Kate Zernike > Quotes

“The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“We believe that unequal treatment of women who come to MIT makes it more difficult for them to succeed, causes them to be accorded less recognition when they do, and contributes so substantially to a poor quality of life that these women can actually become negative role models for younger women,” their proposal said. “We believe that discrimination becomes less likely when women are viewed as powerful, rather than weak, as valued, rather than tolerated by the Institute. The heart of the problem is that equal talent and accomplishment are viewed as unequal when seen through the eyes of prejudice. If the Institute more visibly demonstrates that it views women as valuable, a more realistic view of their ability and accomplishments by their administrators, colleagues, and staff will ultimately follow.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“On June 28, 1974, the front page of the New York Times asserted that the program “by which the Federal Government is compelling colleges and universities to hire more women and blacks is lowering standards and undermining faculty.” The article—on the page with news of Watergate, Nixon’s visit to Moscow, and the ongoing energy crisis—continued, “Moreover, it is charged that new minority and women appointees may be paid more than white male faculty members at the same level and that some do not have the proper qualifications for the tenured and untenured positions to which they are appointed.” The article was based on a newly released report by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. The author, Richard Lester, had considerable stature: he had been vice-chairman of Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women and was an economics professor and former dean of the faculty at Princeton. He supported efforts to diversify faculties. His quarrel, he said, was with the process. The competition for “the limited number of minority academicians” had “at times driven up salaries ‘well above those for whites with equivalent or better qualifications.’ ” Lester had based his conclusions not on hiring data, but on meetings he’d conducted with administrators at twenty leading institutions, which went unnamed. (About fifteen hundred colleges had federal contracts, requiring them to file affirmative action plans.) The Times article noted, toward the bottom, that “the charge that women and minorities are not prepared [to be] as potentially excellent educators as white males cannot be substantiated.” Lester himself cautioned that abandoning affirmative action would be “premature.” But the damage was done. Other publications piled”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal,” it argued for a kind of social androgyny, where work could become more a part of women’s lives and children more a part of men’s, where a girl’s “intellectual aggressiveness” as well as “her brother’s tender sentiments” would be “welcomed and accepted as human characteristics.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“I do not think women will seek higher degrees in any great number in fields like the sciences and engineering if, by doing so, they are apt to be punished socially and psychologically instead of being rewarded, as men are, for their efforts and achievements.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“(Kleckner became the first woman tenured in biochemistry at Harvard—only the fifth woman tenured in the sciences—in 1984.)”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Writing his annual report in October 1973, Wiesner condemned Watergate and the American intervention in Vietnam as the arrogance of power. While MIT needed to champion “and perhaps defend” the role of technology, he wrote, it also needed to direct its research, resources, and influence toward “the changing issues of the times.” That year, the university fully divested itself of the Draper Instrumentation Lab, signaling that it had heard the antiwar protesters’ demands to replace war-related research with “socially constructive work.” Within four years, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation would replace the Department of Defense as the university’s biggest sponsors. In World War II, MIT had helped the nation by exploring the structure of the atomic nucleus; now it was building housing for low-income elderly people in Cambridge, attempting to understand the basic mechanisms of cancer, and expanding opportunities for women and Black students.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception. True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Harvard hired her on three conditions: she was not allowed in the Faculty Club, she could not march in academic processions, and she was not eligible for faculty tickets to football games.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Nancy was accused of being unscientific, an enemy of free speech, and a “hysteric,” in the words of the syndicated columnist George Will. The Atlantic dismissed her and other women who objected to Summers as “feminist careerists” seeking “thinly veiled job preferences or quotas for themselves and their friends.” In the New Republic, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor and author whose book had helped inform Summers, worried that efforts against sex discrimination might push young women into “lines of work they don’t enjoy.” Almost two decades later, there’s still work to do. A landmark report in 2018 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that 50 percent of female faculty members had experienced sexual harassment, and that the biggest complaint was not “sexual coercion” but put-downs about their intelligence, exclusion, and the kind of marginalization that the women of MIT had described twenty years earlier. But the progress is also undeniable. The MIT report was followed by an explosion in scholarship examining the reasons for the disproportionately low numbers of women in science, technology, engineering, and math, and in strategies to increase their representation and treat them as full participants in their fields. Those efforts have expanded beyond women to include others from traditionally marginalized groups.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“boys score higher on tests of spatial reasoning, but tell girls they are performing an “art task” instead of a “math task” and the gender gap fades. Fields presumed to require raw “brilliance”—physics and math—attract more men, while women are more likely to go into fields they believe require “hard work.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“The National Science Foundation counted about 245,000 scientists with doctorates in 1973. Of those, 1,611 were Black men and 249 were Black women; 106 were American Indian and just 3 of those were women. Black women were 6 percent of the population and one-tenth of 1 percent of the scientists. White men, meanwhile, were 41.5 percent of the population and 90 percent of the scientists.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Nancy, too, hated the idea that women did science differently; she saw no evidence it was true, and she suspected that “different,” when it came to women, would always mean “lesser.” A feminist science could only segregate women more, make it harder for them to compete on the same field.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Zella Luria, Salva’s wife, had organized a small group of older women to mentor Alice and two other women who were starting as science professors in Boston, meeting monthly in the older women’s homes in the suburbs over after-dinner coffee. Alice enjoyed the company of the older women—Zella, Annamaria, and Ruth Hubbard, from the Harvard Biolabs. But she heard their stories the way Nancy had Barbara McClintock’s; they were from a different time, before doors had opened for women. Her own generation, she thought, would be one of transition, of careful navigation: the women had to work twice as hard as men to show they deserved the jobs that had opened up to them, and they had to be reasonable, not too aggressive—not too male. Alice was willing to work hard, and she didn’t want anyone to think she was seeking special treatment, because she didn’t think she needed it.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Gerty Cori worked as a research associate at Washington University in St. Louis for sixteen years before she was made a full professor in 1947, the year she and her husband won the Nobel Prize for their discoveries about how sugars are metabolized. She had earned one-tenth of what her husband did, even though they had earned the same degree from the same medical school and worked side by side.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“The women had spent their careers trying not to think about being women, hoping they would be seen as scientists. But as the first or only in so many settings, they felt they had to live up to a higher standard. As Penny said, a woman couldn’t fail, because everyone expected her to. She obsessed over the smallest details of writing grants, afraid that being turned down would be another reason that no one would take her seriously. When she was awarded grants—which happened so often that one of her colleagues said she had a “golden ass”—she saw it less as success and more as the absence of failure. When she received a prize, she knew people assumed it was because she was a woman; she joked that she wanted to be the second woman to win, or better yet the tenth. Sylvia told how male undergraduates had challenged the math she put on the blackboard. Giving seminars to faculty or at conferences, she found herself interrupted regularly; the custom was to wait to ask questions at the end, but she noticed that people felt free to interrupt the women. Trying to be perfect was like dancing on the head of a pin, she said. Exhausting.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“A scientific career proceeded along two parallel tracks, she wrote: real science and professional science. Real science was doing experiments, making discoveries, the work she’d fallen in love with back in the Watson lab, the long and winding conversations about science along Bungtown Road. “A unique kind of exhilaration and excitement,” as she described it. “What is known is useful and sometimes beautiful, but only what is unknown is of interest. It is this open-minded quality of science—the excitement of the search, the constant, but usually unsatisfied, striving toward the solution of some very difficult problem—that is addictive.” Professional science was figuring out how to get paid for making discoveries: writing grants to buy equipment and pay grad students and postdocs, publishing papers and speaking at scientific conferences to get “exposure” in the field, winning tenure, teaching, managing a lab. It was a job “constructed by and for men (a certain type of man),” she wrote. Someone with a wife at home to manage life outside the lab, and with supreme self-confidence. Real science and professional science were each a full-time job, with intense pressures and long hours.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“to think like a physicist, to keep asking “What if…?” and to stay interested in everything, because you never knew where the breakthrough would come from.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Women in their thirties and forties might consider themselves feminists but resented the previous generation for pushing the Equal Rights Amendment and lesbian rights rather than fighting for maternity leave, subsidized childcare, or flexible work. Women who worked full-time earned just sixty-six cents to every dollar a man made. The feminists of the sixties and seventies hadn’t warned working mothers how hard life would be to juggle; stay-at-home mothers, meanwhile, felt that feminists demeaned them.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“She published a version of the essay in Redbook magazine under the title “The Case Against Full-Time Motherhood.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“when you explored people’s ideas about work, you ended up discussing their ideas about family. Her research led her to become one of the first to study another idea that was just poking up in the public consciousness, labeled with a phrase that Lotte herself disliked: work-life balance.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“She thought back sometimes to the conference at the American Academy on “The Woman in America” in 1963, and Erik Erikson’s ideas about how men and women approach work differently. She had thought it bizarre. But she had come to agree with his argument that women couldn’t win by trying to jam themselves into a male model of work; true equality required what he had called “revolutionary reassessment.” Her book had argued that employers needed to stop measuring commitment by the number of hours spent in the office. Instead, they had to define the tasks, let employees figure out how and where to get the work done, trusting their intrinsic motivation to meet expectations. All the talk of “quality time” with family got it backward; women and men would be better off with quality time at work and more quantity time at home. Instead of work-life balance, she preferred “work-personal life integration,” though she acknowledged it was a clunkier phrase.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Kendall Square would become the biotechnology capital of the world. It offered land that was lonely for developers, and empty warehouses with high ceilings and strong floors, perfect for installing the heavy equipment required for labs and manufacturing facilities.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“My mother herself worked in a bank after she finished, quit to get married, and raised three children, but always regretted that she had not gone to law school. Her decision to go when I was seven—I was the youngest of her three—became the defining event of my childhood. She inquired at Yale, where a man told her, “I wouldn’t let my wife go to law school.” She ended up instead at Pace University.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“This was the way the world saw women in science in 1968. They were rare but not exquisite; more abnormal. If women were smart enough to be working at the highest levels or at the most prestigious laboratories, they were probably unfeminine and unfriendly, definitely not much fun.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“But the women of color also had to overcome educational disadvantages built up over generations. Their secondary schools had lacked labs, advanced math classes, and guidance counselors.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“After her week in Germany Nancy arranged to go there. Eugene was another university town, this one an hour from the rocky coast of the Pacific and surrounded by tall Douglas fir trees. With its wide streets and small local shops, the city echoed an old American frontier town, and to Nancy it was like turning back the clock.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Betty Lou Raskin, a chemist who ran the radiation lab at Johns Hopkins, noted in an article in the New York Times Magazine in 1959 that the Russians graduated more female engineers in one year than the United States had in its entire history. “In our society it is somehow ‘unfeminine’ for a girl to try to find out how, why or what makes this world tick, but it’s very ladylike indeed for her to fly around it serving cocktails,” she wrote.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Motherhood, Rossi argued, had become a full-time job for the first time in history, as fewer women worked farms, craft shops, or printing presses alongside their families, and some could afford not to work outside the home. But child-rearing did not last forever, and women were living out the rest of their increasingly long lives “in a perpetual state of intellectual and social impoverishment.” Home pursuits had been “needlessly elaborated” even as technological advances had eliminated many of the time-sucking chores of the past. This pattern stunted marriages as well as women, made children excessively dependent and directionless. (They needed, Rossi argued, “a healthy dose of inattention.”)”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science

“Delbrück and Luria’s work spawned the so-called Phage Group of scientists working at universities across the country—sometimes called the Phage Church—and set the stage for great leaps in molecular biology. Adherents were inspired by a slight book written by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1944 titled What Is Life?, which posited that biology might be governed by universal laws like those that explained chemistry and physics.”
― Kate Zernike, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science