The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, …by Kate Zernike is my second book for Women’s History Month. I found both books
disturbing and discouraging. Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis told of
privileged men taking advantage of poor and black women. The Exceptions focuses
on different privileged men (some with Nobel Prizes) taking advantage of women
scientists (some with Nobel Prizes). In both cases, the books celebrate small
victories. Regardless, the underlying problems still exist today. The bottom
line? Being a female comes with challenges and obstacles independent of race,
class, education, or position.
I attended MIT and recognized some of the details, like roast beef sandwiches from Elsie’s in Harvard Square and the 10-250 lecture hall.
“In 1959 that the Russians graduated more female engineers in one year than the United States had in its entire history.”
Title IX helped. Annamaria Torriani-Gorini, who had labored as a research associate for thirty years after receiving her doctorate in biology, was elevated to the faculty in Biology at MIT, as was Vera Kistiakowsky in Physics. /// MIT offered her a position as an associate professor, on the tenure track. Her job offers elsewhere were one level below, for assistant professorships. She thought it was as nice an apology as MIT could offer for the form letter rejecting her first application.
“Gerty Cori worked as a research associate at Washington University in St. Louis for sixteen years before she was made a full professor in 1947, the year she and her husband won the Nobel Prize for their discoveries about how sugars are metabolized. She had earned one-tenth of what her husband did, even though they had earned the same degree from the same medical school and worked side by side.”
“One would have assumed that all tenured women would be treated exceptionally well—pampered, overpaid, indulged,” she wrote. “Instead, they proved to be underpaid, to have unequal access to the resources of MIT, to be excluded from any substantive power within the University.”
A landmark report in 2018 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that 50 percent of female faculty members had experienced sexual harassment, and that the biggest complaint was not “sexual coercion” but put-downs about their intelligence, exclusion, and the kind of marginalization that the women of MIT had described twenty years earlier.
Lisa talked about salaries, how some women realized they were underpaid only after they got sudden raises.
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