In 1999, creator Kate Zernike, then a reporter for The Boston Globe, broke an infinite story: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had admitted to a long-standing sample of discrimination towards girls on its college. Zernike, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, tells the complete inspiring story in The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science.
Zernike begins by specializing in molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins’ life and profession path. In the spring of 1963, Hopkins, a Radcliffe junior, turned so enthralled by a Harvard lecture on DNA by Nobel Prize winner James Watson that she sought work in his molecular biology lab. But like different girls then and now, Hopkins confronted troublesome selections as she weighed the calls for of science towards marriage and potential motherhood. Zernike situates the tensions that led to the tip of Hopkins’ first marriage throughout the broader context of the ladies’s motion of the Nineteen Sixties. Eventually Hopkins earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1971, and by 1973, she had accepted a place at MIT’s Center for Cancer Research.
While the biographical sections are intriguing, Zernike’s narrative picks up velocity within the later parts of the e book, which delve into the methods male colleagues appropriated Hopkins’ work and used it for monetary achieve. By the Nineties, Hopkins realized that “a woman’s work would never be valued as highly as a man’s. It had taken her twenty years to see it—she’d understood it about other women before she’d realized it was true for her, too.”
Hopkins’ revelation led her to succeed in out to feminine colleagues, leading to a letter by 16 girls at MIT compiling proof of discrimination, together with unequal entry to analysis assets and pay. The girls spent the following 4 years doing fact-finding as a committee, and by March of 1999, they’d compiled a report. Although it was solely scheduled to look in a school publication, information of the report reached Zernike’s ears—and when Zernike’s article appeared on the entrance web page of the Globe, the story took off. Hopkins arrived on campus the following day to digital camera crews, and he or she obtained emails from girls the world over. Overnight, MIT turned a “pacesetter for promoting gender equality,” and different universities quickly undertook comparable efforts to look at their biases.
Zernike closes her narrative with updates on Hopkins’ continued profitable profession, quick bios of the 16 girls who signed the unique letter and an examination of the progress for girls in academia—and the work nonetheless to be accomplished. These girls’s efforts—and the next affect this revelation had for girls throughout academia—make for a gripping, page-turning learn.
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