The Exceptions Quotes

“We believe that unequal treatment of women who come to MIT makes it more difficult for them to succeed, causes them to be accorded less recognition when they do, and contributes so substantially to a poor quality of life that these women can actually become negative role models for younger women,” their proposal said. “We believe that discrimination becomes less likely when women are viewed as powerful, rather than weak, as valued, rather than tolerated by the Institute. The heart of the problem is that equal talent and accomplishment are viewed as unequal when seen through the eyes of prejudice. If the Institute more visibly demonstrates that it views women as valuable, a more realistic view of their ability and accomplishments by their administrators, colleagues, and staff will ultimately follow.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“boys score higher on tests of spatial reasoning, but tell girls they are performing an “art task” instead of a “math task” and the gender gap fades. Fields presumed to require raw “brilliance”—physics and math—attract more men, while women are more likely to go into fields they believe require “hard work.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Nancy was accused of being unscientific, an enemy of free speech, and a “hysteric,” in the words of the syndicated columnist George Will. The Atlantic dismissed her and other women who objected to Summers as “feminist careerists” seeking “thinly veiled job preferences or quotas for themselves and their friends.” In the New Republic, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor and author whose book had helped inform Summers, worried that efforts against sex discrimination might push young women into “lines of work they don’t enjoy.” Almost two decades later, there’s still work to do. 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. But the progress is also undeniable. The MIT report was followed by an explosion in scholarship examining the reasons for the disproportionately low numbers of women in science, technology, engineering, and math, and in strategies to increase their representation and treat them as full participants in their fields. Those efforts have expanded beyond women to include others from traditionally marginalized groups.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“In 1995, two psychologists had written what would be later recognized as a seminal paper that described how perceptions are shaped by conditioning, stereotypes, and “traces of past experience,” so that even people who explicitly disavow prejudice bring bias to social interactions. That notion, however—of implicit or unconscious bias—was not yet in popular use. Lotte’s introduction to the report described it this way: “The key conclusion that one gets from the report is that gender discrimination in the 1990s is subtle but pervasive, and stems largely from unconscious ways of thinking that have been socialized into all of us, men and women alike. This makes the situation better than in previous decades where blatant inequities and sexual assault and intimidation were endured but not spoken of. We can all be thankful for that. But the consequences of these more subtle forms of discrimination are equally real and equally demoralizing.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception. True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“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.” She struck down the notion that had once nagged her: that the women were “simply not good enough.” Nearly half were members of the National Academy of Sciences or the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which made them, pound for pound, more accomplished than the men in their departments. “Indeed, it should be almost obvious that the first women, the first blacks, the pioneers who break through despite enormous barriers must be exceptional,” she wrote. “While the term ‘affirmative action’ is sometimes used to mean letting people in simply because they are women, minorities, that is the opposite of what affirmative action means at MIT and most emphatically, to women faculty at MIT.” Discrimination had been allowed to continue, she wrote, because no one, not even the women themselves, recognized it: “It did not look like what we thought discrimination looked like. “Women faculty who lived the experience came to see the pattern of difference in how their male and female colleagues were treated and gradually they realized that this was discrimination. But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its ‘special circumstances.’ Only when the women came together and shared their knowledge, only when the data were looked at through this knowledge and across departments, were the patterns irrefutable.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“They found that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty.” Lotte chimed in to finish the sentence: “even in the light of obvious goodwill.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“The data hinted at how marginalization worked: men and women often started out equally, but while women struggled against a thousand cuts, men were accruing small benefits—a modest grant here, a crucial piece of equipment there. No one had necessarily intended to discriminate; it was more what the department heads had defended as the entrepreneurial culture of MIT: you could get what you wanted if you knew to ask for it. The women did not know; they took what they had been given and assumed everyone was following the same rules. Or they were too polite to ask: some men received raises to keep them from accepting job offers outside MIT; some women who’d had outside offers either had not been able to move because of their husbands’ jobs or did not use the offers as leverage because they did not want to operate by threat.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“She thought back sometimes to the conference at the American Academy on “The Woman in America” in 1963, and Erik Erikson’s ideas about how men and women approach work differently. She had thought it bizarre. But she had come to agree with his argument that women couldn’t win by trying to jam themselves into a male model of work; true equality required what he had called “revolutionary reassessment.” Her book had argued that employers needed to stop measuring commitment by the number of hours spent in the office. Instead, they had to define the tasks, let employees figure out how and where to get the work done, trusting their intrinsic motivation to meet expectations. All the talk of “quality time” with family got it backward; women and men would be better off with quality time at work and more quantity time at home. Instead of work-life balance, she preferred “work-personal life integration,” though she acknowledged it was a clunkier phrase.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Millie and Sheila Widnall, some of the earliest women on the MIT faculty, were still the most celebrated on campus, famous and beloved for paving the way for others. But for some of the women, their example had become more of a burden. No one doubted they were extraordinarily accomplished and inspiring. But it was as if two female stars were enough. Men held them up as proof that women at MIT could be all they wanted to be if they just worked hard enough—“Millie did all this and had four children, what are you complaining about?” A colleague had told Penny that when they discussed her promotion to full professor, others compared her to Sheila and Millie, even though they worked in entirely different fields; the only thing they had in common was that they were women.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“The women had spent their careers trying not to think about being women, hoping they would be seen as scientists. But as the first or only in so many settings, they felt they had to live up to a higher standard. As Penny said, a woman couldn’t fail, because everyone expected her to. She obsessed over the smallest details of writing grants, afraid that being turned down would be another reason that no one would take her seriously. When she was awarded grants—which happened so often that one of her colleagues said she had a “golden ass”—she saw it less as success and more as the absence of failure. When she received a prize, she knew people assumed it was because she was a woman; she joked that she wanted to be the second woman to win, or better yet the tenth. Sylvia told how male undergraduates had challenged the math she put on the blackboard. Giving seminars to faculty or at conferences, she found herself interrupted regularly; the custom was to wait to ask questions at the end, but she noticed that people felt free to interrupt the women. Trying to be perfect was like dancing on the head of a pin, she said. Exhausting.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Over the next few days, her despair turned to indignation. She kept hearing what Eric had said: “What did you ever contribute?” She felt like a fool, duped. She thought of all the years she had blamed herself for whatever problems she’d had in science, thought she could fix them on her own. Now she saw it didn’t work like that. She could try to innovate, try to be the best, try to please everyone; it would not matter. A woman’s work would never be valued as highly as a man’s. It had taken her twenty years to see it—she’d understood it about other women before she’d realized it was true for her, too. But now that she did, it was as obvious as the clearest scientific result, like seeing the repressor bind to DNA. She had taken all of this personally, but she now realized it didn’t have much to do with her. These men barely saw her; she was a nonentity.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“But many people still had trouble understanding that sexual harassment didn’t necessarily involve having sex—and even when it did, they weren’t sure it could or should be regulated.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Women in their thirties and forties might consider themselves feminists but resented the previous generation for pushing the Equal Rights Amendment and lesbian rights rather than fighting for maternity leave, subsidized childcare, or flexible work. Women who worked full-time earned just sixty-six cents to every dollar a man made. The feminists of the sixties and seventies hadn’t warned working mothers how hard life would be to juggle; stay-at-home mothers, meanwhile, felt that feminists demeaned them.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Alice Rossi “immodestly” proposed more day care and more participation from fathers in raising children.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Now she wondered if any woman could get away with the self-promotion successful science demanded. The rare women she’d heard of who resisted convention or tried to assert themselves—Barbara McClintock, Rosalind Franklin, now apparently Ruth Lehmann—were labeled “difficult.” “Greedy” for expecting to be recognized and rewarded in the same way as men.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Nancy, too, hated the idea that women did science differently; she saw no evidence it was true, and she suspected that “different,” when it came to women, would always mean “lesser.” A feminist science could only segregate women more, make it harder for them to compete on the same field.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“The early 1980s saw the emergence of what was called feminist science, with scholars arguing that science was a world constructed by men, based on values that had traditionally excluded women: it was objective and controlling and moved according to facts; women were emotional, unpredictable, they responded to feelings. The bias was baked in. Science could not be entirely objective because its practitioners were influenced by social context, just as anyone else was. A feminist science would recognize the interplay between science and values and environment. It would move away from biological determinism, including the idea that women were not innately suited to scientific enterprise.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“1979, the Equal Rights Amendment was declared dead, after it fell three states short of ratification.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Kendall Square would become the biotechnology capital of the world. It offered land that was lonely for developers, and empty warehouses with high ceilings and strong floors, perfect for installing the heavy equipment required for labs and manufacturing facilities.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“By the early 1970s, discoveries about the genetic structure of bacterial and animal cells had progressed so much that biochemists could manipulate fragments of DNA from different organisms—taking a bit from bacteria and their viruses and inserting it into DNA from a monkey virus—to create wholly new organisms, or recombinants, that did not exist in nature. The new technologies offered enormous promise for curing diseases caused by defective or missing genes. They also exposed previously unimaginable dangers and ethical concerns: that someone by design or by accident would create and unleash new organisms that were toxic or cancerous or drug resistant.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“(Kleckner became the first woman tenured in biochemistry at Harvard—only the fifth woman tenured in the sciences—in 1984.)”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“A scientific career proceeded along two parallel tracks, she wrote: real science and professional science. Real science was doing experiments, making discoveries, the work she’d fallen in love with back in the Watson lab, the long and winding conversations about science along Bungtown Road. “A unique kind of exhilaration and excitement,” as she described it. “What is known is useful and sometimes beautiful, but only what is unknown is of interest. It is this open-minded quality of science—the excitement of the search, the constant, but usually unsatisfied, striving toward the solution of some very difficult problem—that is addictive.” Professional science was figuring out how to get paid for making discoveries: writing grants to buy equipment and pay grad students and postdocs, publishing papers and speaking at scientific conferences to get “exposure” in the field, winning tenure, teaching, managing a lab. It was a job “constructed by and for men (a certain type of man),” she wrote. Someone with a wife at home to manage life outside the lab, and with supreme self-confidence. Real science and professional science were each a full-time job, with intense pressures and long hours.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“why science was so hard for women: children and competition. The headline was “The High Price of Success in Science: A Woman Scientist Disputes the Notion That a Woman Can Be a Successful Wife and Mother as Well as a Successful Scientist.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“it becomes difficult if not impossible to determine which ‘ism’ is in force,” the report noted. Although, it added, “In such a case, it does not matter whether one is being hit with the club of sexism or racism—they both hurt. And this is the nature and essence of the double bind.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“But the women of color also had to overcome educational disadvantages built up over generations. Their secondary schools had lacked labs, advanced math classes, and guidance counselors.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“The National Science Foundation counted about 245,000 scientists with doctorates in 1973. Of those, 1,611 were Black men and 249 were Black women; 106 were American Indian and just 3 of those were women. Black women were 6 percent of the population and one-tenth of 1 percent of the scientists. White men, meanwhile, were 41.5 percent of the population and 90 percent of the scientists.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Alice’s report, written with three other women, was published in Science in February 1974. Women were about a quarter of the society’s membership. They reported that they worked as many hours as the men did, published as many papers, stayed at their jobs the same length of time, and shared the same motivations—men and women alike worked because they needed the money and because they loved the work and the sense of professional accomplishment. Yet on measure after measure the women had lower status. They earned less than men with the same qualifications, with the most educated women suffering the widest wage gap. Women had more trouble finding jobs, it took them longer to become professors, and they were absent among department heads and other jobs in top administration (which paid more). Administrators sometimes argued that they paid men higher salaries because men were expected to support families, but the study found that men were paid more than women whether they had children or not. Women were less likely to be asked to speak or consult outside their institutions, to write a review or a chapter or serve on an editorial board—all signs of professional respect. The study belied the bold promises a decade earlier to women who had hoped to combine family and career. The married women with doctorates reported the most dissatisfaction of anyone in the survey. They were more likely than their married male peers to have been discouraged from pursuing advanced degrees, less likely to have role models, and more likely to mention “bias.” While most men in microbiology were married, less than half the women were. Most of the women had no children, but the opposite was true for men. Most women said they could move only if their husbands found good jobs; most of the men said they would move regardless of whether their wives found a job they liked. Not surprisingly, women were twice as likely as men to say that their life and career had not lived up to what they envisioned when they finished their training.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Zella Luria, Salva’s wife, had organized a small group of older women to mentor Alice and two other women who were starting as science professors in Boston, meeting monthly in the older women’s homes in the suburbs over after-dinner coffee. Alice enjoyed the company of the older women—Zella, Annamaria, and Ruth Hubbard, from the Harvard Biolabs. But she heard their stories the way Nancy had Barbara McClintock’s; they were from a different time, before doors had opened for women. Her own generation, she thought, would be one of transition, of careful navigation: the women had to work twice as hard as men to show they deserved the jobs that had opened up to them, and they had to be reasonable, not too aggressive—not too male. Alice was willing to work hard, and she didn’t want anyone to think she was seeking special treatment, because she didn’t think she needed it.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science