 So thank you so much for that great talk and she will be back up for a panel and I hope if you haven't addressed it on your panel I hope somebody will ask her about imposter syndrome which she wrote about for Slate and is a great topic and you'll have a chance to ask questions. So I am incredibly thrilled and honored to be able to moderate a discussion with Carol Greider who as I'm sure you know is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. I pronounce that right very good. Thank you. She's a Daniel Nathan's professor and director of molecular biology and genetics of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She runs her own lab there and I was privileged to be able to interview her in her office a few days after she had won the Nobel Prize. I was writing a piece on her for the Washington Post and I can say that her office was full of flowers and a card from her daughters many cards from her daughter's elementary school class one of which congratulated her for finding a cure for telomerase and one of which one of which said that her prize is just quote so cool I can't even think about stuff which I think shows the power of the power of example and I'm also honored to be able to talk to Nancy Hopkins who is an incredibly distinguished science scientist that as I'm sure you all know she is the Amgen Inc. professor of molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her current research interest is cancer prevention. She has been a constant advocate for women in STEM in the 1990s. She instigated a groundbreaking report at MIT into systemic discrimination against women on the science faculty. As Dr. Klawe indicated they have made enormous progress in advancing women in STEM and I'm going to ask her to talk about that and share her insights. I just wanted to start by asking Carol Greider if you could if you could just tell us where you were and what you were doing when you got the early morning call saying that you had won the Nobel Prize in science. Well this is a story that has been reported on a number of times. So the phone call comes usually early in the morning because in Sweden it's in more in the afternoon so it was early in the morning and when the phone rang it is true that I was folding laundry but that's not something about the fact that I'm you know a woman scientist trying to multitask it's just about the fact that it was a Monday morning and the laundry wasn't done yet. Right although you did confess to thinking that was the same year that the president won the Nobel Prize and you did confess to thinking that he probably wasn't folding laundry. Well I actually I didn't say that three days later when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize three days later and I happened to say I bet he wasn't folding laundry as a joke not because he's not a woman because he's the president he shouldn't be folding laundry but it ended up in the newspaper and I have had to answer questions when I was vetted by the White House for a position that I was going to be on on a panel they said did you really say and I had to admit that I did question the fact that the president wasn't folding laundry. But I I would like for you to then both talk about it the fact that as we as we examine what have been the barriers for women in the STEM fields the question of of combining work and family is something that comes up and the and the Dr. Kwame has talked about in fact that it can be quite a flexible field but it has also been challenging. Nancy Hoplens I wondered if you could talk about is the changes that you instituted at or helped bring about at MIT where did the question of of combining work and family come in how much of a barrier was that when you looked at it and what did you do to alleviate the situation. It was such a large barrier that you didn't talk about it literally could not even mention the word baby on campus. You just did not bring it up. We're talking about when. So that's the I remember I'm pretty old. So this is going back a ways. So it would have been as late as the nineteen ninety four five or mid nineties. You did not say baby on campus because if you raise the issue it might imply that either you regretted not having children or you were thinking about having them. And actually at that time if the dean the dean said he wanted to do a woman a favor make sure she got tenure. He hid the fact she had had children who didn't believe you could be a great scientist and a mother. So it was kept secret. So people kept the fact they were pregnant secret. So that's where we were. It's a long time in the mid nineteen ninety. Not that long ago but it is a different world. So I think one of the most important changes that happened at MIT was putting babies on the table. So how did you do that? You brought in some babies. We we did. And it was a major major change. You know it's hard to believe for young people hard to believe. So this is good. We did. And the president provost took it on as an issue a few years later. It was until 2001 and discussed it with the whole university. We're going to have new family policies. They'd be made uniform through all of MIT. We'd make it so standard that a woman could take a leave and be like taking a sabbatical. There was no longer a stigma attached to it. But it was a major change. And then they put daycare in the middle. So now there's babies being pushed around the campus everywhere. Men women pushing babies on the campus. It's totally normal. He just has it been completely normalized. Is there no longer a stigma than attached to parenthood. I think I'd say that's true. I do. I think people now know that women actually bear children. And can remain a committed scientist. And yes. And the difference is that in my generation, unlike the fabulous star we just heard, I think many women didn't go into it because they couldn't imagine you could do both. And of the women who did go into it, more than half didn't have children. That is completely different today. So the women who go into it now, young women, almost all of them have children. I think it still is hard. It's too hard. So Carol Brighter, I think you're you were probably starting you your children are what now are they 1417. Right. So it would have been about that era that you were having. So is that the way you felt? I mean, was there a stigma attached to parenthood to motherhood when you were at the beginning of your career? Or if there was, I was ignoring it. I probably like Maria was just like, I was just going to do that anyway. And find a way to do it. But I do know that that, you know, even even today, it's very difficult for people to figure out, you know, how to manage that. And when what are the expectations? And, and it's not just in in science. This isn't just a women in science issue. This is, you know, across the board. These are these are issues that face, you know, all professional women are working women that how society views the women and the role. And, you know, is it really true that you can split the job? You know, people say, Oh, I can split the job. And you know, my husband's been very helpful. And then, you know, they end up taking on more responsibility. And that's in part because we're not working in a vacuum here. We're working in our whole society in general. And I think in general, in our society, there still is more expectation on the women as the caregivers. And can you talk about during the course of your career, I think you've taken concrete steps to facilitate the work family challenge for for women and for parents, both in your own lab and when you were called Spring Harbor. Can you talk about that a little bit? I think what I've done has been very, very small steps and in compared to what we heard, you know, actions that people took, like Maria said, very directly. But I try to, you know, do what I can to be, you know, the role model, not just as a department chair. So when I became department chair, I had no aspirations to be department chair. And I was asked, Would you please put your name in the hat? And I thought, Why would I want that job? But then I thought about it. And, and I remember that when I finally decided I was offered the position, I decided to take a position, I signed it with the pen that was given to me by the American Association of University Women, because it was a statement that I was making, you know, to be there and to be on the committees. And, you know, small things like, you know, when my son had a play, I would leave the lab and say, I got to go, Charles is in the play. And then I would come back later on or come back and work in the evening. And so just showing that that can be okay. And I do think that, you know, as a woman in science, it's actually probably a lot easier for us than it is for, for instance, professional women in banking or, or something where you have to be at a particular place at a particular time. I can get my work done and, and, and and evaluated on what the product is not so much how many hours I'm there. And so it is, you know, I tell people that want to be professional women, you got to come to the sciences because it's so much more flexible than in other areas. Right. To an outsider, it does look as though it would be it would potentially be a flexible field. Journalism actually has become much more flexible over the past 20 years, because because of the ability to telecommute and to work from home and to be flexible and work in different places. But it is shocking, actually, for me, I had my first child in 1995. I was working for the Washington Post. There was not the statement, what I wouldn't say it was easy, but there was not the stigma that you describe in the mid 90s, where you were not even able to, to say that you were pregnant. So it is, it is kind of shocking to me to hear that that was, that was the mid 90s when that was happening and that it's changed so much in a relatively short period of time. Very encouraging. I mean, I do think part of it is that the academic schedule has this very tight window. And so and they overlap. So women were having children in this period when they were also trying to get tenure. And so they had a family leave policy and no woman had taken it and gotten tenure. And so women of course decided they shouldn't do that because it must be that you can't do it. So it was really opening the question, putting it on the table and talking about it. And it is amazing how fast the stigma was removed, I think. All you have to do is talk about it. And can you, can you talk about the, really, all you have to do is bring it up? Can you talk about the, the way that the landscape has changed? I mean, one of the, one of the, as a layperson, I'm not a science reporter, I'm not a scientist. But I think many of us from the outside think of science as, as these lone individuals who are geniuses, sort of toiling alone, making great discoveries. And in fact, science is a very clubby, you know, relationships are incredibly important in science. Being admitted to institutions, being admitted to societies. I mean, for hundreds of years, the challenge was to be admitted to the university, to be allowed into the professional society. Those sorts of barriers now have, have fallen largely, we're admitted. And, and yet you have tracked in the course of your career, that the, the clubbiness has not gone away. The clubs have changed, right? So your latest work has been looking at scientific advisory boards and whether women are invited to be on these prestigious, potentially quite lucrative, boards of private corporations where, and, and, and you have found that in fact they are not. So it's sort of like, you know, it's like, like medicine, I guess, where you're constantly, you know, trying to find cures for, and sometimes, right, viruses or morphing or, trying to, trying to solve a problem that, that changes. So where, where are we in terms of dispelling the clubbiness or opening the clubs? What I see is that in the, the universities took the problem on and they solved it by setting up methods of monitoring. So they check the data, they look at the numbers and they watch the hiring very carefully. And if they see something slipping, they fix it. The good universities, that's what they've done. And because they've had to or because they've wanted to? Well, that was really what the discovery was, that you could open the door, let people in, but there were all these barriers once they got through the door. So you had to go and address each one of those and you had to keep tracking it. And I believe we've also seen, if the university stops tracking, it goes right back. Okay. Okay. So what you see is that where it cannot be tracked. So, for example, men who found companies, well, sit up, choose people for scientific advisory boards. When people are left with their own devices, it looks like the 1950s. Right. So, I mean, I happen to have some data here. I love data. And I was just telling Carol, I mean, if you look at the companies that went public biotech last year in Boston, and you look at who are the founders of the scientific advisory board members, the management, there were 132 men and 12 women. Okay. So we have 70% biology majors, 50% PhDs in biologies and MIT numbers, and, you know, about 30% of the faculty. When you go and look who are being invited to do this, and it's like 5%. So, how do you monitor that? Right. Because this is individual behavior and that behavior is reflecting what's going on every day in those labs. That's just not an accident. And so I asked these men, well, how did that happen? And they're shocked to see the numbers because the company starts, one man talks to another man, venture capitalist come and seek him out. There's two or three people. They invite two or three people. There's a tiny number of people. There happens to be no women who would think about twice about it. The next company starts the same way and the next one and then suddenly you look at the cumulative data and there aren't any women there. So what do you do about that? That's a tough problem. And I believe that's really what is affecting women at every step of the way. It's that little bit of marginalization. And, you know, science is, as you just said, very interactive. And being left out is really not good. So you talk about the effect of a little bit one person gets on a board or starts a company and then the effect of a little bit of marginalization and a little bit of marginalization. And Carol, you talked about that in my interview with you as well. And it can work. So if at every step of the review process and science is a field where there are so many levels of review, right? I mean, there's so many degrees and positions and you can be weeded out, weeded out. That was the phrase that you use, a little bit of weeding and a little bit of weeding. And so women can get weeded at every step. And it has kind of, I think and I don't know if it's exponential or reverse exponential, but can you talk about in your field, tell me your biology, you talk about something called the founder effect, which I think is kind of the opposite, where when women are in a field at the beginning and then they start to hire each other and attract each other in a way that encourages the field that is inclusive. You talk about what happened in your own field. Well, people would often remark when I would go to meetings and I'd be one of the speakers on like American Society for Cancer Research or something like that and frequently I was, you know, one of 40, only female speaker, one of 40. And yet people would say to me, it's remarkable, there's a large number of women in your field, right? And here's this tiny little field over here and we do tend to have more women in that field, but it's this you know, tiny little microcosm. But the thought is that the reason that there are more women in that field is not because people said, well, maybe studying the telomere is more attractive to women. Like, why would that be? Why studying the centromeres in the traffic to women? And so it seemed to be that it really started with a very prominent man, Joe Gaul, who was a person that was very supportive of women. He had a lot of trained, a large number of now very prominent women. And then those women went out and started their own labs. And there perhaps were a few more women in their labs than there were men. And so that started this this little area where there was one field that tended to have more women in it. Now, admittedly, once it got popular and it took off and I was recently showing a chart of the number of publications with the word telomere in it in the in PubMed, and it goes like this. And you know, of course, then when the asymptote goes up, you know, now it's, I would say 70% men. So yes, it started off that way. And it was just by, you know, a little bit of the seeding, basically the jackpot effect starting with Joe Gaul. Right. But you know, for a long time with the data that people were saying, you know, there aren't very many women at the higher levels in the STEM fields. And I remember when when Nancy came to Hopkins and gave a talk when you were your report. And what I loved about that was that it was so data driven. It's like, okay, let's start at the data and look at what's going on. And so when you now go back and you look about the data, why aren't there so many women at the top, people would say, oh, there's not enough coming in the pipeline. There aren't enough women coming in. And yes, we do have to encourage young women to go into STEM fields. But that wasn't the case at all, because when I was a graduate student, we were 50% back 25 years ago, 50% of us were women. Right. But then you go to the next step. And it's, you know, 30% at the maybe 40% the postdoc level, 30% at the assistant professor level. And then it goes down and down as you go up the ladder. And it's very clear that it's not that it's a pipeline issue, there aren't enough coming in, but that it's a leaky pipeline, is that more women come out than men do at each step. And there is a very important report that I want to give a little plug to. That is the American Association for University Women published a report a couple of years ago. Why so few? And if your data driven as Nancy and I are, there is a ton of really important studies in this, in this report that talks about why are there so few women in STEM. And they make a good point that it's not one thing. There are many different reasons why you would have people leaking out of the pipeline. But this is where they clearly say it's a leaky pipeline. It's not that there aren't enough coming in. Right. Right. So I guess this will be my, my last question then, then open it up there. There was a report that came out recently suggesting that we can talk about the external barriers and the clubbiness. And it's clear that it, that it still exists. And, and I would never challenge that. There, there was also a study that came out suggesting that one women, one reason women might drift out of the STEM fields is because of, and I think Dr. Clive, this speaks to your work on imposter syndrome is because women have very high standards for themselves, tend to have very high standards and are very, can be daunted by the fact that grades in the STEM field can are not A's very easily. And so the, the possibility that, that female students are, are attached to the idea of doing well and making A's and that, and that it's daunting to be in a field where that's not happening. So there may be a kind of a psychological drift away from these fields because of a kind of a perfectionism that, and I, I don't necessarily think that that's innate. I think that, that, well women in some cases are right to fear failure or, or not doing as well in certain fields because I think traditionally we've been punished, I think harder for making mistakes or experiencing setbacks. But I don't know, what do you think about that, about that kind of psychological factor? The thing that we see often that I hear from many faculty is that a student comes up to them, some woman says, Oh my God, I'm not doing very well. Man comes up, I've got this under control. And she's actually doing better than he is. So it's a confidence level thing. It's not so much that they aren't doing well and that bothers them. It's that they're, they don't think they're doing well and they are doing well. Right, right. And so why is that? Why is that? Why is that? I don't know, but it's certainly it's very well documented. I mean, there are, you know, sociologists that have studied these kinds of effects. And, and so I mean, I think that the kinds of positive approaches, for instance, like what you did at Harvey Mudd is to, to do something about that, to, to take the people that, you know, are the, the ones that are speaking out the most and have a side conversation with them. That's a great idea. So there are a variety of things that one could try out as, as trials for, for what might work. But first, you have to know that it really is happening. And then you can come up with ways to combat it. Right. I do think that women haven't been allowed to fail. And in science, you've got to be able to fail. Right. And I think they were right. If they failed, they were out. I see men fail. I thought, oh my gosh, that's the end of his career. Not at all. We can't let Joe fail. They got to pick Joe up and bring him back in the fold. There's a woman that's out. So they're the reason. Most of these reactions turn out to be based on reality. Right. In fact, women are wisely perceiving why they should behave a certain way. It's scary to ask for salary, high salary because you'll be, people will hate you if you do. You know, there are different reactions going on. And that's why they behave the way they do. So blaming the women is often turns absolutely. Yeah. So fear failure can be a rational of quite rational. Yeah. So let me open it up to questions. You had your hand up first. Someone was coming around with a mic. And I we're doing a pretty good job. Before before beginning my academic career, I actually had another career working for the government, writing affirmative action regulations and enforcing them in colleges and universities. We had a women's equity Action League suit. And I've been through, been sitting through a lot of these discussions lately. And I don't hear people talk about this much anymore. I know that affirmative action has kind of a bad, bad rep in many colleges and universities. But I still think it's important for people to know about that the fact that the executive orders still applies to colleges and universities. They still have to have to be concerned about about hiring women and minorities if they're underrepresented. And why don't we talk about this more? But title nine, people think title nine as well, but it's actually has has had effect throughout academia as well. And I'm not sure why it's not talked about more. And I think there were two kinds of affirmative action. One said we have to lower the standard to make the to make diversity happen. The other one was, you know, that you don't lower the standard, but you make an effort to actually bring people in who look different. And I think that that they need almost different names. And I think you need the second kind all the time, you absolutely have to go and work at it because we know now that women are constantly undervalued. So if you don't compensate for that, they're not going to be there in numbers that they deserve to be there. So we need affirmative action to counteract the unconscious bias that holds them back. In the with the black, I can see your sleeve. Oh, stand up. That's better. So this is Washington. And in the end, a lot of it is always about money. You're both in by the medical biomedical field. And we've seen a disinvestment from the federal government and in this field, the NIH's budget has been flat. And we saw a cut last year. And I think, you know, we're going to look back in a few years if this disinvestment continues and see that the impact for young investigators, women and other minorities, that's the that's the group that's going to see the biggest cuts in these funding. And I'm wondering your experience with your your labs. Now your graduate students, are you starting to see this? Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I would I would predict the same thing. And I think that part of the reason that there is this leaky pipeline anyway, at least in the field that I'm in is that it is overly hyper competitive, the field in general, way more so than it needs to be to do good science. And there are a lot of things that go on in terms of getting papers published and playing games and pushing that has nothing to do with how good your science is. And a lot of the women just decide, I don't want to play that game anymore. When it gets to be that kind of just you have to fight for everything. And so for the same reason with the grants getting harder and harder to get, we're reading in the papers now all the time about how a lot of people are shutting down their labs. And my prediction would be based on what I've seen is that there would be a disproportionate number of women and minorities in that group. Right here. Hi, thank you very much. It's a real treat to hear you. So I've been following this field for about 35 years and attributional styles have been around for a long time, you know, the boy fails the test in math. He says, oh, such a dumb test stupid teacher, you know, the girl fails the eighth grade math test and says, I'm so dumb. So beyond that, I think Nancy, what you did in MIT and I often think about it sort of unwittingly propelling you into this world of gender equity, but providing them with the data and then starting this, you know, front page New York Times article about it, et cetera. And this whole ball rolling for higher education made all the difference in the world because when you have a gender agenda, things change and they change radically. So I wondered why we can't have a gender agenda for the boards of those biotech companies. Why not? Right? You know, start that agenda on the boards. Yes, I think we have to do this. I think, you know, we have to somehow people have to understand diversity is here to stay. The workplace has to be a diverse place. I think about this, you know, if you want to be with people who look just like you, although this room is a lot of women, but, you know, you join a country club. But if you want to be in a workplace, it's got to reflect the people we're training and the people. And somehow we have to get to these people. I mean, I look at these computer companies and what are these people thinking? What are they thinking? This is unacceptable. So how do we make that happen? And it's not just biotech boards, right? I mean, it's the Twitter, when when when Twitter's IPO happened, it emerged that that that there was a fair amount of tweeting. How do we put pressure on these people? I've talked to venture capitalists and, you know, they just forget them. In fact, and so I talked to the people starting the biotech companies. Oh, it's the fault of the venture capitalists. Well, you know, it's all their faults and they're really leveraging, you know, really what's all come out of government sponsored research really in the biotech field anyway, and doing this, which I consider to be anti-affirmative. I mean, it's illegal. Should be. I don't know how you bring pressure on these people. The gender diversity for their boards, right? How do you put pressure? If the funding agency would look at the advisory boards. The private private, it's very tough. All right, I think we have time for one more question. And I can see a beige or gray sleeve. Hi, so I was curious about the phrase that you use the cumulative effects of a little bit of marginalization. And I'm curious about the slippery slope when you go from marginalization to discrimination and the really negative stigma there is against women who stand up for themselves, who advocate for themselves when they are pretty sure that something a foul is going on, not to the point where a whole university takes on a Title IX case or goes to the office for civil rights. But when an individual woman is pretty sure that there's something going on, and I wonder what your advice would be to give to young women and to women in any stage of their career. If they're pretty sure that that's going on, what would be the right course of action to make sure that we're not just accepting marginalization in the guise of a larger discrimination issue? Find allies. I mean, I'm not sure if you're talking about a specific case like there's a specific woman who has an issue that happened with her. If that was at my university, I would advise her to talk to people around her, talk to women department chairs or other people and find allies to then go to the administration with it that sometimes just talking as one voice doesn't work as well. Although I think you did it as one voice. No, no, no. I mean, at MIT, I mean, I was mad enough that I was willing to do whatever was needed. But really, it was the women getting together and staying together and speaking as one voice that gave that. And it was those women, there were 16 of us. Four of those women today have won the United States National Medal of Science and three quarters of the members of the National Academy of Sciences. So these were serious people. And when you have, you know, all but one of the 10 women faculty joined that group and spoke as one, that's real power, actually. And of course, we had a great president and a great dean. So we were just incredible. But I, you know, it's now 20 years since we started and almost certainly no week goes by that I don't hear from people in the situation you're in. And it's still very difficult to know in each situation requires a different thing. I mean, if you can get a group of people and allies, that's your best bet. But it's a really tough situation still. Well, thank you so much, both of you. I really can't thank you enough. And we will keep the conversation going now with our with our next panel and our set of moderators. Thank you so much.