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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.Īfter 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. Women were sidelined, propositioned and assaulted as they tried to work and study. Campus housing was nonexistent at first a women’s dormitory was added in the 1960s, but it was still insufficient. MIT’s first female student graduated in 1873, a century before Harvard fully deigned to admit women.īut the few women who actually enrolled at MIT faced an uphill battle. 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 was perhaps an unlikely place for this reckoning to unfold. Revealed: the pay bump for being a straight, white man in US science Even though the main events transpired decades ago, they remain remarkably relevant today given the sexism, racism and other injustices that still permeate academia. The ‘exceptions’ of her title are the exceptional women who pushed through discrimination in science to have accomplished careers, as Hopkins did.

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. 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. That led to a nationwide reckoning about how institutions of higher education routinely held back women in science. Her work led to a seminal 1999 report from MIT in which the university admitted to having discriminated against female members of its science faculty for decades. 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. 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.

Hopkins, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), recounts being mentored by James Watson, yelled at by Eric Lander, slighted by David Baltimore and groped by Francis Crick.

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Nancy Hopkins’s professional career has been partly defined by the ‘great men of biology’ she has worked with. The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science Kate Zernike Scribner (2023) Nancy Hopkins showed how the Masschusetts Institute of Technology systematically awarded more lab space to men.