“The tremendous stress of demanding their share”

Nancy Hopkins’ tape measure is enshrined in the MIT Museum, and for good reason.

For those who are perplexed by the inclusion of such a standard household product in the museum, and actually for anyone interested in the history of science or feminism, I’d highly recommend Kate Zernike’s book: The Exceptions.

Nancy Hopkins, the main protagonist in this nonfiction book, is a renowned biologist, but she might be most famous for the work she did in the 1990s: exposing the discrimination against women scientists at MIT.

Before coming to MIT, Hopkins worked with many of the great names in biology: James Watson (whose sexist denigration of women scientists did not impinge on his approval of Hopkins, apparently), Mark Ptashne, Barbara McClintock, David Bottstein, and many more. She had a PhD from Harvard, but having seen the bitter fights among scientists for scientific credit, was not sure she wanted to enter that ratrace. But in 1972, Salvador Luria called to invite her to apply for a faculty job in molecular biology at MIT, which she accepted.

Zernike does a very nice job of framing the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement in America, as well as the situation for the very few female scientists of the time. Joan Steitz, now at Yale and one of the ‘most highly regarded biologists of her generation’, was told as a graduate student in the 1960s:

“You’ll get married and you’ll have kids — then what good would a PhD have done you?

A 1964 article by a department head included this advice to male faculty:

You must have a lab assistant, preferably female. A female is better because she will not operate so readily on her own, and this is exactly what you want.

Women scientists were routinely steered into staff scientist rather than faculty positions, and if they did get faculty jobs, earned much less than the men. (Gerty Cori, who shared a Nobel with her husband in 1947, earned one-tenth his salary, even though they had the same degrees and worked side by side). Women were constrained by their husbands’ jobs: employers knew this and exploited it. Evaluations of Barbara McClintock (the 1983 Nobelist) focused on her scruffy clothes and ‘nervous’ behaviour. There was speculative gossip about successful women sleeping with senior faculty. Much discussion took place at after-hours drinking sessions, but women were either not invited or treated as sex objects.

Such was the society of science at the time Hopkins started as a faculty member at MIT. As one of the very few women, she was often in awkward situations: at conferences, the faculty wives cooked and cleared the table while the men discussed science — which group should she join? (She tried to ‘sit strategically on the edge of both groups, talking with the women but listening to the men’). Francis Crick, Watson’s co-recipient of the Nobel, puts his hands on her breasts while asking her what she was working on. (She froze, pulled away, ignored the molestation, and brightly talked about science while pretending nothing had happened).

When she took the MIT job, Hopkins was optimistic that those times had passed. There were civil rights laws that prohibited job discrimination now. Plus, MIT took pride in the fact that it was a meritocracy — no legacy students, no athletic scholarships.

And yet, over the next two decades, Hopkins found her work impeded by ‘a thousand cuts’, as they say. A class she developed and taught with Eric Lander was given to another male scientist, and the two men planned to write a book based on the course. Student evaluations were much more critical of women lecturers than men. Salaries were secret, but the men seemed to be paid more and women required to fund more of their own salaries with grants. Women faculty were started at much lower salaries than men, since the male department heads thought men needed to support a family. The men were given priority access to microscopes and other shared equipment. There was blatant discrimination in hiring discussions. Women were excluded from group grants. No woman had ever been a department head.

The last straw was space. Always a tight resource at research institutions, it was clear to Hopkins that she had access to much less lab space than the male faculty. She had a large grant from Amgen, but no space to put the fish tanks for the work that grant would support.

That’s where the tape measure came in. One night in 1991, Hopkins entered her MIT building and literally measured every room. Not surprisingly, she found that even a junior male faculty had almost double the space she had.

Hopkins drafted a letter to the president of MIT outlining the space, salary and teaching issues that she ascribed to discrimination (after decades of assuming each problem was her own, rather than a pattern). Mary Lou Pardue signed on, and they invited the other 15 tenured women faculty (out of 212 total!) to discuss the issues. These women were isolated in different departments and barely knew each other, but were startled by how similar their experiences had been.

Much to its credit, MIT responded. Women’s salaries were raised to equal levels, and the MIT subsidies also equalled. More women faculty were hired. A Committee on Women Faculty was formed to review hiring and other practices. And when this news blew up in the press, it emboldened women faculty at other institutions to push for similar changes: if storied MIT could do it, why not their universities?

Kate Zernike was a reporter at the Boston Globe when she heard about this landmark situation at MIT, and the book comes out of her reporting on the subject.

Zernike devotes chapters to the backstories of other women at MIT as well as Hopkins: Mary Lou Pardue, Lotte Bailyn, Millie Dresselhaus. Each is remarkable. Dresselhaus, for example, took 5 days off to have each child, and raised four children with her husband Gene (and babysitters), taking them around the world and training them in chamber music. (Honestly! Impressive, but an impossible standard to aspire to!)

Nancy Hopkins wrote to an MIT colleague during the 1990s:

It is probably the tremendous stress of demanding their share that causes women to retreat too soon and thus to almost invariably end up with less.

Excellent book, highly recommended.

Interview with Kate Zernike on NPR