On paper, Nancy Hopkins had a charmed career. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, she was handpicked by James Watson, of Watson and Crick, for mentorship. In 1973, she was hired as an assistant professor at M.I.T.’s Center for Cancer Research, and was quickly promoted to receive tenure. But in the early ’90s, when she began a new set of genetics experiments using zebra fish and requested an extra 200 square feet for aquariums, the faculty member in charge of facilities refused.
Hopkins, then in her early 50s, had a feeling her lab was already smaller than those of her male peers. For a year, she fought for more space — a battle that culminated with her measuring the entire department. “I literally got a tape measure and measured every lab in the building,” she told me. She found that her space was 500 square feet smaller than the average male junior professor’s, and from 1,500 to 4,500 square feet smaller than her male fellow full professors’. The person in charge refused to look at her data. “Here I was measuring the goddamn laboratories,” she says, “and I brought him the measurements, and he wouldn’t even look at them.”
She began to notice that other women seemed just as invisible as she felt, while men whose science didn’t seem any better were lauded as geniuses. But it was years before she named this problem in her mind; she thought of discrimination as something that ended when women were allowed to hold jobs like hers. “It’s hard to believe anyone could be that naïve, but I was,” she says. At the start of her career, her science seemed to speak for itself, and her talents were encouraged by great men in her field. Now that she considered herself their equal, she was confronted with all the ways they seemed to disagree.
The question of whether women could, or should, be a part of the scientific profession was as old as the profession itself. According to Londa Schiebinger, a historian at Stanford, it was during the Enlightenment era in Europe, as science was transformed into a profession and universities and academies formed, that a fork in the road was reached, and women were formally excluded from Western science. Earlier, they’d been among its practitioners, but by 1911, Marie Curie was denied entry to the French national academy despite having shared a Nobel Prize. (The same year, she became the first person ever to win a second.) After a long debate, the academy concluded that it should “respect the immutable tradition against the election of women,” so as not to “break the unity of this elite body.”
[Read about the secret history of women in coding.]
Later in the 20th century, as Hopkins and other women were allowed into the “elite body” of academia for the first time, they found that cultural and structural barriers remained. Frustrated, Hopkins drafted a letter to Charles Vest, the president of M.I.T., calling for action. It was eventually signed, and added to, by 16 of the 17 tenured female faculty members in the School of Science (there were 194 tenured men), and became the basis for a 1999 M.I.T. report, written by Hopkins and other science faculty, documenting how women in the sciences had access to fewer resources than their male counterparts. Almost none of the junior female faculty, the report found, believed “that gender bias will impede their careers.” It was after receiving tenure that “many senior women faculty begin to feel marginalized, including those who felt well supported as junior faculty. They sense that they and their male colleagues may not be treated equally after all.”
Hopkins’s report catalyzed significant change at M.I.T. Vest convened meetings with eight other universities, all of which committed to support female faculty, using policies — collecting equity and inclusion data, providing support for faculty with children — recommended in the report. Hopkins submitted a two-page grant application to support her zebra-fish research, and was offered $10 million — two million more than she needed. “Once you raise money that easily, that fast, guess what? Your research gets easier!” she says. “I got elected to the National Academy. I became, like, a real person.”
from Best News Viral http://bit.ly/2ZhI8EG
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