In 1999, writer Kate Zernike, then a reporter for The Boston Globe, broke an infinite story: The Massachusetts Institute of Know-how had admitted to a long-standing sample of discrimination in opposition to girls on its school. Zernike, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Occasions, tells the complete inspiring story in The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Battle for Girls in Science.
Zernike begins by specializing in molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins’ life and profession path. Within the spring of 1963, Hopkins, a Radcliffe junior, grew to become so enthralled by a Harvard lecture on DNA by Nobel Prize winner James Watson that she sought work in his molecular biology lab. However like different girls then and now, Hopkins confronted tough selections as she weighed the calls for of science in opposition to marriage and potential motherhood. Zernike situates the tensions that led to the tip of Hopkins’ first marriage throughout the broader context of the ladies’s motion of the Nineteen Sixties. Finally Hopkins earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1971, and by 1973, she had accepted a place at MIT’s Middle for Most cancers Analysis.
Whereas the biographical sections are intriguing, Zernike’s narrative picks up pace within the later parts of the e-book, which delve into the methods male colleagues appropriated Hopkins’ work and used it for monetary acquire. By the Nineties, Hopkins realized that “a girl’s work would by no means be valued as extremely as a person’s. It had taken her twenty years to see it—she’d understood it about different girls earlier than she’d realized it was true for her, too.”
Hopkins’ revelation led her to achieve out to feminine colleagues, leading to a letter by 16 girls at MIT compiling proof of discrimination, together with unequal entry to analysis assets and pay. The ladies spent the subsequent 4 years doing fact-finding as a committee, and by March of 1999, that they had compiled a report. Though it was solely scheduled to look in a school e-newsletter, information of the report reached Zernike’s ears—and when Zernike’s article appeared on the entrance web page of the Globe, the story took off. Hopkins arrived on campus the subsequent day to digicam crews, and she or he acquired emails from girls the world over. In a single day, MIT grew to become a “pacesetter for selling gender equality,” and different universities quickly undertook related efforts to look at their biases.
Zernike closes her narrative with updates on Hopkins’ continued profitable profession, brief bios of the 16 girls who signed the unique letter and an examination of the progress for girls in academia—and the work nonetheless to be finished. These girls’s efforts—and the next impression this revelation had for girls throughout academia—make for a gripping, page-turning learn.
