things

36:11

that you notice and you know, let

36:13

it slide again. It's sort of like the exception right, But it's

36:15

the very small exceptions, so you're

36:17

not included in a meeting. Well, I don't know. Was that a

36:19

snub or was it just like those guys are friends and

36:21

that's why they ended up deciding to go into

36:23

this venture together. It's the very

36:26

small things that none of us would raise our hand and complain

36:28

about, but ultimately it does end up

36:30

in women being pushed aside. The

36:32

women at MIT in nineteen ninety nine

36:35

use this phrase marginalization, and I

36:37

guess I love that in the same way you do the

36:39

manutiae of sexism, because to me, it implies

36:41

like this sort of subtle

36:43

pushing aside. It's not anything again

36:46

that like you can complain about there's

36:48

no law to prevent this, but you sort

36:50

of have the sense that it's happening. And then on

36:52

top of that, because you have to spend

36:55

all this energy and time, or because

36:57

you end up spending all this energy and time thinking

36:59

about huh, was that a snub or was that just

37:01

me? Is that just Is that the exception or is that the

37:03

rule that adds to the

37:06

level of discrimination, because of course you're spending your

37:08

time doing that rather than you know on

37:10

the job that you're there to do.

37:12

It's also one of those things where,

37:14

especially before the terms like marginalization

37:17

or even before like the minutia of sexism

37:20

was introduced, it's I

37:22

think difficult to see those types

37:24

of things in yourself, just like you said, like,

37:26

am I imagining this? Am I not? And

37:29

so I think that that can make it really difficult

37:31

to identify larger patterns.

37:33

And you talk about this in your

37:35

book too. And the introduction of the term

37:38

sexual harassment helped many people

37:40

put words to, you know, be able to articulate

37:43

what they had experienced for years

37:46

and it was like, oh.

37:47

There's a word for that.

37:48

But in other cases, I feel like there is some

37:51

resistance to apply the term

37:53

to themselves because what they experienced

37:55

wasn't what they thought discrimination looked

37:58

like. Do you think that this played a

38:00

role in the efforts to hold

38:02

universities accountable for these

38:05

unfair practices, just like the disconnect

38:07

between here's this term that sounds

38:09

very serious and like, oh,

38:12

but my experience is I'm used to this, like

38:14

this happens all the time.

38:16

I think that's definitely true. You know, Nancy Hopkins

38:19

will say Nancy says, now you know it took

38:21

me twenty years to recognize the problem. It

38:23

took me fifteen years to recognize that it was happening to

38:25

other women and another five to realize what was happening

38:27

to me. And that that idea

38:30

of sexual harassment and being a you know,

38:32

not wanting to mention that phrase, not really

38:34

accepting that that's what's happening to you, that definitely

38:36

played for her, because for Nancy, sexual

38:39

harassment meant there had to be sex, right,

38:41

someone had to make a move on you and then

38:43

deny you a job because they you know, you hadn't

38:45

accepted, You hadn't you hadn't given in. So

38:48

I think there was real confusion. I

38:50

think to your point, it probably

38:54

insulated universities to a degree because

38:57

women weren't going to bring it up, and so they didn't

38:59

have to deal that, they didn't have to mention it. Sometimes,

39:02

when I've been talking about this book over the last

39:05

year or so, you know, it's like I'm like,

39:07

oh God, I hate talking about this because there is

39:09

now it's so hard looking back now

39:11

when you know, we talk about

39:13

unconscious bias, now we talk about sexual harassment.

39:16

And I think there's there's really an eye roll element

39:18

to it. People are like, oh, yeah, I had like I had

39:20

the training on that it's not a real thing.

39:22

I don't have that, or it's

39:25

overhyped, you know. There's like this sense that there's

39:28

just like an excess of wokeism. But

39:30

what I tried to do in the book was really explain

39:33

really because of that, because I was worried that people

39:36

kind of roll their eyes and be like, yeah, whatever, stop you're complaining.

39:39

What I wanted to do in the book was just show how

39:41

this day in and day out,

39:44

that these how this the minutia of sexism,

39:46

the sort of slow grinding of this really

39:48

sort of wears down Nancy, wears

39:50

her down over a period of years, to the point

39:52

that she finally feels like she has no she has no option

39:55

but to mention it because otherwise she's just going to

39:57

leave science. And I think the pattern

40:00

probably was more often that women did leave science.

40:02

So I think the fact that women

40:05

were reluctant to talk about sexual

40:07

harassment actually ends up insulating

40:09

universities because they didn't have to deal that, they didn't

40:11

have to respond to the complaints.

40:14

Many of the scientists that you write about,

40:16

including Nancy Hopkins, like

40:18

we've talked about attributed their own mistreatment

40:21

and the discrimination they faced to their own

40:23

personalities or the personalities

40:25

of those around them, like Oh, that's just

40:27

the attitude on the fifth floor, or like oh,

40:29

I shouldn't have been so forceful in that meeting,

40:31

so shrill for Nancy,

40:34

how did this internalization and

40:36

also especially the myth of meritocracy

40:39

in science eventually give

40:41

way to the growing awareness that

40:43

this was not just an exception,

40:45

this was a systemic issue.

40:48

So this for me was in many

40:50

ways the hardest part of the story

40:52

to report and convey and the

40:55

writing, but also the most fascinating

40:57

and compelling. She

41:00

starts out, really, I mean, she's

41:02

not she's not an activist, she's not a

41:04

feminist, and she really hates

41:06

feminists right like, she thinks feminists are the problem.

41:08

There are these women who are whining about everything. They're the women who

41:11

complain about every little thing. She doesn't want

41:13

to be that person. And she

41:15

thinks science is a meritocracy.

41:17

Lucky me, I'm incredibly well trained. I'm

41:19

in this field that is a meritocracy. All I have

41:21

to do is do my work, get

41:24

good results, and I can win an Amoil prize.

41:26

That's what she thinks, and you

41:28

know, I like to say the next twenty years is her schooling, right,

41:30

But so I had

41:32

to figure out, you know, when, because this is something you

41:34

know, you're not going to find in the archives at Harvard, even

41:37

necessarily in her diaries or which some

41:39

of which I had. Was this whole idea

41:41

like when did she change? When did when did kind

41:43

of the light begin to go on in her head? And

41:45

it really was when she I think the

41:48

start of that is when she reads a biography of

41:50

Roslin Franklin, who, of course was with

41:53

James Watson, Nancy's mentor, Francis Krek, and

41:55

Maurice Wilkins. Roslin

41:57

Franklin contributed to understanding the structure

41:59

of and Roslin Franklin

42:02

died tragically young. She died

42:04

before the three men who she had worked with

42:06

were awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

42:09

We now understand that Roslin Franklin actually did

42:11

play a real, very important

42:13

role in this, but that was not known at the time.

42:16

But Nancy reads this biography of Roslin Franklin,

42:18

and not only does she realize

42:20

that Roslyn played this huge role in decoding the structure

42:23

of DNA, but more importantly, she sees

42:25

how the men viewed Roslin. And

42:28

this book is written by a friend of Roslin's, and it really

42:30

describes Rosalind as much more of a human, much more

42:32

of a well rounded person. And Nancy

42:35

realizes that like her, Like Nancy,

42:37

Roslin was very passionate about her science,

42:39

very driven. You know, she chose not to have children because

42:41

she was so in love with science. And Nancy

42:44

reads this book and she thinks, oh, this is my

42:46

life, and she begins to see how

42:48

the same way that Rosin was viewed, many

42:50

of the men around her are viewing her this way.

42:53

And that's where she kind of, you know, it's not that

42:56

she has this total epiphany, but she begins to

42:58

notice different things. Think

43:00

she thinks is, oh, I'm on this fifth floor at MIT,

43:02

if the cancer center at MIT. It's very competitive.

43:04

It's just that it's too competitive. I have to leave the fifth floor,

43:07

so she goes to the third floor. Then she discovers

43:09

that men from outside MIT are taking credit

43:11

for her work, which is of course the same exact

43:14

thing that happened to Roslyn Franklin. And so it

43:16

really is it's this, you know, one of the ways someone

43:18

describes it about Franklin was this slow robbery

43:20

right like it's things are slowly being taken

43:22

from her, and Nancy ultimately

43:25

leaves her field. She leaves the field of

43:27

cancer research and goes into a new field. And

43:29

that's when she goes

43:31

into studying zebrafish and she tries

43:34

to get more space for her zebra fish tanks, and she realizes

43:36

she can't get more space, but all the men have the

43:38

space they need, so she literally

43:41

takes out her tape measure and goes

43:43

around the building and measures all the lab space,

43:45

all the office space, discovers that she is a

43:47

fully tenured professor at MIT has

43:50

less space than men without tenure, and

43:52

she begins to complain about it. Then she discovers that her salary

43:54

is lower. And then there's the final straw that breaks

43:57

the camel's back is that she co develops

43:59

this class with a younger man,

44:02

and suddenly her department head informs

44:04

her that she's no longer going to be teaching that class because

44:06

the younger man wants to teach it with another guy. And

44:08

then she discovers that these men are going to form

44:11

a company around this course, and as they tell her, they intend

44:13

to make millions. So it's like this again,

44:15

it's this gradual edging out. So

44:18

this course is taken away from her, and

44:20

she thinks, well, again, her default

44:23

is this must be my fault, this must be my problem.

44:25

But then she looks at her teaching evaluations and she realizes

44:28

no, in fact, I get some of the highest teaching ratings

44:30

in this entire department. There is no

44:32

way that I'm being pushed

44:34

out for this reason. It's not a matter of meritocracy.

44:37

That science, like so many other fields,

44:39

like life, depends on the relationships

44:42

you have, depends on who's conferring

44:44

the merit. You know, we have this idea I think

44:46

that merit is like gravity. You know,

44:48

there's some equation that determines

44:51

it. But of course merit depends on many

44:53

things. It depends on the context, depends on who's

44:56

awarding the merit right, it depends on many

44:58

different things. So I think one of

45:00

the great lessons from this whole, from the book

45:02

and from the whole experience, is that there is no such thing

45:05

as pure meritocracy, because if

45:07

there were going to be one, it would be science. And science

45:09

is not it.

45:11

Like I said, I've I went to grad school

45:13

in the twenty tens, and

45:16

we have come a long way in academia

45:18

since this story broke in nineteen ninety nine,

45:21

but the problem of discrimination, marginalization,

45:24

sexual harassment, it's still very much

45:26

present across all parts

45:28

of academia. And I think

45:31

that one of the biggest issues

45:33

is that there are rarely formal channels

45:35

to share feedback about professors

45:37

or potential advisors without fear

45:39

of retaliation. That combined

45:42

with the fact that professors don't get

45:44

training in mentorship often

45:46

at least like that seems to be the general

45:49

rule in EEB. What

45:51

are some of the ways you think we can do better

45:53

or what are some of the biggest problems that still

45:56

exist.

45:57

One of the reasons that we think of science as a

46:00

meritocracy is because we do have the sense

46:02

of like, oh, it's all about data. It's all about numbers,

46:04

right, And then our in our data loving

46:06

society, there's this whole idea that we can like optimize

46:08

things, right, and so like there is this optimal number

46:11

and that's that's the meritocracy when when you reach

46:13

that number. So I

46:15

do think that I think we have to think about numbers,

46:17

but in a different way. So the way that

46:19

I think about numbers and how it solves,

46:21

how it helps to solve this problem is you

46:23

just need more women. You just need to keep hiring

46:26

women. What tends to happen is what happened

46:28

at MIT in the early two thousands, which

46:30

is that, again, as as

46:33

had happened in the early seventies, there was a wave

46:35

of new hiring of women in MIT. Then

46:37

the dean, who had been sort of very much behind

46:39

that idea, hire, you know, hire more female

46:42

scientists. He leaves, and again the number

46:44

sort of plateaus again. So you need people

46:46

who are we need to continue pushing

46:49

further to be more women, because we just have

46:51

to change the perception of who belongs

46:53

right like. So there's a documentary in which

46:55

Nancy features, which some of your listeners may have heard

46:58

about, called Picture a Scientist, And the title

47:00

from that documentary is taken from this idea

47:02

that when you ask children to draw

47:04

a scientist or to picture a scientist, picture

47:07

a genius, they draw a man. Right

47:09

when you ask someone to draw a leader, they draw

47:12

a man holding a briefcase. That's

47:15

our traditional picture. I will

47:17

say, I think that is beginning to change a

47:19

little bit and again, one of the ways

47:21

we change that is just to change the numbers.

47:23

What happens now is that women come into a field,

47:26

and because most of the prestigious

47:28

fields in this country have been dominated by

47:30

men, our picture of who belongs in that

47:32

field is still a man. So you need

47:34

to have the numbers so that our picture of that begins

47:36

to change. And I do think that that's happening. But

47:39

the other thing I like to talk about is the

47:41

change in Really it's simply our

47:43

language. They are really interesting

47:46

studies done by a woman

47:48

named Sarah Jane Leslie at Princeton and Andre

47:50

Chimpion who's at NYU. They

47:52

have looked at the language around genius

47:55

and the language around when we talk

47:57

about science and math in particular, and who goes into

47:59

those fields. What they have found

48:01

is that people tend to associate

48:03

the idea of genius or the word genius

48:05

with men. They also tend

48:08

to think that for scientific fields,

48:10

and particularly for fields that rely a lot on

48:12

numbers, so pure math, theoretical physics,

48:15

that to go into those fields you have

48:17

to be a genius, you have to have some kind of row brilliance.

48:20

The ultimate result of this is that women think

48:22

oh, to go into that field, I have to be a genius.

48:25

I can't do that. That's not me. But

48:27

if you say to those women, this is a field that requires

48:29

hard work, they're like, oh, I can do that.

48:32

So to me, I think just changing

48:35

our language begins to change the problem. And

48:37

I again go back to a story about Nancy for

48:39

this. So, of course I met Nancy in nineteen ninety nine

48:42

and one of the first things I noticed about her, which

48:44

is one of the first things that many people notice about her,

48:46

is that she has this very slight English accent, and

48:48

it's because she grew up living

48:50

close to her grandmother who was from England.

48:53

But in twenty eighteen I started, you know, I came back to

48:55

this idea. I was being able to explore the idea of doing this as

48:57

a book, and I noticed that Nancy

49:00

using the word brilliant a lot, and I thought it was sort

49:02

of like in the way British people, you know, like, oh, that scone

49:04

is brilliant, the tea is brilliant, it's a brilliant play

49:06

whatever. So I noticed

49:08

that she kept she would talk about these women, and she kept

49:10

saying, oh, she's brilliant, you know, she's brilliant. She's brilliant,

49:13

and I thought it was this britishism, So I

49:15

asked her about it, and she said, oh, no, no, no, that's not it at all,

49:17

she said, I just started to notice that everyone

49:19

always referras to the men as brilliant, and

49:21

no one ever says that about the women. So I just decided

49:24

that I was going to change this, and I was going to start

49:26

referring to the women as brilliant. And I thought, that's

49:28

kind of brilliant. So, you know,

49:30

I've done this a little bit when I've talked about the book over

49:32

the past year or so. I'll just go to a bookstore and I'll

49:34

have people kind of shift their frame of mind and

49:36

say, like, look at the person next to you, look

49:38

at the woman next to you. Just tell yourself

49:41

she's brilliant. Like, imagine how

49:43

that changes your perspective. So a

49:45

lot of this I think can be solved

49:47

by a kind of very basic thought

49:49

experiment. And I don't think it just applies

49:52

to science. I think it applies to the question of like, why

49:54

have we never had a female president in this country?

49:56

Right?

49:56

Like why are most of the women who are leaders in

49:58

this country Why do they tend to be in the legislature,

50:01

not in the governor's chair, not in the oval office.

50:03

Why are despite the fact that more

50:05

than half the law students in this country are women,

50:08

why are there so few women at the highest levels of law?

50:10

All those questions, and I think,

50:12

again, it is this subtle

50:15

frame switch that we have to do in our own minds. We

50:17

have to start thinking, when I listen

50:19

to this person speak, am I valuing

50:21

what they say more because it's a man.

50:24

If as I listened to this woman speak, if she were a

50:26

man, would I be taking what she said more seriously?

50:29

Would I'd be thinking this person's a genius. They should

50:31

do something really extraordinary. They're going to do something

50:33

really extraordinary. So again, I

50:35

think ultimately the answer

50:37

is to get women into these roles, to

50:40

have people see the difference and not

50:42

just the exception, not just one

50:44

woman, not just one woman who's made it, but many,

50:46

many women. And that of course means

50:48

that not only do we see that women can succeed,

50:51

but that women can fail just as men do. And it's

50:53

not the end of the world. It doesn't mean that no woman

50:55

will ever be successful. So I think we need

50:57

more numbers, but I also think it's a matter of

50:59

shit, the way we look at women and what we

51:01

think they're capable of.

51:04

I was curious, what sort

51:06

of reactions you have gotten from

51:08

this book from you know, women

51:10

who are in science, women who

51:13

are not in science, older women in

51:15

science, younger women in science, Like, what kind of

51:17

what's the range of reactions.

51:18

That you get. Well,

51:21

I often feel like I have to apologize to people

51:23

for the reactions to my book, because women,

51:25

particularly older women, will say to me, be like, oh my god,

51:28

it was so you know, so familiar, and I had to take

51:30

pauses in between chapters because it's so it

51:33

felt like my life all over again, and I'm just like

51:35

and then they're like, I love your book, and I'm like sorry.

51:39

So I would say that, you know, in

51:42

the same way the story resonated for me

51:45

at the time I was thirty when I first reported

51:47

the story for The Globe, in the same way that

51:49

the story resonated for me not a scientist,

51:52

it has resonated for for other women

51:54

in other fields. As I knew it would be. I

51:56

joke when we were talking about the subtitle for the book, you

51:58

know, maybe it should be the exceptions of universe story,

52:00

because I think as much as everyone thinks like, oh no, this

52:02

just happened to me, it's really happening to many

52:05

many, many of us. Young women

52:07

have been interesting.

52:08

You know.

52:08

I think some young women do

52:10

have this recognition of how

52:12

self doubt is grinding them down, and they see what

52:14

happened to Nancy, and they want to change things.

52:17

Other young women think

52:19

there's been no progress. Why you know, they're angry.

52:21

You know, how can you talk about like how are you? How can you celebrate

52:25

the progress, which the book does to some

52:27

degree, like in fact, this didn't change anything.

52:29

I don't think that's true that it didn't change anything. One

52:32

of the things I'll say is that Nancy in

52:34

particular has been most struck by

52:36

the reactions of men who come to her,

52:39

and most often they're like, oh my god, I had

52:41

no idea this was happening. And

52:43

so these men are which you know, you can

52:46

laugh at, but you can also say, well, good for them,

52:48

like they're now changing their perspective. And

52:50

so I think she has had emails

52:53

and conversations with many men who really

52:56

now have sort of the zeal of a convert around this,

52:58

and they really do think this is an important problem to

53:00

solve. I think for

53:03

women in science, I think the problem is

53:06

still partially

53:08

acute. I think we have changed many of the

53:10

structural issues, like as I mentioned, there

53:12

was no daycare at the time. So

53:14

many of those problems we can fix.

53:17

It's the problems that you can't measure. It's the things

53:19

that you can't take a tape measure to. Those

53:22

are the problems that are harder. It is the slight, you know.

53:24

It is the way people talk to

53:26

you, the way they assume that you're not as smart, the way that

53:28

they don't expect you to belong in a lab.

53:31

That's that's the hardest problem to solve.

53:52

Kate, thank you so much for taking the time

53:54

to chat with me today, and for writing

53:56

this book and for breaking this story

53:59

back in eighteen ninety nine. Since

54:02

learning about this story and reading this

54:04

book, I don't think a day has gone

54:06

by without me telling someone about it or

54:08

sharing some outrageous tidbit from it.

54:11

And if you would also like to have

54:13

this story preoccupy your thoughts forever,

54:16

and trust me you do, check out our website

54:18

this podcast will kill You dot com, or

54:21

I'll post a link to where you can find the exceptions,

54:23

Nancy Hopkins MIT and the Fight

54:26

for Women in Science, as well as

54:28

a.

54:28

Link to Kate's website.

54:29

And don't forget you can check out our website

54:32

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54:35

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