[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. March, as many of you know, is Women's History Month. Every Thursday for the rest of the month, that's four Thursdays, we'll be taking calls from women moving into traditionally male professions. We previewed this a little bit yesterday with our call in that ended the show for women who were the first woman to do something, anything. One example, a caller said she was the first to be a telephone pole climber for the phone company in New Jersey.

Today, right now, it's Women in STEM. With us for this is New York Times reporter, Kate Zernike, whose articles you may be following these days for her excellent coverage of abortion rights after the Dobbs decision. She also has a new book called Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science, which details how a group of women scientists at MIT forced the school to admit in 1999 that it had been discriminating against this female faculty. Kate, thanks for coming on WNYC for this, and congratulations on the book.

Kate Zernike: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, this is for you too, as we invite any women who are working or have worked in STEM, that's science, technology, engineering, and math for the uninitiated in the acronym, to call in. 212-433-WNYC. Did you have any role models as a kid for wanting to go into a STEM field? As it happens, my middle school in Queens was the Marie Curie Junior High School, 158. [laughs] I wonder if any of the girls who ever went there got the idea of going into physics or chemistry as a result of Marie Curie's name being on the school, or what inspired you, whoever you are, into STEM fields in the first place. Women, 212-433-9692.

Have you experienced discrimination as a woman in math, science, technology, or engineering? You can tell us a story to help it not happen to others. 212-433-WNYC. Have you seen the circumstances of women in your field change over the years? Did you have colleagues or mentors that helped you navigate tricky situations? Women in traditionally male-dominated STEM fields, this is for you with Kate Zernike. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Kate, the book is called Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science. Can you introduce people who don't know about it to Nancy Hopkins?

Kate Zernike: This is a story that I broke as a reporter for the Boston Globe in 1999. Nancy Hopkins, at the time, led a group of 16 women at MIT who went about this, went about showing discrimination true to their fields as scientists. They gathered data and they gathered stories and they presented it to the MIT administration and said, "We need to look further into this. We need to look to see further whether there are disparities between men and women." Over a period of five years, they collected this information and in 1999 they made their case so persuasively that the president of MIT acknowledged that the institute had been discriminating against women.

This really set off a reckoning across the country for women in science. The MIT women never expected their story to go public. I think what they especially did not expect that women across the country and really across the world would say, "This is my story, too." In the book it's called, The Exceptions. We meet Nancy Hopkins, I take the story back to the beginning. Nancy Hopkins, at the beginning of the book, is a 19-year-old junior at Radcliffe, which was the girl's version of Harvard, and she is struggling to figure out what to do with her life.

She thinks she has one year left to figure this out because that's when she'll graduate from college. Then she has 10 years left to do some incredible thing and then she's got to quit and have kids. The incredible thing she finds for herself is in a one-hour lecture taught by James Watson, four months after he's won the Nobel Prize with Francis Crick for decoding the structure of DNA.

In this one lecture, she just really falls deeply in love with science and with the promise of genetics. She goes into science thinking that it's a meritocracy. That it relies on data and numbers. The book tells the story of how, over the next 20 years, she figures out that that's not actually the case. She also starts out not at all a feminist, and this being in science makes her a feminist. It takes a period of 20 years for her to even acknowledge this to herself.

Brian Lehrer: Quite a bit of what you describe is quieter or less obvious than, say, blatant sexual harassment. It's a lack of respect or acknowledgment. Hopkins waiting to use a microscope she had paid for with a grant, postdocs presenting her ideas as their own. Is that the heart of the story?

Kate Zernike: That is, and I think that's why it grabbed me. When I did the story, I was just starting out my own career and I had the example of my mother who had wanted to go to law school when she graduated from college in 1954 and was told, "You'd never get a job as a lawyer." She went to business school, but she had to go to the girls' version of a business school. She finally went back to law school, and so I saw that doors had been opened for women. What the women at MIT taught me was really that it's not just about opening doors, that it's about how you treat women throughout their careers.

When I say women, I think this applies to other marginalized groups as well. It's how you treat women, but it's also how you see women. What they were saying was, "This is how we see women intellectually." It's about valuing women intellectually. I started thinking about this book. Again, this is one of those stories that I never forgot, and I started thinking about that it would be important to do this book, to go back to this story in the beginning of 2018.

I was watching the Me Too movement, and obviously, that was a huge advance, but it struck me that, yes, at the heart of all of this-- First of all, I think the kind of discrimination the women in MIT described is much more pervasive and much more insidious, and I think affects women in many different professions, but it also struck me that this undervaluing of women intellectually was really at the heart of what we saw with Me Too as well.

Brian Lehrer: Irene in Terrytown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Irene. Thanks for calling in.

Irene: Hi, there. I started this conversation a long time ago. I graduated from Cornell in 1960 with a bachelor's in physics. I chose physics because I liked science and I wanted to have a career, as opposed to the usual choices where women could be teachers, nurses, or secretaries. When I decided to be a physics major, I was a chemistry major, that seemed okay. When I wanted to change, my advisor said, "Girls don't major in physics."

Brian Lehrer: Actually said that, like that?

Irene: Like that.

Brian Lehrer: Flat out.

Irene: I was a shy kid, but somehow I went ahead with my plan. I had a lot of obstacles when I wanted to be hired at the proper level, but I didn't accept what was being told me. Bell Labs offered me a job. Bell Labs had a separate women's employment division. I learned that I would be paid less, I would not have any further education sponsored by the company [chuckles]. I turned them down and they said, "Nobody turns Bell Labs down." I don't want to go on and on, but I think my own path was, I knew what I wanted, I didn't have an advanced degree, but I wanted to be hired as a professional and I was able to do that by turning down a lot of jobs along the way.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. You stood your ground, Irene. That is such a great story. Wow. Oral history from a 1960 Cornell grad. Logan in Boise, Idaho, you're on WNYC. Hi, Logan.

Logan: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. How are you? You have a story for us?

Logan: I do. Yes. I am a woman in renewable energy finance, the renewable power. I've spent my career obviously in more male-dominated spaces. I started my career actually in the military, and when I got out of the military, I finished up my undergrad at Columbia University. When I graduated, I was very interested in renewable energy, I was interested in finance, and I really felt that I was well-qualified for a lot of those roles. I felt like the world was my oyster coming as a veteran from the military. from an Ivy school and being a military veteran.

When I ended up at a renewable power investment bank in New York City, I very quickly learned [chuckles] that these [unintelligible 00:09:24] are very much driven by male preference and male-dominated. You'll go into a situation, especially as a young woman, the whole executive team will be male. The whole board will be male. I was actually fired from my job for reporting a managing director that actually masturbated in the conference room of our office. He was also fired. I think he clearly had issues at the firm, but I wasn't believed or protected. It was my very first role in the industry after working so hard in the military and working so hard to pay for my college. I arrived in the industry at the very beginning of my career, I just had to overcome this awful thing [chuckles].

Brian Lehrer: How long ago was that and how much have you been able to overcome it and stay in that field?

Logan: That's the silver lining here. That was about three years ago, and it was completely devastating to me. The whole situation was totally devastating. It just felt, no matter how hard I worked at that company, they didn't care. My future was going to be determined by this other person's actions, and so I just thought I was devastated. I thought I would never be able to overcome it. As the years went by, I kept applying for roles in renewable energy finance and gaining experience. I packed my stuff up. I pretty much moved all over the country, going anywhere where I could get the experience that I needed and--

Brian Lehrer: That's why you're calling us from Boise, Idaho after going to college at Columbia?

Logan: [laughs] Yes. I spent a year living, and I went down to Houston and I worked at a Portuguese Power Developer in Houston, EDP and that was a wonderful experience. Then, here I'm on an M&A team here in Boise, Idaho at another renewable power company. What I learned is that, all in all, a lot of places you go, this isn't the case. The last two places I've worked have been companies that prioritize gender equity, but there's pockets of this industry that are still very-- They're male-dominated, they're driven by male preference. The way they view the world and the way they view women, it manifests throughout the organization, and it can affect you negatively in your career, unfortunately.

Brian Lehrer: I hear you. Logan, thank you so much for sharing that story. Hopefully, that will help people to at least know what's out there and, hopefully, to fight what's out there that's still biased against women in the STEM fields. Call us again, Logan. Thank you. Robin in Queens. You're on WNYC. Hi, Robin.

Robin: Hi. I'm a teacher by trade and I switched over to teaching computer courses for a major bank. That was about 25 years ago. In teaching bankers, I was the only woman of color and the only woman, period, teaching courses. I would go into the classroom and they'd look at me like, "Is the teacher here yet?" I'd say, "No, I'm just a board wiper, please have a seat."

They would look at me, but I was teaching Lotus 1-2-3 at that point, teaching them how to [sound cut] their loans, and once they knew that I had to teach them a skill to make their money, they finally sat down and gave me respect. It wasn't horrifying, but it was the beginning of a struggle that I had with the bank and I eventually left.

Brian Lehrer: Robin, thank you for sharing your story. Well, Kate Zernike, what are you thinking as you listen to that set of callers? Enter anywhere you want.

Kate Zernike: Oh gosh. Well, first of all, I think what's so heartbreaking is hearing these stories that are so recent. I went back, Nancy is the one, if anyone remembers, in 2005 when Larry Summers, who was then the president of Harvard, he explained the reason the lack of women in higher levels of math and science by saying they didn't want to work 80 hour weeks and lacked the intrinsic aptitude for math and science.

That's now 18 years ago, but it was striking to me to go back and read the coverage and see how people defended him and said, "Well, he's just raising a point," when there's absolutely no data to suggest that. I think what I also hear is just the passion for science that women have and that really resonates with this book. The women in this book, the women whose stories I tell in The Exceptions, they didn't want to have to play what they thought was the gender card.

They stayed in this because they were so devoted to their science and it was really only when the discrimination, the small accumulation of the marginalization really started to push them out of science that got in the way of doing their science, that they were willing to stand up and say, "Enough." I think, also, what's striking to me, the first caller about physics, I have a soft spot in my heart for physics because my dad was a physicist and my grandfather, but physics is real--

Physics and math are a particular problem because there've been really interesting studies showing that just the language we use around math and science and around the word 'genius'. We're much more likely to say a man is a genius. Women work hard, but the guy is a genius, he's this phenom. Women and men are both likely to think that or to say that, believe that. The effect of that is it keeps women from going into physics and math because they think, "Oh, I can't do that because I'm not a genius."

I think a lot of this is it is these attitudes and that's, I don't know, the highest, hardest glass ceiling, is how people see you. As I said, it's not just about opening the doors, it really is about changing your mindset.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more caller story in here. Sunny in Lower Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Hi, Sunny.

Sunny: Hi, how are you? I have an interesting story. I'm a physician by training and I practiced for many years, but I had a career change and I went into healthcare technology at a startup. Our startup won some-- I don't want to use the word 'contract', I can't come up with the word, that was funded by the state for new startups that had potential and we were a finalist and we went to this important meeting to share with healthcare executives and important people about our startup company.

The person who was running the program looked at me, I was carrying a notebook because I always carry a notebook to take notes. He yelled at me in front of everybody to take careful notes or something about taking notes. Me and the other team members were very confused and everybody else was male. We realized that he thought that I was the administrative aid or the secretary or something, and actually embarrassed me in front of the entire audience.

I also noticed that in my current position, there are other people who have switched and who are physicians. The men are always called doctor, but even though I actually practiced management for longer and actually ran a division, I'm still always called by my first name. It's just little things like that, but that, what happened to me recently at that meeting was about-- I joined the company about 10 years ago, but yes, I was shocked, too [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Sunny, you get the last--

Sunny: -sexism as a doctor.

Brian Lehrer: You get the last word, doctor, on today's show. We thank Kate Zernike, New York Times reporter who's got the new book called The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science. Thanks a lot, Kate. Really appreciate it, and thanks for riding along with the callers.

Kate Zernike: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, every Thursday this month, we'll take another area, male-dominated, where women are working more these days. Stay tuned for next Thursday's episode.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.