A distinguished female professor of cognitive and behavioral science pointed me to “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science,” by Kate Zernike. It’s a very readable book, telling the stories of Hopkins and a few other women researchers who had academic careers in biology during the 1960s through 1990s that were impeded because of various sorts of sex discrimination: some flat-out sexual harassment but mainly unequal treatment. One interesting thing is that the stories are mixed: these women faced discrimination and also had support from powerful leaders in the field. It was not a simple case of struggle; rather, they faced the same sorts of ups and downs that most of us would face in an academic career, but with the sexism being a sort of headwind that reduced the positive swings and made the negative swings more difficult.
I wonder if things were particularly bad for women in biology and genetics because that field, at least the way it seems from reading that book, was extremely competitive. Also it was a fairly small subfield that got a lot of prestige—many of the people in the story received Nobel prizes. I don’t think the Nobel prize is a good thing; I associate it with competitiveness and the scientist-as-hero narrative. Remember that Harvard creep from the Edge Foundation who disparaged scientists who had the integrity to refuse to fake their data? He called them “schoolmarms,” in a delightful mixture of sexism and contempt for rule-followers. But that’s the image, right? The swashbuckling dude who moves fast, breaks things, and gets the Nobel prize.
On the other hand, there’s been plenty of sexism in other fields of science. Back in the 90s when I taught at the University of California, the statistics department had only two tenure-track female professors. Meanwhile, at least two tenured male professors were sexual harassers. When the number of professors who are male and sexual harassers is equal to or greater than the total number of female professors, you’ve got a problem. And that’s just the way things were.
To return to the story of Nancy Hopkins and her colleagues: it was instructive to see everything they had to go through—and, at the same time, they had many positive experiences in their careers too. One thing that struck me is that many of the reforms instituted in order to ensure equal treatment of men and women would be beneficial to most of the male scientists too. For example, one issue that came up was that Hopkins kept being squeezed out of lab space, and at one point it seems that they flat-out lied about office space, a problem which Hopkins was able to demonstrate only by sneaking into the offices at night with a tape measure. Stopping the boss from lying about your office space—that’s good for most of the researchers, as a direct matter and also as a way of restoring a general level of trust.
P.S. Regarding the “same number of sexual harassers as women on the tenure-track faculty” thing . . . the University of California statistics department has a webpage of past faculty, including tenure-track faculty and also lecturers and visitors:
There are 56 people on the list, including me and various other people I know, but not including some others who taught there. I’m not sure how they decided who to include on the page.
Click on the names and you get little webpages, like this:
Or this:
All the links seem to go to webpages, except for these three people:
Clicking on those sends us to this error page:
What do those three dudes have in common? They all were involved in sexual harassment scandals. I guess this treatment on the webpage is some sort of compromise: the harassers don’t get removed from the main page, but they lose their individual pages.
