i am barbaro. i am co-host of the daily podcast on new york times. i am not hosting tonight's show that is huge, huge gift to me. and we are here tonight to speak with the one and only kate zernike about. i got a camera. i have my copy about her book, which was literally just

yesterday. congratulations. thank you. thank you i just finished the book just today. no, a couple of nights ago. okay. you never want to read a book too. then you forget details it is called the exceptions nancy hopkins and mit and fight for women in science. and for the next hour or so, you and i are going to have a conversation about the book. what brought you to it, what you learned from it. that's going to take us to around eight. and then we're going to do a question and answer with you all. so please to think of your questions now and a quick note about the virtual version of this event we're having conversation in person, but and what i think is one of the coolest things ever this going to be recorded for c-span's booktv right. means if you ask a really smart question you too might be on

c-span. and all your friends will think you're the coolest i i want to start by kate, not through her resume, but through our own relationship and dynamic, which is intriguing. yes. so back in 2014, in the infinite wisdom of new york times editors, kate and i were both assigned pretty much the exact same bit at the exact same time. and i wouldn't say either of us were thrilled about this when it first happened. it was to cover it was a cover. then the nation's rising political star chris christie and. this was at the peak of his political stardom. so the idea that there was enough to go around that meant to be clever. you guys are terrible so as as any of you came here tonight over the george washington bridge. no, we were assigned to cover

christie when we thought he was going to be like destined for the white house. but within weeks of me getting this assignment alongside several of his aides to shut down the george washington bridge and this entire project of chris christie came crashing. and i was out of there. but what i learned by working with you was not just that you are a very good writer and a very curious journalist and a very generous colleague, but that you've had so many lives as a journalist, you have had so many bits covering criminal justice. congress, the rise of the party, new jersey. then after roe v wade was revoked overturned. you covered the fallout from that for the times and somehow in the middle all of that you've now written two books. one was about the tea party and somehow over the last few years you've written book.

and i don't know how you've done, but i want to talk about how it is you first came to the story that is at the center of the exceptions so start there for us. yeah. so i first of all thanks everyone for coming. really great to see everyone. well, i don't see you. i just see light. i was 1999. i was a reporter, the boston globe. i had just taken the higher education beat and since you mentioned that i can occasionally be cranky in career, i will say that. i didn't say that. well, i am i really didn't i? but i can i'll just i'm just confessing now. but so it was this was march of 1999. and i had taken over the higher education beat at the boston globe in september of 1998. and as you can imagine, boston being a college town. it was really big. you know, it's a big job. but this will appear a theme because they had a site they'd given me the beat and they said, but somebody else is going to cover harvard. and i was like, so what's left

anyway? that's not really fair. i mean, there's obviously there's other schools in boston, but anyway, so, so. march of 1989, i get a tip, some editor who passes it to another editor who finally lands with me and something about women at, mit, you know, female scientists at mit and discrimination. and i was like, oh, you know, it's 19 and i like discrimination. it going to be how bad can it be? or dawn of a new millennium and. so i called and i that the name i was given was a woman named nancy hopkins and i called her and she was very i just, i loved her voice. she was it was slightly, slightly excited and nervous, but very, very certain. like she really really had the sense that, nancy, just like had a firm grip on this. she knew what she was doing. she's very passionate. and she told me that not only these women had she and some female colleagues had done a report about discrimination,

women at mit. but mit was actually going to admit that it discriminated women. and in our business, known as a man bites dog story, like it was like, really, they're going to admit it. like rolling over and. so i went and i met nancy. we talked about, you know, the first question when you talk to someone as always is you're asking me now how, did you come to this? so nancy told me that she had this. it started with a problem. she didn't have enough space, fish, tanks. she was studying zebrafish the time and she knew that she had less space than the men. and i said, well, how did you know? and she said, well, i measured and was like, measured? and she said with a tape. and i said, oh. so anyway, it turned out that she had gone the building and measure taken tape, measure stretched it out, measured every inch of every lab, every office. and i just here is this incredibly distinguished accomplish scientist in front of me who was crawling around at night, measuring spaces. that was amazing. that was the first thing.

so it was mit admitting it. the fact these women had produced this report that so reliant on data and that it pulled the numbers, it struck that this was just the most mit thing to do. right? right. like you approach it like scientist. and then the third thing that i loved about this was that these were talking about a different kind of discrimination. they they called it 21st century discrimination. so, yes, were blatant things like not enough space or not as much space as the men the salaries were different. but what they talked about was was, you know, the women in the june at the junior faculty level were actually treated well. it was as women progressed in their careers that they were not, you know, locked out of a grant or assigned a lesser course to teach the small, small acts that added up to what they called marginalization and keep mind again 1999 we had not yet really talked about unconscious bias right the first big paper on unconscious bias is 1995.

and so this was sort of the first i had thought about it and like remember them telling me they said, you know, when when someone's planning a scientific panel, a conference, they call their friends and they who do you recommend to be on the panel and? because most of the scientists are men they end up having men. so you end up with what we now call. right, like it's all men stage. and i thought, oh, god, that's really like i've never thought of that. i mean, it was really sort of a revolution in my own thinking. and so i just thought what they done was really interesting. so i did this story. and of course, the tape measure leads the story like the minute you hear the tape measure, like, that's my lead and you write the story for the globe about write the story for report and and it's about how am i the headline is mitt admits discrimination female faculty and as it happens the globe at the time had there was one editor obviously but there's sort of this masthead of for people who were really in charge of the paper and the it just happened that sunday the only woman on the masthead happened to be editing the paper

and so she chose the story to lead that it was awfully to the paper. i talked to her and she remembers that leading the paper but anyway so it runs the front page above the fold and this as much as you can imagine and 1999 pre-social media. the story goes totally viral and i, you know, call nancy next day just to kind of check in. and i can't her for days because her phone constantly busy why does it go viral because as all of these women at other universities you know these women at mit didn't think their story was going to become public. they didn't count on me. and but what they also didn't count on was that the same thing was happening to other women. and that's what becomes a theme, because nancy, for 20 years, thought it wasn't happening to her. she sees it's happening to other women. then she realizes, okay, it is happening to me, but she thinks that she is she thinks she's the exception. she thinks only hopkins understands what's happening and

nobody else can possibly be thinking the same thing that she's. and it turns out not only are the other women of mit thinking this, but women all over the country and in fact she gets emails from hong kong and china it's like it turns out women over the world in science are thinking exact thing. so two days later, the new so. so bob burgin, who's the dean of science at the time he arrives in his office sorry, on a sunday he arrives his office monday morning cbs evening news there, the new york times puts it on the front page on tuesday and that just makes it even crazier. and people are suddenly like all, want to talk about this? and it ended up being this really seminal moment, higher education, where mit, the president of mit, admitted discrimination and he had this great that people kept repeating, which was it was in the report and he said, i've always believed that discrimination in higher education is part perception and part reality. and he said, true but i now understand that reality is, the greater part of the balance and

that was repeated everywhere. a journals, the editorial across the country and it just it just rang so true that that again it just resonated but chuck vass, the president of mit, was sort of as was asked by the ford foundation, to lead a group of university presidents, presidents to do this work on other campuses, to look at the ways that women were disadvantaged on other campuses. so they got a group of the nine most elite colleges in united states to look at the information. and he really embraced that role of, you know, mit. i at mit had done this bad thing. ultimately, they did the right thing by acknowledging. and chuck really became a hero to a lot of people and you saw these changes at the time you know, there was one female president in the ivy league within, you know, two years there was shirley tilghman, a molecular biologist like nancy was president of princeton, mit, when it had its next president. that was woman you just started

to see this slight across academia. so that story of a big scoop that you got is 25 years old and i can still say i can still feel the joy. yeah. as you describe it. so my question, of course, is why did you decide to go back 25 years later, almost and write a book length story about that moment in basically women's rights history, gender history, universities, kind of what was the spark there? and then we'll tell the story of what you actually found in the book. yeah. so i had always remembered, you know, people often ask me, especially i find this when i go talk to kids in schools, they'll what's your favorite story? and i'll always say the same thing, which is like, i don't have a favorite story that would be like asking my favorite child and i do have a favorite child, but i'm not going to say because they're here. but but, but, you know, and it's

really true. like i love all of my stories in different ways are very few that i don't reflect on with some joy, but this one, first of all, these women were just of i just love what they'd done. you know, this approach, this sort of scientific approach, the problem. and they taught me something that i hadn't understood. so i was like that. and nancy and i kept in touch, but really what made me think about it was? this was all coming. it was all happening. i started thinking that this was actually january 5th of 2018. i had the first conversation with my agent about this and so you remember, you know, the end of 2017, metoo is surging. and i was watching the metoo movement and thinking, okay, this is important that this is happening. and this is a huge moment. but it struck me that that was a narrow of the problem. and i kept thinking about these women at mit and thinking about how they had really illuminated a broader problem, the broader problem of discrimination. and again, as they called it, it was 21st century discrimination.

so what they was that women, these small disadvantages add up like the really do become a mountain and you know my own mother wanted to go to law school when she graduated from college in 1954 and her father told her, you know, you can't go to law school because you'll never get a his bet. his lawyer friends were like, we wouldn't hire her so and she ultimately went to law school but instead of going law school in 1954, she decided to go to business. but she went to not harvard. harvard didn't take women. she did the radcliffe in business administration. so my from my mother's story was that you know the problem for was that doors were closed and by my lifetime by 1999 and certainly god, we hope by 2018 doors were to women. but what these women at mit had taught me was that it's not just about opening doors. in fact, again, the younger women at mit were really happy. it's how you how people are treated and almost more

importantly, how they are viewed as their career progresses. right. so do you see the women are going along the same way? are you are you thinking that they have as much promise as the men or are you secretly thinking like, okay, they're here? as these women said? the line that was sort of heartbreaking from the report, we are tolerated, not welcomed. it's like, yeah, we know you to be here. we know we had to open this door. but like, will you just go sit over there on the corner? and so it struck me that that underlying that whole problem is just the idea that we're not taking women seriously as intellectuals, as professionals, so that that underscores what's happening with me, too right? like if we took women seriously, we wouldn't treat so badly, right? so i thought i wanted to tell more these women's story. i thought what they had was really interesting and. i'll let you sort of introduce because you're very good at it, but i there was so much i didn't about their story and that was the great joy that awaited me. this is when i ask you to tell story. so, i mean so so when you go

back, you know 25 years later and you decide to invest a book treatment of reporting the story of of women and and how they get to that report, what is the story that you find. i mean, and you should start at the beginning of the nancy hopkins story, because we're still we're talking about it a little elliptically here, like kind of who this woman is and how her life brings her on this journey where she feels emboldened to do the thing that she does which is author this report. right. exactly. so i when i did this, i thought knew nancy, but i didn't. and i also thought coming out of 1999 that mit, i had forgotten in the intervening years, that the original story that this had taken the women five years to do. but i had sort of thought, well, mit kind did the right thing, end of story. they rolled over. but in fact what i found was that mit had not initially

welcomed, there was a lot of resistance, a lot of pushback from the men and. it was really sort of the women who did the convincing but didn't know anything about nancy. so, nancy is we meet in the book with we meet nancy. she's a 19 year old college junior at radcliffe. again, harvard didn't admit women at the time, so she was at radcliffe and she she falls in love with the study of dna in a one hour lecture that's taught james watson as in watson and crick who four months guys who as in the guy's right so four months after he and francis crick have won the nobel prize have been awarded the nobel prize for their for decoding the structure of dna. so nancy's in this lecture and she you know, she's really at a crossroads in her life, her father has died year before. she has no idea what she's going to do with her life. and she's so i always say nancy has the most restless mind i've ever, ever, ever met. she thinks to herself, i need to

figure out what i'm going to do with my life. and i have one year to figure that out because i'm going to graduate from college. and she this boyfriend and i have my 38 because this is pre amniocentesis have to figure out i have to do all the things i'm going to the great things i'm going to do i have to do great things. i basically have to save humanity by the time i'm 30. so i have one year now to before graduation, figure out how i'm going to save humanity. then i'm going to humanity, and then i'm going to go go have my kids. but if i don't figure out how to humanity in the next year, i'm going to kind of slide into that marriage and kids and dog and the suburb i live in, what she calls i love this phrase. it's, you know, death by privilege. so she goes to this watson is totally entrancing. she suddenly realized not only is this interesting her but this is going to solve all the questions ever had about life. like why did her mother cancer when she was done? when was young? why does she look like, you know, this relative but not that relative and she works up the courage to go to james watson's

lab and say, i'd like to work for you. he's like, sure, come on, work. and she gets wrapped into this world. it's a totally new world for her, and she is just sound. her people. and initially she thinks, remember, she's got this time frame and she thinks, well, all i need to do is just do science. i going to do a nobel prize worthy experiment. i don't need to do this whole phd nonsense and she but but says, no, no, you're really good. you should go do a ph.d. so she goes to yale and, tries out the ph.d. thing, and she's like, i really just want to be back at harvard studying expression with this one person i like. and so she gives the ph.d. to go back and be a technician, which is interesting because that's kind of the role that most women were limited to. she was being offered the chance to be more than a technician. she's like, no, no. all i want to do is that science. so she drops out of yale comes back to harvard, does really one of the most important in early in the early understanding of how our genes are expressed as a

technician. and by this point watson to her okay like that the experiment is over and they present the result and he's like okay you you're going to graduate school basically she's done this incredible experiment so harvard all she has to do is sort of like write up her papers and publish and you know she's she gets her ph.d. from harvard within two years. so then by that point, her dream has always been to understand cancer by. that point there's been this developed mit where the discovery retroviruses we now know more about because of covid. and the discovery of retroviruses is up. the possibility that we can understand how viruses cause cancer. so nancy gets hired to this new center for cancer research at mit and she is one of the first women hired at mit to do that. so what is her understanding of women's to be a woman in science at this stage of her career when she wasn't at nancy is many things but she is not an activist she is not feminist.

she she actually went to spence in new york city, grew up in morningside heights. she went to spence where they taught her how to curtsy in case she should happen to be presented at court to the queen. so nancy is a very polite person and she's thinking, i don't need all that sort of feminist stuff. all i need to do is do my science and i will, you know, things will fall into place and thinks that if you just do this work, you'll be recognized for it. she also loves she a certain certainty in science, certain certainty, but she says a certainty science, which is that it's meritocracy, right? it's data numbers. if you just do the job that's all that matters. it's not going to it's not going to matter whether you're a woman and. she you know, like i think i thought 25 years later, the door was open. all that that's all that matters. so she was just going to do this great work and she'd be recognized for it. and that was the end. so when does she start to

experience the kind of other side of this? so she comes to the realization much later. it takes her 20 years, which is kind of amazing and i will say that the early readers of my book often got very angry with her. i mean, what is wrong with you so? but pretty quickly. so she goes to m.i.t. and what happens there? she's in center for cancer research. she's one of the founding founding members. but everybody else, a man, she's the only woman. and she likes to joke. for a long time, there were more nobel winners than women in this place. so so initially, see, it's and it's sort of this space they're all working round initially has a lot of she has problems and it's things like you the ups guy assumes that she's a secretary and that she's the one to sign for packages. the graduate students in the lab think that she's another graduates, another postdoc. and

so they sort of treat her that way. or some people treat her as a technician. she's also with these cells that she, you know, takes great care to to grow just so she can drop tumors on the base of the watch how the tumors grow. and people just sort of like rate her cells as if she hasn't all this time creating them. so she sees these hurdles, but she thinks, well but this is just there's just a lot of sharp elbows here, right? yeah. it's a competitive place. and so she continues in this vein and there's actually a great moment in the book where she, um, she writes this article for, um, for radcliffe quarterly and she talks about her life as a woman science and she attributes the whole, she doesn't see any, the whole problem for women in science is that you can't have a personal life because at this point she's been married and divorced and she's decided she's going to become what she calls a nun of science. but she's still not thinking that the treatment she's getting is she's a woman. she thinks the only problem for women is that you have kids and she's not going to kids.

so there won't be proper and she thinks this or these early problems are because of her personality conflict. and then the personality conflict sort of gets resolved. but ultimately she starts having credit taken away from her. and in one of the final moments this someone takes to sort of somewhat she does quite a big discovery. and i think it's in fact, discovery that gets her tenure at mit. and then she hears that another man, someone actually comes to her and says, this other guy has been wandering around giving speeches saying that he discovered that. and so she thinks you know, god, this field is really competitive, but thinks she still is reluctant to think that it's because she's a woman, that she says, you know what i'm going to do, i'm going to change fields. and it's just that is really competitive. and she actually thinks of going into because she's studying retroviruses so she thinks of she thinks of going into but she knows that the world of hiv research at the time and this is in the eighties now is very competitive. so like i'm not going to go into that and she discovers she's got her developmental biology and

she has this idea that she's going understand human behavior by, studying zebrafish. and she's, again, one of the first people to study zebrafish. she takes a sabbatical in germany. she goes and learns from this. the field is headed by a woman at the time and she thinks, okay, i'll do this. you know, do her own experiment. right? she'll do her own social, which is i'm going to go into this field where there's a woman at the head of it. i'm really interested in this work. let's see how that goes. maybe a field where there's a lot of women. you go to a developmental biology, there's a lot of women on the stage. maybe that'll be different. and she finds out it's actually not different. she's doing like a real world experiment of her own role as a woman. yes. the science. yes. and i think if i'm remembering the chronology of the book correctly, this brings back to the tape measure. yes, exactly. so she goes to germany, she back from germany with this little you know, she's got the first fish. she's going to grow thousands of fish. she's got like six of them. and she's so nervous about these fish because, you know, like all of us, we had goldfish as kids

and we kill them. so she's really worried she's going to kill. these fish, these prize fish that she's brought from germany. so she keeps them on her lap. the whole flight and she comes back to mit and she's cultivating them and she starts growing more. she's got this really, really tricky experiment she wants to do. she needs more fish because you have to go through three generations of them before can get your results and needs more space in her lab and it turns out that they're going to renovate this floor where she'll get her space. but it turns out that the space is going to go to the two other guys in the floor. and she's sort of working to try to negotiate that. ultimately, she can't get the space that she needs. and so she begins to look and she's like, you know, all these other guys is, again, it's still men in the building all these other guys have much more space. and i say, why can't i have this boy? i can have the same space. they. she goes to the head of the cancer center is like, nancy, don't be ridiculous. and like, well, even a six year old can look around this building and. see, i have less space. don't be ridiculous. he's gaslighting her. you all have the same space.

yes, yes. and i don't she would say. he doesn't even know he's gaslighting her. so she thinks, well, i'm just going to show him and. once i show him, it will all over that we will get this solved. so she does the tape measure thing and she goes around. she goes late at night, which again is kind of crazy. she's now, you know, in her late forties hanging. you're fully tenured and she's sneaking around hoping like these post-doc walks don't stumble upon her measuring the floor and she's down on her hands, knees stretching out the tape, measure so and it turns out, yes she has much less space than the men. she has much space not only than the men, but men without tenure. and she takes the numbers to this guy and he's like, i don't want to see those. i know. and like, he just insists that this is not the case. and so ultimately, she she consults a lawyer. she go, the lawyer says, terrible, you should go. you know, he had done a case with the mit and he says you should go see the provost. and she's like, she is she's she's so not concerned with

university politics. she doesn't even know who the provost is. so she figures out of the process. she writes a letter, she sees the provost. he's like, nobody has ever asked me for this little why is this a problem he can't understand phd. and so he sends to the dean of science. and by this point, she's beginning to have an inkling so there's this great moment when she's she goes to see the dean of science and he's sort of trying to get her out of his office, not that interested. and she gets up to walk out and she's like on from the lawyer on the instructions from lawyer says, well, i think this might be discrimination. he's like, wait a minute. you know, and goes, he follows her out of the hall when he's come back in and they talk and he ends up getting her the space which is really i mean, i think it's like 130. it's 113 square feet or 230 square, very small amount of space. and so she thinks that problem is solved and that sort of the it's not solved. and when does she realize that the space is just kind of the of yeah, the space is the beginning of this. so right around time that she's doing all this measuring at mit,

she gives her a really big task which is that for the first time biology is going to be a required course. so this is, you know, again, like it's hard to now and we can all go do 23 and me but at the time only physics and chemistry were required of all undergraduates at mit because were the important sciences. right. so this a recognition of how important biology is to our futures and how undergraduates really need understand it and they know it's a gamble for the department and they that they need to have great instructors it. so they asked nancy to do it and they ask her because she has already created oddly enough when she's still not a feminist she creates the first women's studies course in and it's a course to teach biology to non biology majors. she does an amazing job with this. her ratings for that class are higher anybody else's in biology. so come to her and say, we need you to create this new course. it's a really big deal for the department. know you can do it. great. so they ask her who she wants to teach with. she's like, she's so confident. she's like, i don't care.

whoever they assign her to teach, she's 48 at the time. they assign her to teach with a 34, 34, 34 year old man who's a total phenom, great lecturer. and they teach the course together for three years and indeed he gets really amazing ratings. she gets good ratings. she brings her ratings up the course gets phenomenal ratings out of a seven the course gets a six. she's excited she has this you know that the department head sends her a note saying with all the the breakdown of her scores from the student evaluations. and he says, great job. and she goes to see the department head and she walks in and he says, do you want to teach next year? she's like the bio course that i developed, that i developed. and she now, like, you know, she's put she's taught the women's studies course for non bio majors for years. she's been three years developing and teaching this course and she thinks like, okay, i've got seven years of work and the guy says no that guy wants to teach you with this other guy and she's like, well can we all teach it together? yeah, maybe. but they blow her off. blow off, or she calls the guy

who who who's now going to replace in this course. and she says, what's going on? oh, no, i'm sorry. she calls the guy, she's teaching the first and she says, what's going on? and he well, you know, yeah, it's not that i don't like teaching with you. i just i'm excited teaching this other guy. i'm feeling a little stale. and then she calls the other guy and he says, well we're going to write a and and we're going to start a and we're going to do cd-roms and it's going to be this great thing. and he's sort of clueless in a way. clueless. and he's like, we're going to make millions. like, you don't have any idea how many introductory bio students there are this country? and she again she's so reluctant. she thinks like, wow, i created this course. it's worth millions. great. but of course, they're going to shut her out of the millions. that's the point. when she thinks like this is crazy. and she writes she's. so ultimately, she she fights she goes the channel that she's done before, the provost, the dean of all the channels she thinks are going to work. and it utterly fails.

and they blow her off until may of that year. and by that point she's saying, well, could i teach with you? and they say, you know, it's may we don't have time to integrate you into this course. so you can just be an observer in this course, can sit in the front row and take notes and tell us how to. it's really humiliating it's really insulting. it's really insulting. is heartbroken. she loves this course and in her head, she's not using the word discrimination. she's using the word discrimination this point. but what really changes her is the weaken that she gets the weekend after she gets this letter saying you're going to be in the front row, you're not going to be teaching this course. she goes home and she starts to reflect on her ranking on, her ratings, and she realizes that like that her ratings for the department are really, really high and they're higher than many of the men. she's the only woman, by the way teaching of the 25 introductory courses that at mit, she's the only woman teaching any of them. and she thinks if were a man, i

would be getting a teaching prize. doing all this. i created a course for them with a very quick turnaround. it has a smash hit. why am i out? and she just realizes this has nothing to do me. this is my gender. they are not even seeing me. i am a i'm a casual of this whole thing. and by this point, she's been watching other women kind have been pushed aside, but she thinks that those women know what's happening to them and she not yet realized until this moment that it's happening to her. and so she writes a letter, you know, she's at her wit's. and by this point, i love this because jim watson is still a mentor to her at this point. and he says to her, you need to write this stuff down and there's she very dutifully writes, i will now take a journal because jim watson tells me to, do this and i do everything that jim watson tells me. so that was. so she begins writing this all down was fantastic for the book and she so she, you know, she realizes she's out of the course. there's nothing she can do the one final thing she's going to do is write a letter the president of the mit and she

writes this letter and she says, you know, probably don't know me. i'm nancy hopkins. i'm a professor of biology. and i think you should know, you know i've had problems with my salary. i've had problems with my space. this course was taken away from me. i think this is discrimination. i think you should know about it. she shows it to one friend, not a scientist. and he's like, i don't know if you should send this. this guy doesn't know you. he's going to think you're a whiner. you know, he won't have any way to evaluate whether you're a good scientist or not. she thinks, oh, you know, okay, maybe that's the wrong outcome she takes it to. she it to a woman. she doesn't well, who's also in biology with her and she respects this woman because this woman mary lou pardue is the first woman to be in the school science to be elected to the national academy of sciences, which is, in some people's minds just as big a deal as winning the nobel prize. and so she takes it to mary lou and they have lunch and they're sitting in the back of this restaurant where interesting. i later met with nancy, but they're saying this of the small

table and nancy gives mary lou the letter to the president and she watches for what seems like eternity as mary lou reads the letter very, very slowly. and nancy's watching and thinking like, oh, my god, she's going to tell me this is me, it's my fault. and finally, mary lou looks up and she says, i'd like to sign this letter and i want to come see the president with because i've long thought that this was a problem. and that was an incredible moment for nancy, because she realizes she's no longer and in that moment, there's a kind of power. but then what's so great about that moment and this ultimately leads it's the first of many steps to my story is that nancy says to mary lou, do you think there might others and they go back and they talk to a third woman in biology and they get down the book. the book, of course, is taught and they look up the list of faculty and they count. and there 15 women in this, 15 women with tenure in the school of science and 190 497 men,

nearly two tenured professors, women. so, of course, being scientists, they're like, god, the sample size. isn't that great. they get two more women from the who have crossed appointments from the school of engineering and they set out to talk to all of these women. and within a very short course time, every woman save one has signed on and the reaction is so swift they show up in this woman's and the women are like, do you have something i can sign? they just they are i won't sit. they're chomping at the bit, but they're they're really eager. they all recognize this is a problem, but they've all been scattered around the school science. so nobody knows that this is happening to someone else. there's a there's a passage in your book as these women are meeting or they discover the subtleties of what they're being excluded from and the one that struck me and i wonder going to talk it for a second involves a mortgage and a home loan. yeah. so i should point out at when we're talking about sort of homes and families half of these women lest you should think that

well the women the reason these women aren't as successful is they're raising children. half of these women have children. they were so passionate about their science, that they made this sacrifice. they made this sacrifice knowingly. but there's this amazing scene where they go to see that. so they write they decide they're going to write a letter. the dean of science instead, and then they make an appointment with the dean science. and they're so nervous about this letter that. they write the dean of science and they show up. and of course, has even read the letter. right. but he does have six of the women, six of the 16 in his office, and they all to tell their stories. and the dean of science himself has four children and thinks, god, none of these women have children. and then one of them is telling him about her personal. and she said, you know, i want to buy a condo, but i can't afford it. and he practically lunges across the tables. why didn't you come to me to ask for a and she's like, i didn't know i could. and that's when they discover that all of these men are actually getting no interest

loans from mit to buy their own places. and the women just have no idea this happened. these are women who who the once once bothered to ever tell them. one's bothered to tell them. and of course they haven't thought to ask because this is a generation of women. i do think this persists today that just feel so lucky to be in the door that they're not going to ask for anything else. so they feel really lucky. they're so i mean, at this point, the women who children aren't taking leave, the only people who are taking maternity leave or the men paternity leave, and they were often using it to start companies. so, you know, the women just seeing like it was, again, as say, it was like these very small things, just like their eyes were opening of what what they were missing out on. so this escalates a couple more steps from the dean's office before we get the letter that you to the report that you ultimately obtain. so how do they make the decision? women, these 15 or 17 women,

right? yeah. 16 in the end two to kind of like go that last big mile. so when they go see the dean they don't want anything. i would consider revolutionary they want a committee to look into the numbers and again like they're still a little reluctant to say this is discriminate and they have a sense it might be but what they is they want a committee that will look into the numbers and see whether women are shortchanged in teaching assignments and in grants and in, you know, various ways, space and salary as and in the genes like. sure, you can have your committee. like, i don't know if it's going to change anything. and he initially writes this off as like mit is just a competitive place and these women kind of don't have the sharp elbows. so he says, but you can have your committee but then turns out the men don't want them to have a committee because men are worried about a revolution. they have get over the hurt and then the men want to be included on the committee. and the dean says, look, you to get the men on your side and. so they include the men, but it takes like a remarkably long for

this committee to actually meet. and they have to the craziest thing is like they're going to have a charge for the committee like a task for the committee but they have to have a committee write the charge. it's like a committee to have committee and it's really like academic insanity. and so they finally have it and they do. they have this committee and they do the report and they collect the data. and the dean fixing their problems and. nancy writes up the first incarnation of the report and then they it to to the essentially the faculty senate. it's a small group of faculty. and there's a woman there who is a professor of management at the school sloan school of management. she, interestingly enough, has been since the 1960s an expert on and she using this phrase in the sixties which is so interesting me on dual career couples and on work life balance which by the way is a word she hates. she thinks integration, which is so interesting to me because we're now talking about integrating our lives.

lonnie bailon was talking about this in the sixties, so sees this, and she's actually the incoming of the faculty and she thinks this is going to be a great way for me use mit as an example and i want to get this report out and share with the other schools. but they're worried about sharing their report because people have shared their names and these stories because so few women, everyone's going to know where it comes from. so there's a couple of steps before it becomes public. but finally they write kind of this not sanitized version but stripped, you know, a version that's stripped of names and identifying details and they this report and they're going to give it to the faculty and nancy to be giving a speech or a talk to the mit science journalism science fellows, science journals and fellows and mentions that someone says to her, what's it like being a woman at mit? and she says, oh, it's funny you should ask. we have this report coming. and the head the program who's a former journalist comes up to her after and said like would you mind if i called a reporter at the boston globe and somebody

at the times about this? she's like, oh, no, we can't do that. and then she says, oh, actually, you know, mit is going to edit this. like, this actually is kind of a revolutionary thing because we have the president on board. so she says to him, yeah, you can do this. so he's one. and again, this is something i don't until 25 years later, i have no idea where this tip came from. he's the who calls the globe and the new york times and whoever gets to call the new york times, doesn't return the call. so the lesson is always return the call. so you get a tip from someone who's in that audience with nancy. you know, i got a tip from the head of the science journalism. well, the head of science journalism program phones editor at the globe, who someone who tells me right. it's actually a pretty interesting story about the power here of journalism because. it's quite conceivable that this dopey times reporter never returns call and no one ever learns about this. reporter a public way. yeah. and then we don't get the revolution that flows from it right and. what's, what was so amazing about going to do this story in

book length was it just became clear all the small steps all the ways this could have gone wrong. like you think they form a committee and of course a committee always a report like that's what happens right now. there was never any plan. write a report out of this. it was just these women were going to have their committee. they could like, you know, go make their mud pies, do whatever and there's actually jerry friedman, who's a nobel prize winning physicist, discovered the quark and he's one who says to nancy, nancy, you've got to write all this stuff down. you've got to tell the dean about this stuff. give him a report. if has it in writing, he can do something about it. so that's the first idea where they were. they actually get the report and again, like they presented lottie hears about it. lottie decides that, you know, lottie just happens to be expert in workplace balance. she decides to go public. and then you have this president who is willing to go out on a limb and say, you know what, i was wrong. this is a real thing.

right? so, yeah, the story as we talked about at the beginning, this story goes viral and mit was very worried initially there had been an episode earlier where they were they were closing down an apartment and the globe got wind of the story first. and the faculty went nuts, mostly because they didn't want to read about their own department in the front pages of the boston globe. so i called and i said i was going to do the story, and they were they completely freaked and they were like, no, you know? and then i said, you know, in the way do i was like, i'm going to do the story anyway. sorry. and so they thought, all right, we have this pushy reporter, our hands. we may as well make people available. so they made the dean of science available to me and they made lottie. and then gradually they made other people available to me. and then we had this statement from the president. and yeah, the fact that it was on the front page and again, there's this wonderful moment where lee royden, who's a geophysicist she goes into her office on monday morning and a guy comes bounding in and, he's got this. i won't do my scottish accent,

but he comes in, he's got the scottish accent and it's like, you're above the fold, you're the fold. and he was just like everyone was so excited. this what's interesting though is that lottie will now tell me that they had so they're very nervous about the running and then the story runs. the women are all thrilled and they're so grateful. and the president writes to nancy and says she's very nervous. she opens this email from him and he says you know tough story but fair it gave the credit where it was due, which was to the women. so there's two interesting things. which one is that there were women at mit, not among this group, but other women who thought that that the women had given too much credit to the men. right. that was the dean of science and the president looked good. i actually think these women look really good. and really strong and really ingenious. and that's i took away with me and remembered for these 20 years was just how creative and smart they had been about this. but again, what lottie told me

was that so the women get together a week later to have sort of a celebration and they it was crickets from the men, the men in the department, the president and the dean were very supportive. and by this point, they're all you know, they put nancy in the administration and nancy, they say to her, we want you to be had this new committee on diversity. and nancy, to her credit, says, well, we're going to have a committee on diversity. it can't just be women. it has to be underrepresented minorities. and they make a black man, the co-chair, her. so there really progress. but i think there was sort of a reluctance among. the mende, they're still a little nervous about what this for that there's a there's an irony the way the whole final dimension of the story plays out that you and i talked a little bit about, which is that part of the reason the report that nancy helps write gets so much press is because the man at the top of the university is willing to admit that there is discrimination. and you write about this, you say, rather than embarrass mit,

the president's decision to, admit there was just great discrimination, made them seem bored. and so when i finished the book, started to think to myself, well, here we are. we start this story of nancy hopkins. she can only enter the sciences of james mentorship. she goes on incredibly long journey of discovery, discrimination and still even at the end of that journey, this pivotal moment is when a man kind of blesses the claim of discrimination. and so even in the moment of kind of victory, there's this very powerful reminder, right? that that this is a patron. right? right. exactly. there there's one detail you say that. so, nancy the clintons invite this is again, it's 1989. the clintons invite nancy to to the white house. and she's supposed to go with the dean of science. and for some reason, don't know if he misses a flight or he can't do the fight. so she ends up going to the white house on her own. so she does get that. and nancy, really become a hero to women.

science. women at other universities suddenly discover themselves getting raises and they refer to them as nancy hopkins raises because they know why they're getting raises because they've been underpaid. all these and they're just desperate. please don't sue. so, yeah, i mean, i think she she takes on this role as sort of a hero to women. you're right. it was only through the blessing of the man. i think it would have remained a he said she said. and there were he embraced if he hadn't embraced it. and i will say too, you know, so a few years later, larry summers is giving a he's just become president of harvard a couple of years earlier and he's giving a talk. and he talks about nancy's in the audience and the subject is diverse, you know, diversify the ranks of elite science and math. and he says that he thinks one of the problems is, well, one of the promises first says is that women can't work air weeks, which -- her off to start with. and then he says, but i also think there's there maybe an of

intrinsic aptitude and this sends her into the stratosphere understandably and she gets up and walks out and a globe reporter i've now moved on to the times. the globe reporter covering education calls her and asked her for comment. and it becomes this very public battle between nancy and larry summers. and what was so amazing to me, going back to to look at for the book was how many people stood up and said, well, larry summers, he's just raising up he's just raising a point of data. you know, shouldn't we at least consider analysis? and the reality is, like we had data for many years showing that that not the issue, that there's more there's more diversity among men, among women than there is between men and women. so that was not the case. so so i do think that that yes, it was still because these men had blessed it. and i think there was a sense, among other some other university presidents who i won't name that chuck vass, the president of mit, had kind of rolled for these women. and they, you know, again, like there was an article in i can't

remember if it's the wall street journal. they referred to the mit. at mit. he had caved. mit had had produced a report of junk to which the dean of science, you know, there was a guy on that committee who discovered quark. you think he believes in junk science? it wasn't junk science. this is a real thing. so we're going to turn to questions in just a moment. so i want you to put in the back of your head, but i want to end with asking you now that the is done and released to the world and, you've had time to reflect on it, kind of what is that? what is the of nancy's experience and have things admitted under careful watch improve it now. i mean what is the level of presence by women in the sciences there. yeah so kind of that it's a fairly straightforward. on your previous question, i kind of have two answers here. so on i'll take the second one first on mit. at mit is now run by women, as is, by the way, city of boston, state of massachusetts. it's really incredible.

and mit is run by women from the head, the corporation, which is their board of trustees. the president and the dean of science the provost, the chancellor, the director of research, the president, the president of the united president biden has three women as his chief science advisors at mit we still see a lot women are still coming in and that and i should say like one of the reasons that these women's report was important was that when you looked at the number of undergraduates coming in, it just was not that that women were not interested in math and science. the number of undergraduate women was really, really high where they started to do in law was in the higher levels. so now you see more women in the higher levels. so from undergraduate to graduate to postdoc to junior faculty, there is still a higher attrition for women in phd programs and they say they did a report on this last year. and what they say is that it is

still intellectual discrimination, that they feel this assumption that women do science, this feeling they are still only tolerant, tolerated that they don't belong. so, you know, but then look at the school of engineering engineering. as long been a bastion of men and, there are eight departments in it and school engineering. and at mit, five are led by women. i mean, it's really it is totally revolution as probably know. i think what is it six out of the ivy league schools we had maybe it's even seven will be had led by women next year there was one at the time so is you know we've seen a real change and i do think numbers matter like it's not just about representation representation is not enough but we do have to sort of normal this idea that the women can be geniuses too and that's the most important thing in terms of where i land all this i think i land where you know where nancy kind of let

you know, nancy. and i've had so many i mean, obviously so many conversations. but this conversation keeps coming up where she'll say, you know, why i put up with this for 20 years? like, was it all worth it? and yes, she became an advocate for women in science and. that was great. and she was able to continue and do great science. she had great work in zuber, very important work in zebrafish, but she still thinks, you know what, was i missing? you know, what? what did i miss? science. what could i have done? so i think i sort of i up on the book with the first line of the book which, you know, again, it's nancy she's at radcliffe on her way to this lecture at harvard. and the first line of the book is it was hard to deny promise. and the idea was here you are at harvard, you know, look around you. there's a harvard man in the white house, john f kennedy, and think of the promise. all these incredibly intelligent, bright young people to sunny day. and where i come to at the end is like when we shut people out are denying that promise. and so i sort of leave with a

line that bob brown, who's now the president of boston university, but he was i think he chancellor provost at the time. and he worked with, nancy, to to create day to really change things for women. and it and he said to me, know we rely on science to solve our biggest challenges. why would you shut out half the population begin with. why wouldn't you want everyone on board? if these are the challenges we're trying to solve? so that's kind of where i end, you know, that this is right that there's a here, there is a tragedy and that's that's to me like the tragedy is that we denying the promise. and the tragedy is every time i hear nancy saying, well, what else could i have done every time you made you know, if you're making someone crawl around at night to measure space, think it like she could just be sleeping, if nothing else, but like think of all the other things she could be doing if someone doesn't have to scrap her resources. think of all the amazing things they could do. and it's not just, you know, writing stories like we like to think we can save, but this is the literally cure for cancer.

well, why would we want to shut someone out? why would we want to make someone put up with this of nonsense? right. that's where i end. it's a pretty big question. and so are now going to do question and answer. and i believe some microphones are going to be making their way around the room. you guys all know the drill shortens. we know massive pontification unless your pontiff. high congratulations on this amazing rethinking of this story. i'm just curious, as someone who's about the tea party and this amazing revolution of women in science, how you about the fact that we are living through the wholesale rejection of

evidence based policymaking thinking expertise itself by extremists in this country. yeah you know it's funny in the acknowledgments i talk about my father who's a physicist and say, you know, raised me to love stories and to respect. and it's so it occurred to me that that was actually i'm not supposed to make political statements as a reporter and that's a political statement now, which is really that to me is tragic. so i think this is all part of you know, it's it's the thread i get. i don't know if it's a thread, but the really scares me because i've just, you know, over the last five years i've been exposed to so many people doing so many incredible things, really being rigorous about their work and to have it dismissed and sort of, you know, reduced to twitter feeds. yeah, i think that's another real tragedy in this thing. hi. do you a microphone?

okay. who better take my mask off? i'm martha berg. hennessy and have known nancy since. we were in the fourth grade, along with and lucy. i learned to curtsy. i had forgotten that. we had learned to curtsy. and lucy reminded me of that when we just had dinner. but one of the things we have known, nancy, a long time and she and have had this discussion and the when you were speaking, i can't wait to read the book. thank you. and when you speaking, i was thinking of the raising in the sun a dream deferred is a raisin in the sun. and nancy and i have had discussions, arguments. i think you can be married and children and have a successful career, which is what i did in the entertainment business. and you may know the me to started in the entertainment

business and i am stories that would make your hair curl but she always that science would triumph and i give her a lot credit. she worked hard and i do think she sacrificed something and think she would think that today can we get when are we going to gauge this point? because one of the points you make in the book and nancy talks about this is the irregularity of of research based science, the the hours you keep, the you know, discovery doesn't come out of discovery doesn't come out right. like the zebrafish don't, you know, give you your tumor, you know, at a hour of the day to go pick up your kids so is was nancy who's right in debate about whether it's actually possible to to to have a balanced life and be scientist obviously that's the debate seem to obviously you think your right friend. well i would but is a different industry right yeah i would say so right you know but i think

the difference is that can't i think other fields can time a little bit better. i mean i know okay so you're saying no so i and i can't time the news right like i can't time a breaking story so so i do relate to nancy. i guess i think. well, first of all, it's a certainly how lot easier if you have day care on campus if you can take maternity leave and not fear that that's going to be a huge stigma on you if you if you don't feel like you have to disguise your pregnancy and, you're so worried about wearing baggy clothes that you, you know, don't give the best lecture. so i think it has become at the time, you know, now, universities often stop the tenure clock. so one of the ways, you know, i name the book, the exception is because as i say in the prolog this word exception or exceptional kept coming up and one of the ways it did was andrea ghez who's won the nobel in physics a couple of years ago she said to me it's longer exceptional to show up, you

know, to show up to a daycare center. aren't seeing a woman or a man, frankly, pick up his children from daycare center on campus. i mean, nancy will tell you, she never even saw a woman in close fitting maternity clothes. that's a huge change for her. so think i with help, you can do it. i think other women say that, but i think there is a real fear about because the pressure is so much in those early childhood years or childbearing, the research field. yes. to get tenure to do your big experiment before you have kids. mm hmm. yes but i think i think you don't have the pressure. get tenure, right. like you to to succeed in science, you have to become in your field before can get tenure because you would need all these letters from people to to say how great you are. and so to do that. i can see why she know why she felt that she needed to make the sacrifice and she was not alone among this group of women, but one of the things i think about with this book is, again, nancy did trust the meritocracy.

and we're about to have this huge debate. this goes to your question about debate about science. we are about to have once again, thanks to the supreme court, we're about to embark on another big debate about affirmative action. and it's going to be really hot and we tend to i think the, opponents of affirmative would say we need this to be a meritocracy. these women at mit all in the meritocracy. they that was that matter, especially in science. and what they found out is there is no such as a pure meritocracy. so i think that lesson is also really important for us. so when affirmative action falls and those who want it to fall talk a pure meritocracy finish, that thought. oh, we're still going have it's still going to be who refers to the panel? it's still going to be, you know, who's who's writing the grant and who are their friends. you know it's still going to be it's still going to be who know it's still going to be it. life is so quirky that's you know, i mean, again, like just

all the things it took to produce this this silly little committee report and change the world in this small way. i now see from writing the book took so many different things. and you think about the things it takes to create a successful career to create a successful life. there are so many things that matter it's not. you can't it's just not meritocratic. it's not metacritic we just have to stop pretending. who else else. yeah. i think you keep michael. i guess my question might be thinking more broadly than the injustices within academia. what are the changes that you two would bring to the times to it to make a left, to make more meritocratic? well i am like nancy, a very

firm believer, hard work. so my first job was at a small paper in massachusetts. and everybody i started as an intern. and my first job was filling in for the lowest level reporters were town reporters. everybody had a town you covered and you had to produce at the time we measured copy, not my words, but by inches you had to produce your ten inches, ten column inches every day. and if you had a front page story, you were really excited. but people in town were like, where's the column? like, so you had to do stories because otherwise they would complain to the editor that there was no story for their town. this created an incredible work ethic and i will say that there are a number of colleagues from that small who went on to the boston with me and quite a number who actually at the new york times with me now so i am a firm believer that hard work in your early career really matters and it's it's not just good to put on your resume and to show people it's really good training for you. it really forces you to think in

a certain way. so i think that i think sometimes we do gosh, i really hate opining for the times. this is my opinion, not the opinion. there are times i do sometimes think we do a disservice by thinking the answer to our problems is just to, oh, let's get these people in young. like, i think they sometimes come young and they don't have this training and so they flounder a little bit. not as good about supporting them. we've gotten much better, i think the last two year or two or three years, i should say, particularly since george floyd. but i do think that we need to to be better about supporting people in their early careers. i i, i think that we have gotten here's an interesting, subtle way we've gotten better. i always think of the there was a shooting at that i think it was a country music festival in las vegas las vegas a couple of summers several summers ago and if you noticed who did the story, there was the lead of the paper which was the shooting and

that was the facts. and then you had the next the off lead, which was the story about the victims and family and what a tragedy this was. and it was sort of the tug at the heartstrings piece. the news lead was written by men. the off news lead was written women. now, some days there's no room for the light feature thing on the front page. and those days you will often see mostly male bylines. that's still true to some degree, but i will say we've gotten a lot better. partly because we have put more women in management and i happen to know that one of them who is a very dear friend of mine and is a deputy in the national desk, which is now led by women, amazingly, i've been on the national list for 20 years. this is like we've never had the number women in leadership positions, she said, was the deputy. and she said to the editor who was a man at the time, the national editor so-and-so female can write a news lead and it was like revolutionary. of course she can. she knows what to do. she can handle the facts. she can handle all, you know,

the newsletters like big story that balances all the developments of the day. and there was sort of this idea that, i don't know, it was the guy we had call and the guys do it. we had to call in the big reporters. so i think that is a big change. and again just the personnel, i mean, when i look at the national and the fact that it's run by women, that is incredible. me yeah. so i don't know that i have anything to add to that. yeah i mean, like, what can we do that's different i still, we are still working on that problem. we are still working on the who or, you know, like science. we are still working on the who are our geniuses problem like and there's great researchers. woman at princeton, sarah jane, leslie whose work i'm fascinated by. she's written op ed for the times and she's actually done studies about this where you look at at the kind of language that is to describe men and women, we are much likely to say that a man is a genius with a woman. it's that she works hard. i would suggest you all reread the coverage of the 2008 election and the primary in that race, because you might, you know, i think it was true with with that case as well between obama and hillary. and there i just did it.

just did the thing of obama. clinton sorry, but but so i still think i still think that's biggest hurdle. and i think that's the biggest hurdle for us all, actually, not just at the times, not just to them. it's not just science. kate, thank you very much. don't think we have any more questions. thank you all for coming. colby is of the amazing book that kate just wrote are in the lobby. they are assigned or she can sign up for you later and i really encourage you to go buy one. thank you, everybody.