 Hello, welcome. Thank you for spending time with us today. My name is Alexander Pelosi, and I'm here to introduce you to my friend, Kate Zernikey. She's a New York Times reporter. She's a national treasure, really. And I don't usually do things like this because it's not my wheelhouse, but this is such an important book, and she's such an important writer, and this is such an important moment that I wanted to share and be a part of this, this book. This is the exceptions, Kate's book, and I'd like to now turn it over to Kate and get her to tell you who she is and what this book is all about, Kate. Thank you, Alexander, for thank you for being here. I really appreciate it, and thanks for everyone for joining us today. So yeah, this is a book, my book called The Exceptions, Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science. I was, I've been a reporter at the New York Times for 23 years, and this is a, but this is a story that I did, I broke as a reporter for the Boston Globe in 1999. In 1999, I'd been a reporter for the Globe for, I guess, two years at that point, three years, and I got a tip. I started covering higher education in September of 1998, and at the time, my father, when I started covering higher education, my father, who's a physicist, said to me, you ought to look into the work this woman named Millie Dresselhouse is doing to get more women into science, and I was like, into physics, and I was like, yeah, whatever. That seemed like a really boring story to me. So I ignored him. And then in March of 1999, I got a tip that there was something going on with women in discrimination at MIT. And I thought, okay, and the tip came from the editor, so I thought like, I better return the call. But I was sort of thinking like, oh, it'll be a lawsuit, it'll be a, he said, she said situation. I wasn't really sure what I was expecting to find. But I was told to call a woman named Nancy Hopkins, so I did. And Nancy told me that, Nancy was a molecular biologist, and she told me that not only was there something about discrimination at MIT, but that MIT was actually going to admit that it discriminated against the women on its faculty. So I thought, well, that seems kind of like a man bites dog story. So I was interested in that. And then she told me that MIT was doing this because a group of women at MIT had worked to collect data to show all the ways that they were not treated as well as the men. So less lab space, smaller salaries, less share of grant money. And I thought that was really interesting, mostly because it just struck me as a very MIT thing to do, that these women who were scientists would fall back on data and science to sort of prove their case numerically. So I went to Nancy's office and I met with her, and I asked, as I often do, when I start a story, how did this all, how did you find out about this? How did this all start? And she said, well, I needed more space for my fish tanks because she was a zebrafish researcher at the time. And I went to my head of the center and he, the cancer center and he said, I couldn't have it. And I said, but I have less space than the men. And I naturally said, well, how did you know you had less space than the men? And she said, well, I measured. And I said, you measured? And she said, with a tape measure. And in fact, Nancy had gone around, what she told me was that she had gone around the entire building and taken a tape measure and measured every lab space and every office space and found out that not only did she have less space than the men, but as a fully tenured female professor, she had less space than men without tenure. So men with less status. And it's one of those moments as a reporter where you just like, you know, lightning hits you and you go, oh, that's my lead. Because it was, again, it was just this like very MIT thing to do. I did not know at the time that MIT's motto was men's at Manus, which is mind and hand. But it really struck me that this was a mind and hand. This is a MIT thing to do. And later on, it occurred to me, it's a very mind and hand thing to do. So I did this story and it ran on the front page of the Boston Globe on March 21st, 1999. I tried to call Nancy to follow up, as I often do, with people I write about. And I couldn't reach her for like a week because her phone was ringing off the hook. Because when that story appeared on the front page of the Boston Globe, as much as anything could in 1999, it really went viral. The Dean of Science, who was a man who had helped these women get what they needed and sort of present their case, he arrived at work the next morning and the CBS Evening News was outside his door, the door of his office. Nancy arrived in her office, she picked up the phone and it was like, you're on the air in Australia. The New York Times put the story on the front page two days later, which of course was very thrilling for me as a reporter for the Globe. And women from all over the country and really all over the world started emailing all the women who are mentioned those stories at MIT and just saying, this is my story, this is what's happening to me. And I thought I was the only one, which sort of leads us into the title of the book, The Exceptions. And the way, so the reason I chose that title was because I kept stumbling over this word because women were constantly described as, oh, she's exceptional, she's exceptional. At some point you think like, well, how can they all be exceptional if there are so many of them? Like there are many, many talented women who deserve these jobs. They were exceptional and that they were able to succeed at a time when not many women were. But one of the ways they both succeeded and sort of had trouble seeing discrimination is that they saw every small slight, every sort of molehill of a problem they saw as the exception. They would say, oh, well, that's just a personality conflict or that's just the particular situation or it's my fault. And they didn't see until they came together and started comparing notes that in fact this was part of a much larger pattern. And it was the women and the men who finally realized this. So I was 30 when I did this story. I just turned 30 when I did this story. And I had thought, I think in 1999, starting out my career, I had thought that the discrimination was really about opening the door. And so once you opened the door, it was fine. Women could have equal opportunity. And the reality was what these women taught me was that it really wasn't just about opening the door. It's about how you treat people and how you view people as they proceed through their careers and that the women were just still viewed as not quite equal. As they put it in the report that they did, they said were tolerated rather than welcomed. I think one of the reasons this report did, there have been many, many reports like this in science. I think the reason this one was different was that the president of MIT signed on and he had a really powerful statement, which I think describes the way everyone viewed this problem, including me, which he said, I've always thought that gender discrimination in higher education was part perception, part reality. True, but I now realize, and he said this because of what the women had showed him, I now realize that reality is the greater part of the balance. And that, I think that was the phrase that resonated with people across the country, across the world. I fast forward, I went to the New York Times a year later. I kept in touch with Nancy periodically. I did a story about women in science for the times in 2001. In 2011 for MIT's 150th anniversary, a group of younger women at MIT revisited the report and looked at some of the numbers, looked at the status of women in 2011. I went up, I did a story about that. One of the women gave me a book about MIT that had a chapter in it about the women's report. And she said, if you wanna follow up in six months and we're gonna keep following these numbers, feel free to keep in touch. And I thought, yeah, yeah, that'd be good. And part of me thought that would be an interesting book. And I took the book about MIT and I put it on a shelf in my bedroom. And I would walk by it every day and look up and think, well, that would be an interesting book. I should really follow up with Hazel. And I never did and then we moved to the shelf and so the book, I don't know what happened to the book. I put it aside somewhere and I forgot about it. And then in 2018, Nancy had retired from MIT four years earlier. She still has an office there, but she has this huge archive. I mean, it was really notebooks and notebooks from this time doing what she calls her women's work. And she didn't know what to do with these papers. And so she was thinking about giving them to the MIT archives. And there was a discussion first about making a documentary and then about writing a book. So we started talking about that. And this was the first time we had a conversation was January 5th of 2018. So the Me Too movement was surging and I was watching Me Too and thinking, okay, this is a very important movement and what they're talking about is really important. But it struck me that like, it's only a small segment of the problem to be saying to executives, like you really shouldn't open your bathrobe to your female employees. Like it's a little sort of surprise that we had to say that in 2017, but we did. But I had always remembered going through my own career what these women had to talk about with this more subtle discrimination. What they talked about was in 1999, nobody was talking about it. And that was implicit bias or unconscious bias. Again, this idea that it's not just about opening the door for women, it's about how you see them and how you treat them as they move through their career. So you can't just look at women as like, oh, she could be like, she could be my daughter. I really want to see that she does well. You have to think like, oh, she could be my wife or she could be, she's my equal partner. How am I gonna treat her? Am I gonna treat her as an equal? And it struck me that this was actually that that idea was a more pervasive and more stubborn problem for women, particularly professional women. And also that this idea that we just don't take women seriously as intellectual beings kind of underlies or does underlie the me too problem. We don't, it's all a matter of not taking women seriously. So I thought that this book and this story could be instructive on a wider level and could talk about sort of what I think are still the broader problems for women, particularly professional women. And so I went back and I did the book. The trouble is now that now we talk about implicit bias and unconscious bias so much that I think people are known to hearing about it and they think like, oh yeah, I did that. I did the workplace training, I'm cured, whatever. You know, I never had that or I'm cured, whatever. So I wanted to tell the story in a very up close way so that sort of telling Nancy's story from the beginning, from the beginning of her career and just walking through how she resisted seeing that this was happening to her and then finally did realize it and came together with these other women to do something about it. So the book takes Nancy back to, the book starts with Nancy in 1963. She's a college junior at Radcliffe, which is where the girl's version of Harvard. And she's 19 years old. Her dad has died the year before. She's very confused with what she's gonna do with her life. And, but she's really a planner and she thinks like, she has this boyfriend and she thinks she's probably gonna marry the boyfriend. So she has a year until graduation and what she doesn't wanna do is graduate, get married and have kids right away, which is what a lot of her peers are doing. She wants to have a career until she's 30 and then she thinks like, I have to have kids by 30 but I've got 10 years to do this like really important thing with my life. And she says is the most like the important thing with her life has to be curing human suffering. So she's not one to set small goals. So, but she doesn't know how she's gonna do this. And she goes to a one-hour lecture, biology lecture taught by James Watson four months after he and Francis Crick have won the Nobel Prize for decoding the structure of DNA. And in this one-hour lecture taught by James Watson, Nancy just falls in love with the idea that she's gonna study DNA, that genetics is gonna explain everything about us like why you're fat, why you're thin, why you're nice, why you're not nice, everything about human behavior and the human structure. And she's hooked. And so she's not a particularly bold person but she sort of summons her boldness and goes to Watson and says, can I work in your lab? And he lets her work in her lab and he really becomes her protector and her champion. She ultimately, you know, she sort of struggles with work and love and we can talk about that. But she ultimately gets hired at MIT in 1973 and she's gonna be, science has evolved point where you can study the basic science of a basic biology of cancer. And so there's great hope that we can understand the fundamental molecular basis of cancer. So she is hired at MIT to study that, to study the virology of cancer. And she's off on her own and it's the beginning of affirmative action and she knows she's in affirmative action hire but she's not worried about it because she just thinks science is a meritocracy and I'm gonna be able to prove myself. And so I guess I would just queue up the book. It's a very long way of queuing up the book but I would queue up the book to say what happens in the book is essentially Nancy's schooling. Like she realizes that in fact, it's not a pure meritocracy and maybe no such thing exists. Okay, well, I could talk about my thoughts of the book but before we get into sort of the mommy wars and the good soap operas that are woven in only you could have written this book explain to people your background and how, I mean, the reason we're the National Archives, thank you National Archives for hosting this, this is not just any book, this is a actual, it's like a very important book, right? And so the science of it, science is very intimidating. I don't know anyone that could have written this book except you, why? Explain your background and how you got the science. Okay, so as I said, my dad was a physicist, my grandfather was a physicist, my second cousin, I have actually two second cousins who are physicists, my great grandparents were mathematicians, like everybody on my father's side of the family are scientists. And so I was raised to really respect and appreciate science. And to be somewhat comfortable with it, I would say that I was definitely one of those young women who like struggled with math and thought I wasn't good at math, but I did like physics. I will say it was not easy for me to do the science in this book, but it was very important to me to get the science right. And it was very important to the women because the biggest thing about these women is that originally the subtitle of the book was gonna be 16 Women MIT in the fight for women in science. So Nancy works with 15 other women, but it's really Nancy's story, so we changed it. But all of the women really want to be known as scientists. So they really wanted a book that was gonna celebrate the science. So I knew that was really important, but it was hard to me. I think I felt like because I had broken the story for the globe, I did, that was actually my credential. I don't know that it was necessarily that I had a family of scientists, but I really, I wanted people to celebrate science because I think science is really important. What's strange for me now is that saying I respect science has become a political statement, but I do, I think like science is really important. And if you look around any of our problems in your daily life, just every time you pick up your iPhone, that's science. Like, this is a huge problem. This is a huge challenge for us. It's a huge area. And so I just can't stress that enough. I can't stress enough. Like it was very important to me to make the science accessible to people because I think science should be celebrated and welcomed and explored and we should be curious about it. So yeah, I mean, I guess it's partly that my family was talked about science a lot, but I don't, I don't know. I'm not a scientist, so. But you guys, it's not, I just want people who haven't read the book yet to know that it's, you don't need to know the science. The book is a great drama that is not led to science. But you, you roll through the science so casual. I mean, you're really good at- Well, when I saw the science, yeah, I really thought, like, I was very intimidated by the science. And then I thought, no, this is just a story. Like when you talk about an experiment, it's just the story. Like there's an early experiment early on. Nancy does one of the most important experiments in the early understanding of gene expression. Like why, you know, if every cell has the same DNA, like why does one cell turn into a hand and the other one into an ear or whatever? And so they were trying to figure that out. They were trying to figure out, like what's happening with the protein binding to DNA? Does the protein bind to DNA? And it was really intimidating and confusing to me, but I was like, oh no, you just see like, I just imagined it almost as like, you know, the DNA almost as like a character in a story. And that's how I explained it. That's how I approached it. But I do, I do like to think that it's pretty understandable for people. I'm glad to hear you say that you rolled through it. It is. So one of the main themes to me, I mean, this is my interpretation here. To me, the most interesting theme, there are many interesting themes. So the most interesting theme is that Nancy, the hero of our book, she needs to make a decision. She starts to see these little slights building up. And they're just slights, you know, he gets tenure, I don't, or his name goes first and mine doesn't and the office space, they're these things that all seem like little slights. But it turns out that she realizes there's this pattern, right? And once she establishes the pattern, she has the data, she needs to make a decision, and the women at MIT need to make a decision, if they're going to try and fix this from the inside or if they're gonna do it on the outside, are they going to go outside and protest and sue the school and, you know, be really loud troublemakers that ruin the president's, you know, all the men, you know, make life hell for the men of MIT. Or are they gonna work within the system and try to change it from within? And I'm sure that by now you've figured out that she, the reason why this is such an exceptional book is because they so carefully work within the system to change the system from within. And I want you to talk about that because I think that's any person being discriminated in any field, this is sort of a guidebook for the successful way to change things from the inside. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so one of the reasons, so it's really interesting that you say this, because last week I was at MIT and had a pretty big audience and there were some young women in the audience. And they were very, they were like, this is great. You know, everyone was celebrating the book and Nancy was there with me and some of the women were there. And it was like, yay, yay, Rara, MIT. We did this Rara women. It was mostly women. The rare, like sort of mostly female audience at MIT. And then these women, these young women in the back raised their hands and they were like, okay, this is all great. But like for us, the change is not yet complete. It's not fast enough. Like how can you, you know, like this is, they're like, this isn't good enough. And I said, I started to say, I think your generation sees this as a choice between working within the system and burning it all down. And she said, burn it all down. And I was like, I get that, but I'm not so sure that that's a real solution, right? Like, I think, because first of all, what are you gonna put in its place? Second of all, like, you know, I just like, it's actually ends up being, because you don't have to rebuild from the bottom, it ends up being faster or it can be faster. You just have to find the way. So what I love about this story is that everybody at MIT, like it's a really progressive place. They all, you know, like they all think, you know, when you go back, the story starts in 1963 or really in 1955, if you talk, you know, because there's another character who Nancy finally comes together with and starts with her story. But, you know, I talk a lot about MIT in the 60s and 70s, particularly like the anti-Vietnam War movement at MIT, which was huge. And MIT thought it was like doing all the right things, right, like it was protesting the war. The Union of, what we now know is the Union of Concerned Scientists started with a day of work stoppage, like a total strike at MIT, you know, a research stoppage, they called it. And so everybody, and then they were like, we want more, you know, they were really making efforts to get more black students on campus. And then they, you know, there was a very powerful black students union. And then the female undergraduates were like, we're gonna get more women on campus. So everybody from the 60s and 70s was like rowing in the right direction, thinking they were, you know, doing the right thing. But the reality was like, no, in fact, by the 1990s, not much had changed. They had hired a bunch of women for affirmative action. And the percentage of women was still the same in the early 90s. So yeah, so that's part of it. And then the second part of it was just that, like how many different things had to happen for this all to go right, for, you know, for there to be a report, for there to, you know, for the report to go public. So like, you know, these women had a committee. So you think like, okay, you know, the committee is gonna produce a report. But in fact, no. It turns out that the only reason they actually wrote all this down was because this guy named Jerry Friedman, who was a Nobel Prize winner. He won the Nobel Prize for discovering the cork, was like, oh my God, this stuff is amazing. You need to write this down and show, tell the dean. So they wrote a report and then it was like, and then there happened to be a female chair of the faculty and she's like, we should be showing this to other people. And then it was like, we should be showing this to other faculty. And then someone was like, you know, this is really newsworthy. We should tell a reporter. So all these things happened. But yes, you're right. Like ultimately they have to decide are we gonna work within the system? So what happens? So Nancy says like it takes her 15 years of these small slights and several, this is where the science and the social change intersect. There was a president of MIT in the early seventies, Jerry Wiesner and totally like progressive guy. His wife was on the board of Metco, which is the school integration program in Boston. Really, you know, change makers. And Jerry Wiesner said social change like that in the sciences is a series of experiments, right? And so there are all these experiments that Nancy does to prove that it's not, she's like determined to prove this is not about gender. So first she's working on this very competitive, she works on the fifth floor of the cancer center and it's super competitive, very sharp elbows. And she thinks, you know, maybe it's just that this is competitive and the floor is competitive. So I'm gonna move my lab to the third floor and that'll be better. She goes to the third floor, it's not better. It's like competitive there. She gets into a big brew haha with another guy who takes her space. So then she's like, you know what? I'm just gonna leave cancer research entirely and I'm gonna switch fields. I'm gonna go into a field that's led by women, developmental biology. And so she moves into that. She goes for a year to study with a woman who's studying zebrafish in Germany. That woman ultimately wins the Nobel Prize. And in fact, that's not like, then she discovers that she can't get space and she has a lower salary and then she has this course taken away from her. But she goes to see a lawyer. She's really struggling with what to do. She is, oh, it takes her 15 years to figure out that other women are being discriminated against. Like she's watching other women and saying like, oh, I hear how he talks about her. I know that she is being paid, like she sees all the stuff, but she doesn't think it's gonna come to her. And I think she doesn't wanna admit that because she doesn't wanna play the gender card. She's seen older women who are dismissed as difficult and she doesn't wanna be like, above all, she does not wanna be seen as difficult, which I think is something that really resonates with still with women in the workplace. Like, are you gonna raise your hand and complain? Or is that gonna tank your career? So ultimately, she goes and sees a lawyer and the lawyer says to her, I've done some work with MIT and I found the administration really responsive. So why don't you start within the administration? And she's so clueless, he's like, go see the provost. And she's like, who's the provost? Like she doesn't even know that guy's name. But she finds out and she goes and the administration does help her with one problem. So she has some hope. But then this course has taken away from her and she's teaching the course with another guy. It turns out that the guy wants to teach a course with another man and they're gonna sell the course and make it a textbook and CD-ROMs of the course. And they're gonna, as they say, they tell her they're gonna make millions. And so she's like, you know, she's relegated to sitting in the front row and taking notes on how they might improve things. But she's not gonna get a cut of the money or anything. So she's at her wit's end. And that's when she starts, she decides to share with, well, she decides to write a letter to the president of MIT and say, I think there's discrimination here. And she thinks like, he's a good guy. He'll do something about this. But then she shows the letter to a friend, a man, and he's like, I don't know if you should show that, give that letter to the president because he doesn't know you and he might think that you're just a bad scientist. And this is like a personality conflict or whatever. So that's when she shows it to another woman. And in that moment, I think that's to Nancy, that's the turning point because she's like, the other woman reads a letter and says, I wanna sign this letter. And I think we should go see the president. And then they say like, do you think we should talk to other women? And then they discover that when they look for other women, there's only 15 women with tenure in the school of science and 197 men. Like the numbers are just a huge disparity. And they go and they survey all these women and instantly they add two women from the school of engineering who have cross appointments instantly within like a week, 16 of the 17 women have signed onto this letter. So they go see the dean of science and they spend a lot of time building their case and writing this letter to him and they send it. They're very worried and they're like assuming he's gonna have a lawyer in the meeting with them. They get an appointment with them. They show up to the appointment. He hasn't even read the letter. He's like, whatever, big deal. He thinks like this is a one-off faculty problem. And the dean in that moment has what he did. He describes it as powerful as one of his like, as this experiment that he does, which was like, the experiment that he does was such, when he figures out the solution to this experiment he's doing is a physicist. He's on the Connecticut Turnpike and he's like, he's so moved. He's like, oh my God, I got it. And he has to pull off the highway and call his collaborator and be like, I figured it out. He describes this moment with these women in his office as just as powerful as that moment. Cause he sees there are six women around this table and they're all telling their story. And it turns out that all their stories sound very much alike. And so he says later, like, had any one of those women come to me and said, you know, I have this problem, he would have blown them off and said like, oh, you know, this is just a personality conflict. He might have tried to help, but he wouldn't have seen it as a pattern. And it's only when he sees it as the pattern. And I think that is the critical thing about working within the system is that they were able to prove their case and show the pattern. Nancy, but ultimately Nancy can't get this course back and she's really upset about it. And these men sort of persist again in trying to write the textbook to the point that she actually thinks she's gonna sue. And so she really, really questions whether she should sue. But she looks around the country and at the time there was a very case that was being very closely followed in the scientific journals about a mathematician at Berkeley who was suing because she'd been denied tenure. And this woman was just roasted. You know, it was like people talked about her outfits and they, you know, she wasn't really that smart and there were all these sort of whispers about it. And Nancy just thought like, I don't wanna go through that. But she also realized that she remembered the power that she felt being with these women. So I don't know if I'm answering your question about like working in the system, but I do think like what they found was that all of these people who really, for the most part had pretty good intentions were willing to listen. But the women, and so they work with the Dean of Science to fix things. But one of the most important things they do is some of the women initially say, we need to have a committee of all women or Nancy is like, Nancy's so mad that she's like, we need a female administrator in every department to make sure that the resources are the same. And the male Dean of Science and some of the women are like, no, we can't do that because if it's just women, they won't take us seriously. We have to work with the men because we have to recognize the reality is they have the power. But also one of the women who's younger, who's, she's 40, I think she's the youngest of the women, she says, my department head is a real skeptic on this. He thinks we're all full of it. But I know that this guy, once he, he's capable of changing his mind. And once he changes his mind, he can be a total advocate for the opposite position. So we need to get that guy on our side. So they put him on this committee. And as a result, they have this committee with, I think it's two Nobel Prize winners, head of a department, you know, it's just sort of these men who can really make change. And it's, but it's the fact that the men can make the case to the other men that I think makes it so powerful. When the men in biology, which is Nancy's department, first hear about this, they're thinking like, she's insane. And what was interesting about, I said, I went back to MIT last week and I did this talk there and I met some of the women who were junior faculty at the time who were not involved. Cause the senior women didn't want to involve the junior faculty because they knew it would be sort of death to the junior faculty women's careers to say like, I have a problem. But the junior, the women who had been junior faculty at the time said, you know, we were really caught in this battle because the men in the department were telling us Nancy was crazy and the women were trying to get us on their side. And we sort of, we didn't know what to believe. Now that they're in their later careers, they see them, in fact, this was a real problem. They still see someone that happened to them today. But I think it was really important to work with powerful men. And ultimately, as I said earlier, there were so many of these reports on the status of women at various universities. Harvard was doing one every year. Johns Hopkins had done one the year before. And people were just, you know, putting them right in the dustbin because nobody was taking it seriously. It was getting the president on board. It was showing that the president of MIT, you know, this tremendously powerful prestigious Institute of Science and Technology that he was admitting it, that was the difference. And that allowed the message to go out. So I think you have to recognize what the existing power structures are. And you can't just burn it all down. And sometimes you make, it's more of a statement to actually sort of shake up the power system rather than just destroy it. I'm not even sure that destroying it is like a realistic, I don't know that you, you know, it's that old phrase of like, if you're going to shoot for the king, you better get his head, you know, better take him by the head or get his head off, whatever it cut his head off. I think that's really hard to do. I think that the moment where Nancy has the choice if she's going to sue MIT because these two male professors had stolen her class and were trying to make money off of it. As I was reading and she makes the decision not to sue MIT but to work with the women to change it from within was why this book is like a playbook for people that want actual effect real change. You can be really loud and go burn the place down and protest all day long, but you're not going to effect real change. If you actually want to change, you can make more change from the inside than you can from the outside. And I think that if she had sued the school, I think I would have thrown the book down after that. If at that moment when she was making that decision, if she had decided to sue the school, I would have said, you know, no, thank you. Because I think that that's a lot of people do that and they just end up sabotaging themselves. And I think that's not an effective. I don't know. I can't think of any examples of really effective, you know, burning the house down. As you say, I don't even know if that works. To the point though, which is I think you're right, but I also think like, you know, it's interesting because a male interviewer said to me like, well, she she went out, she didn't sue. And I was like, no, that's not wimping out. So I actually, I'm with you. Like I think had she sued, it would have actually made what MIT did. It would have cheapened what MIT did, right? So like, I mean, in the end, MIT, the president of MIT didn't even consult a lawyer. Like he didn't, they didn't have a general counsel at the time, which is kind of amazing in itself, but he didn't call the school's law firm and say like, what do you think we should do about this? He was just like, huh, these women have made their case. This is a really, you know, I'm gonna acknowledge this. And like, I'm gonna acknowledge the work that they've done. And that turned out to be incredibly powerful. I think had these women tried to strip it down, people would have said, and there were people who said, by the way, there were people who said like, oh yeah, he just wimped out. He caved to what we, they didn't have this word at the time. They would have said, you know, in our language now, he would have said, oh, he caved to wokeism, right? No, this was not caving to wokeism. He recognized that they had made their case and he wanted to work with them. He wanted to be on the right side and he recognized that they were on the right side. Right. Now, why can't women be good scientists? I mean, as the logic goes, I'm not saying don't cancel me. I'm not saying women can't be good scientists. I'm saying, take us back, we're in the sixties now. The argument is basically like they have to be home raising the family, right? They have to be taking care of their husbands, right? So to be a good scientist, you have to be in the lab 24 seven, I suppose. So take us back to the original why there were so few women in science. Well, one of the really interesting things to me is that if you look at the number of women in just in academia and also in science, in World War II, it actually went up because all the men were out, you know, women couldn't fight. So the men were on the battlefield and the women took these jobs. So it's not like women couldn't do these jobs. But what happened was after World War II, the universities were like, well, if we want prestige, if we want to look good, we need to hire more men. We need to have more male professors. And so even the women's colleges, like they didn't have, they had male presidents, male professors, they actually got rid of some of the women or lost them to attrition and replaced them with men. So there was early on this sense that, you know, from the beginning of, you talked to like the president of Harvard when women are petitioning to get into Harvard in the 18, I think it's the 1870s or the 1890s, the president of Harvard is like, you know, this is really an experiment. We're not really sure, like we're not sure women have the intellectual capability to do this. And so it's not yet the time to let these women into Harvard. And it's only because women push and say like we really want to take courses that they're like, okay, we'll set up what they call the annex and that becomes Radcliffe. So there is this long standing bias where people think we're not really sure that women have equal brains. Then what happens after World War II is they, because women don't have, allegedly don't have equal brains, we're gonna hire more men to be more prestigious. The universities, some of it is structural. So the universities have anti-nepetism laws and the anti-nepetism laws say that we can't hire husband and wife together. And so if we're gonna hire one or the other, of course they're gonna hire the husband. The only way that the wife, who if she's a scientist can work in his lab and get paid is if, or work as a scientist at the university is for her to be paid on federal grant money. So what happens is the male scientists will often hire equally qualified women to serve as research associates in their labs. So they have equal experience, but they're not equal status. And it's interesting, like if you look at Sputnik in 1957 and then you look at the number of women working as engineers in Russia and working here, Sputnik of course is that sets off the space race and the Russians are gonna win and we're worried about that. The Russians had a much higher percentage of female engineers. It's not like genetically there's something wrong with women. It really was this bias. And that was also really interesting to me to just go back and see how, that like the tide was pushing against these women. And they're, periodically there would be some effort to get more women into science, but there really is this persistence of like, first of all, women don't wanna work that hard. They don't wanna work 80 hour weeks. And we're not really sure they're that bright. And the women, what's interesting too, is that the women are saying, and this is where working within the system doesn't necessarily work for you. The women are saying to other women, just shut up, keep your head down, work twice as hard. That's the only way we're gonna get anywhere. And the reality is like that alone doesn't work as well either. I mean, I think it's, yes, maybe they get ahead, but they're still seen as lesser. I also think that there is, and you and I've talked about this off camera, but like, I think there is this bias, as you say, toward women who are mothers. And so when Maria Gopert-Mair wins the Nobel Prize in physics in, I think it's 1956, it might be the early 60s. The headline in the, excuse me, in San Diego and the headline in the San Diego Tribune is San Diego mother wins Nobel Prize. So like women are seen as mothers first. And the whole thing is like, well, that's the first thing they have to do. And so it really is like, the whole system is set up so that the man is in charge. He's got the wife who's like in one case, there was a physicist whose wife used to leave him meals outside the door of his lab. Like it's really set up, one of the people Nancy works with, his wife gives him lunch money every day when he walks out the door. And he's like, well, how am I supposed to get my science done if I have to think about remembering my lunch money? It's like, so if women wanna do this, they have to do it on top of everything else. So that was another thing to me as a 30 year old, I didn't have kids when I did this story. That was really important to me or persuasive to me was that you couldn't say that these women were not as successful or didn't have equal resources, hadn't been given equal resources because they weren't willing to put in the time or because they were off tending to their children. Half of the women in this MIT group had no children. They had made a very conscious decision not to have kids because they really recognized that if they wanted to be in science, they couldn't have kids. And again, MIT had tried to do the right thing. They tried to offer maternity leave and it was like such a stigma that no woman was gonna take it. The men were taking it, but they were taking it to work on their companies. So I think that there's a bias against women as, not bias, but there's an expectation that women will become mothers. But what you see is that there's really this belief that women just aren't as intellectually capable. And what's interesting, so Nancy, so this all happens in the book, 1999, the women get this, President of MIT signs on to what they've said, admits discrimination. Six years later, 2005, Larry Summers is talking at this conference and there's instantly this national effort to get more women into math and science. Six years later, 2005, Larry Summers, President of Harvard, is talking at a small conference about the need to get more women into math and science. And he, because he's kind of a contrarian says, I'm just gonna pose some contrarian ideas here, but I think really the problem is, he's like, I'm gonna put some new ideas here, but the reality is like these aren't new ideas. He says, I think part of the problem is that women just don't wanna work the 80 hour weeks. And Nancy's in the audience and she's like, okay, that's news to me because I've been working 80 hour weeks for decades now. And then he says, and if you look at the numbers, if you look at test scores, there's, I think some of it is women do not have the intrinsic aptitude for math and science. And he claims that there is a disparity in math in that there's a very small variation between male and female scores that at the very highest level, that when you sort of extract that and take it to the very high levels of science explains why there aren't that many high functioning women in math because they're not doing that well in these tests. Okay, the person who wrote that study is in the audience and she recognizes that he's only read the first chapter of the book that she's written describing all this. In the later chapters, what she and her co-author, a man say is that in fact, this disparity doesn't matter, that there is more variation among men and among women than there is between men and women. There is like this idea that women are intrinsically less capable at math and science is completely false. It's not backed up by the numbers, but it's been incredibly persuasive. So I think it's an intellectual bias. It's the assumption that women have to be mothers. There's this assumption that like if you're a mother, you're doing the thing that's expected of you. If you're a scientist, you're a freak. And I will say like having grown up the child of a scientist, you know, I grew up in Fairfield County, Connecticut. It's pretty like preppy area. I was like a freak child because my parent, my dad was a scientist and my mother worked, that was it. My mother went to law school when I was seven and then worked and that was like really unusual. So I get it that these are old biases, but I just think it's like, it's time to get rid of them. And when you, that was the most interesting thing for me to go back into the history, into the archives and just see how long we've been talking about women this way. And then when you think in what I mentioned earlier about these women in 1964, I looked up Nancy's Radcliffe yearbook, that was her year. And you look at the way the women at Radcliffe were talking about it and they were like, I got this, I'm gonna have a kid, I'm gonna have my career, it's all gonna be fine, I can manage this and you just think, oh, these poor women. And but then like, I've seen stories like this in my own newspaper talking about how women of college age think that they can have it all as well. So I think like in many ways, I wanna evangelize for this book, I wanna be sort of, I wanna like interpret Nancy's story for others so they don't have to go through it. But in many ways, I think you kinda have to discover it for yourself. I think that was actually in some ways the case for me. You know, I saw what they, I saw what these women did, but it's like, oh yeah, like you sort of, you grow up and you feel it, I think you see it as you progress through your career. I wanna evangelize for the book, and I don't wanna say anything buzzkill here, I don't wanna take this down, but are the heroine of the book never has children. Right. So she has to choose between being a scientist and a happy personal life, or I'm not saying the children are happy personal life. In fact, I would say quite the opposite actually. But it's sort of a tragedy that yes, she gets a happy ending professionally, but in terms of young women's, we've come a long way, but have we? Because you don't feel today, I mean, if you wanted to be a scientist today, you'd still probably have to make a choice of, I don't know if you're allowed to say, I'm gonna be a scientist and I'm gonna spend 80 hours a week in a lab and I'm gonna be a good mom. You're gonna fail at one or the other or both, I don't know. This is Nancy still struggles with all this. So first of all, yeah, so Nancy, ultimately the choice is made for her, right? Like her marriage falls apart. And so she's like, she actually has to work in a, like she initially thinks all I care about is doing experiments. I'm not even gonna get my PhD, I'm just gonna do experiments. And then she's so good at what she does that James Watson says to her, you have to get your PhD. And thank God he does, because when her marriage falls apart, she needs to work so she can get the job at MIT. And there's this whole drama in the book, as you know, about first she turns down the job and then she's like, oh my God, I need the job because I don't have a marriage. And she goes and gets it back. But yeah, so I think things, well, okay. So Nancy, is it a tragedy that she didn't have kids? I think like on the gentle side, we can say there are many ways of being a mother. She sees her trainees in the lab, and she calls them her kids. And so she has really satisfying relationships with many people, with many of her trainees. They're very, very loyal to her to this day. That was the one question I was actually afraid to ask her. Did you regret not having children? She has a niece and a nephew who she's very close to. And I think she is always trying to give me career advice. So I think she sees me as maybe the child she might've had if she had, she had kids at 25. But so I've never been able to ask her that question. I think the thing she struggles with most is did she do the right thing sticking with science? Did she do the right thing ignoring this problem for so long? Like why did she put up with this for 20 years, right? And then she struggles with should she, I think she recognizes that she did the right thing in talking to MIT and in doing what she calls her women's work at MIT. But it kind of came to define her later career. And she really wanted to talk about science. And so she would go give these lectures. Universities would ask her to come speak, and they wanted her to come speak about women's issues. And she would always say, well, I'm going to give two talks. I'm going to give a talk about science, and then I'll talk about the women's stuff. She really was still reluctant to be the women's advocate. So I don't know. I mean, yes, there was an enormous cost to her personal life. Ultimately, she does marry. She meets someone when she's 60. She is incredibly happy now. Their marriage is in the vows column of the New York Times. It's this sort of amazing story. She's described as Sally Field with a microscope. She's sort of so extremely happy at the wedding, and she's just glowing. So I think she has that happiness. And whenever she says, well, should I put up with this? I'm like, your life has been amazing. You've done amazing things with your life. But yeah, it pains me to think of that regret. Now, when we're talking about women succeeding in a man's world, it's really easy to demonize the man. And there's some real good villains in your book. But they're also heroes. They're also the met James Watson, gave her her start, took her under his wing, gave her the community, made her fall in love with science. And then the president of MIT, who really embraces the women's movement and validates all of their work. So can you talk about that, about how when we talk about these things, there's good and evil woven in? So I have, as you do, I have two boys and my older son, who's their teenagers. And my older son, I was asking him, because you would ask me, what are some good questions you've had? And so I asked him what his favorite part of that. He was at this conversation in New York and then in Boston. And I asked him what his favorite part of the conversation was, and he liked the part where we were talking about the fact that men signed onto this and that men did the right thing. Because I think, yes, people are resistant. I am resistant to this idea that there has to be these two sides. And of course, two sides makes a better story because they're struggling. But to me, it's when they meet in the middle, that that's really, that's where the dynamic. And how they work it out, that's really interesting to me. And as I said, this story is more interesting to me because people thought they were doing the right thing. They weren't doing the right thing. But then they're willing to be convinced. They're willing to sign on and say, OK, you teach me. You teach me about this question. You teach me about this issue. And they're willing to be educated. And in fact, one of the women refers to one issue. So well, he's educable. So the women see that. And so it is this meeting in the middle that is important to me. And I really admired that. And I think this is a, Larry Summers thought he's being counterintuitive by saying women don't have the aptitude to do science and math. I think what's counterintuitive is to say that actually the men worked with the women in this case. That in some cases, the men who we thought were like, there's one guy in the book who is known as like this hero to graduate students. And he's really compassionate. It turns out he's actually a jerk to all the women. And then there's James Watson, who stole from Rosalind Franklin. But it turns out that he, yes, he gets Nancy her start in science. He makes her fall in love with science. He's also really good at her. He's the one who says to her when she has problems, you need to write this all down. You need to start keeping a diary of what's happening to you. And keeping this record of it is what Nancy's just like, oh, god, this is really like this is bad. I need to do something about this. He's the one who tells her she should consult a lawyer. He says to her, what's happening to you is enough to make me a feminist. He's definitely not a feminist. So yeah, I think that's one of the most exciting parts of the book to me is the way that women and men are working together. And I think that's really useful in today's world, because one of the things that I think people resist about the idea when unconscious bias was first raised and when these women talked about unconscious bias or they described it marginalization or 21st century discrimination, subtle discrimination, I think one of the reasons they talked about it, because people have said to me, well, some of these cases were like pretty clear discrimination, like if you're not getting paid as much. But I think what the women saw as unconscious discrimination was that they weren't, nobody was intending, nobody set out to discriminate against these women. And I think it was a way of softening it for the men. So the men might get on board if they felt, if they didn't feel demonized. And I think that's actually useful today, because I think one of the reasons that people don't like talking about unconscious bias now is that they don't like thinking, they think that it makes them seem intrinsically bad or intrinsically evil. And so I think the more we can have conversations about, the more we can get away from slogans and wokeism, and the more we can actually have conversations about what's happening and what it feels like to live this experience, the more progress we can make. And that's again, why I think you need to work within the system. Because if people think that you're just trying to cancel them or destroy their system, they're not gonna listen, they're gonna run. And you're not, I don't think you are gonna get change. Interesting. Okay, we have a question from the outside world, from the real world. And I would like to ask somebody else's question, but I would like to premise it by saying, the question is, do you have reflections on discrimination within research universities or in the private sector? That's the question. But before you get to answer it, I'd like to say that we all work in the world, right? And there are these little slights. And sometimes you could call it discrimination, sometimes take James Watson, when they were discovering DNA, they stole a photograph from a woman who died she never knew. She's in her grave now not knowing, I don't know all the science, I can't name everybody's name, but she doesn't even know that this photograph they stole from her was how they broke the code of what DNA is, right? She doesn't know that her picture was stolen. And that's an example of how, wow, they discriminated against this woman. And when I read that, I thought, well, they would have stolen it from a man just as easily. Yes, a woman, she probably would have been more polite about it and maybe shared because she's nicer, I guess. But I'm saying, I think those men would have stolen from a man or a woman alike. So when do you know when it's a slight, and when does it become discrimination? And that goes into, do you have reflections on discrimination within research universities and public private sectors? Yeah, so I would say one of the things, this is something that I struggled with even writing the book. I was like, hmm, like, well, I don't know, is that? And this is of course what Nancy was struggling with for years. Interestingly, so there's a lot of interesting moments in the book where women who at the time they called themselves secretaries. Now we might say executive assistant or administrative assistant, but they called themselves secretaries. There are moments in the book where it's actually the secretaries who are the first to recognize that the women are being treated differently. So in one of my favorite cases, this woman is about to write a letter because she's mad, her salary isn't as high. And the secretary who sees the note in the typing pool says, who sees the letter in the typing pool says, don't send this letter, you're gonna be seen as angry. But she as the secretary then goes to the head of the lab and says like, you need to pay this one more money. There's another case where Nancy doesn't even know this is happening, the names on the tenure letter are rearranged and it's the secretary who's upset about this and goes and reports it. So it's secretaries and also in some cases, husbands who are in the book saying, what's happening to you is different than what's happening to the men. But how do you know that? That's your question and that's a really important question. I think what was important to me in the end of the book, there's a woman named Virginia Valiant who's a sociologist and she talks about how, she talks about how women, it's just the way we have seen women and men over the years that makes this more likely to happen to a woman. So because we have traditionally had men in the workplace, when a woman enters the workplace, any workplace, but particularly a place like science where it's been traditionally male dominated, women are seen as unusual or not quite right. So they start at a deficit. So if someone's gonna steal from someone, yes, they're gonna steal from a man, but they're more worried if the man objects, it's like, oh, okay, yeah, I get it. Like that's just, it's seen as maybe sharp elbows, but that's just being ambitious as a man or like he's standing up for himself. If a woman stands up for herself, it's being difficult and she knows that, so it's harder for her to protest. So I think on some level, we know that, but we also, I think it's mostly how we see women. We still see them as unusual, especially in fields like science, but the question, I think I'm gonna kind of interpret something about this question. So research universities and the private sector, I think are somewhat different here. Right now, what you hear is that, what I heard from the women at MIT now is that a lot of women are going into the private sector because they think that the hours are more flexible there that there is, that women in biotech, for instance, there are more opportunities for women in biotech. I think also maybe biotech careers are seen as somewhat more flexible. I think that, I think that is still the case, but I do still think that these biases exist, that these biases remain. So one of the women, one of the women in the book does some research on biotechnology companies and thinks that it's actually easier for women to have careers there. But what Nancy will say now, the work that Nancy's doing now is to get more women into biotech. Because if you look at venture capital firms who are the ones giving all the money to biotech companies, they are not funding women, women's discoveries, they're funding discoveries by men. So I still think that it's really, I think there are disparities between those two. And I think really, I think it is still this assumption that maybe women can hack it. It's the same thing with the president of Harvard was saying in the 1870s, 1890s, that women were just not, we're not quite sure that women can do this. So that's the highest hurdle. The other thing I'll say is that there's more, there's been research since the 70s that if you take the same resume and put a man's name on it or a woman's name on it, men and women alike will look at the man's, the name with the male resume, the resume with the male name on it and say, yeah, he's the better hire. She, I don't know, has her career really developed? Maybe she could do more work. More modern research shows that it's even in the language that we use. So when we talk about who's a genius, we tend to talk about men. Women are described in evaluations as working really hard. Men are described as geniuses, as being just brilliant. So I think we have to get around those hurdles. And I think that's really, really hard. And I think that's a problem for private and research. So private sector and public sector. So what have we learned here today? What have we learned here today? I think we've learned that much has changed, that not enough has changed, that every generation thinks it has cured the problem only to discover the problem again. I think that what I've been saying to people on the road is that as I've been talking about the book is we tend to see this problem as something that's gonna be solved by one big initiative. So like the MIT story blew out of the gate in 1999. It was like, oh my God, we figured out the women in science thing. But then we thought we'd figured it out one and done. Reality is this is in our perceptions still and the work that we have to do here as a culture is every day. It's in how we see women. It's how women conceive of themselves. So this isn't something that's gonna be solved by one initiative. This is a very long, slow process, which is maybe less sexy than burning down the house. But I actually think that ultimately it's more satisfying. And in many ways it's easier just to sort of change, like it's a series of thought experiments, change the way you think about women, change the way you think about yourself in the work world and the potential for women. I think that's the most important thing that we can take away from this story and from our conversation today. Well, I encourage everybody to get a copy of this book. I think there's a lot to be learned and you don't need to know anything about science. Don't worry about that. We don't wanna scare anyone. We don't wanna scare anyone. And although it is a very scary topic, it's a lot. Thank you very much for writing this book. I think it's a really important book and I do think that you're a national treasure. I think you're a genius. And I think that you should be celebrated for this. And I think that we don't celebrate enough that women that do great things. This is a real accomplishment and you should be very proud. And I'd like to thank the National Archives because it's a real honor, but the National Archives, that's quite an invitation. Quite an honor. And it's very worthy. And I'm really grateful to National Archives for giving you this platform to talk about this. And I think that I hope that you'll all go out by book and you'll all learn something. Thank you, Kate, for your time. And thank you all for coming to the National Archives. Thanks.