[When the MIT molecular biologist quantified how much more lab
space men were given, she unleashed a US-wide reckoning about how
women are held back in academia.]
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SUNDAY SCIENCE: HOW NANCY HOPKINS AND HER TAPE MEASURE REVEALED THE
EXTENT OF SEXISM IN SCIENCE  
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Alexandra Witze
March 27, 2023
Nature [[link removed]]

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_ When the MIT molecular biologist quantified how much more lab space
men were given, she unleashed a US-wide reckoning about how women are
held back in academia. _

Nancy Hopkins showed how the Masschusetts Institute of Technology
systematically awarded more lab space to men., Everett Collection
Inc/Alamy

 

Nancy Hopkins’s professional career has been partly defined by the
‘great men of biology’ she has worked with. Hopkins, a molecular
biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), recounts
being mentored by James Watson, yelled at by Eric Lander
[[link removed]], slighted by
David Baltimore and groped by Francis Crick
[[link removed]]. But her actual legacy rests
in her scientific achievements in cancer biology and zebrafish
genetics — and in the attention she drew to discrimination against
women in science.

THE EXCEPTIONS: NANCY HOPKINS, MIT, AND THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN IN
SCIENCE _Kate Zernike_ Scribner (2023)

One night in 1993, seething at the fact that her male colleagues
routinely took up more than their fair share of laboratory space,
Hopkins got out a tape and measured the dimensions of each lab, office
and equipment room in her building to quantify the differences between
the spaces granted to women and men. Her work led to a seminal 1999
report from MIT [[link removed]] in which
the university admitted to having discriminated against female members
of its science faculty for decades. That led to a nationwide reckoning
about how institutions of higher education routinely held back women
in science.

In _The Exceptions_, journalist Kate Zernike details Hopkins’s
journey from a young student convinced that academia was a meritocracy
to a seasoned faculty member who saw that the opposite was true.
Zernike’s account details more than just the journey of one
scientist — it provides a deeply researched dive into the history of
gender discrimination in US higher education. The ‘exceptions’ of
her title are the exceptional women who pushed through discrimination
in science to have accomplished careers, as Hopkins did. Even though
the main events transpired decades ago, they remain remarkably
relevant today given the sexism, racism and other injustices that
still permeate academia.

MIT was perhaps an unlikely place for this reckoning to unfold.
Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a stone’s throw from the elite
bastion of Harvard University, MIT was supposed to be a meritocracy by
contrast, a place where proficiency in engineering and science
levelled the playing field of privilege. MIT’s first female student
graduated in 1873, a century before Harvard fully deigned to admit
women.

But the few women who actually enrolled at MIT faced an uphill battle.
Campus housing was nonexistent at first; a women’s dormitory was
added in the 1960s, but it was still insufficient. Women were
sidelined, propositioned and assaulted as they tried to work and
study. As late as 1985, three years before I entered MIT as an
undergraduate, the university showed pornographic films in large
auditoriums as a start-of-semester tradition.

After finishing her postdoctoral studies with Watson and Robert
Pollack at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, New
York, Hopkins arrived at MIT in 1973 as only the second woman ever on
the faculty in the biology department. She was going against the
advice of Nobel laureate geneticist Barbara McClintock
[[link removed]], who warned her not to
take any university job because of the likelihood of discrimination.
She had already made important discoveries in cell and cancer biology,
and was about to pioneer work on the role of retroviruses in cancer.
Yet she was still frequently told that by working in science she would
be taking a job from a more deserving man, and that she could not
teach genetics to undergraduates because they would not trust
scientific information coming from a woman.

Hopkins’s previously unpublished notes from this time reveal a
searing picture of injustice. She is deliberately demoted on a
priority list for tenure despite her formidable application; excluded
from the profits of a biology course that she co-developed; and
sexually assaulted by a colleague. After two decades at MIT, she
finally realizes that science is not an unblemished search for the
truth but rather a scrum of salesmanship full of competition, greed
and harassment in which men have the upper hand. It all culminates, in
Zernike’s narrative, in Hopkins’s infamous tape measurement.

This might have remained just one dramatic late-night episode, were it
not for Hopkins joining forces with 15 other women on the MIT science
faculty to bring the discrimination to light. They went to the science
dean and, with his encouragement, produced the 1999 report on the
status of women at MIT. The university released the study, which
concluded that the discrimination had persisted across generations of
female faculty members. Within days, Hopkins was giving media
interviews around the world.

Zernike covered that story as a reporter at the _Boston Globe_. She
now illuminates its backstory, placing the MIT experience in the
history of US higher education, from how universities struggled to
cope with the feminist revolution of the 1960s to the Title IX law of
1972 that banned discrimination on the basis of sex in federally
funded institutions.

It is a single story acutely told, with a historical context that
enriches and deepens its narrative. Zernike does not, however, address
gender discrimination at other institutions or include context from
academia outside the United States. Issues of intersectionality, in
which gender, race and other factors combine to amplify
discrimination, are explored, but not at length.

So why tell Hopkins’s story now? The tape measure is now in the MIT
museum [[link removed]], but
that doesn’t mean things have changed. A study released in January
[[link removed]] by
the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California,
found that its female scientists have, on average, just half as much
research space allotted to them as their male counterparts. Thirty
years after Hopkins’s measurements, discrimination in academia
remains alive and well.

_Nature_ 615, 787-788 (2023)

_doi: [link removed]

_ALEXANDRA WITZE, based in Boulder, Colorado, covers the earth and
planetary sciences for NATURE [[link removed]], the leading
international journal of science. Co-author of ISLAND ON FIRE, a book
about the extraordinary 1783 eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki
(Pegasus Books, 2015). For recent clips, see www.alexandrawitze.com
[[link removed]] or follow me on Twitter: @alexwitze._

* Science
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* Women
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* sexism
[[link removed]]
* Inequality
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