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The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science
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May 2025: Strong Women > The Exceptions by Kate Zernike -- 4.5 stars

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Nicole R (drnicoler) | 8088 comments The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike
4.5 stars

While I no longer work in academia in the science field, it was my first career and I will always have a soft spot for it.

Collecting data from the field, analyzing samples in the lab, forming a community with other academics who just love research and teaching.

But, I also faced discrimination in my academic career. When in a room of male scientists, being the only one introduced by my first name and not "Dr." as the men were, being asked if I were the graduate student or a lab assistant, being the only one tasked with taking notes or getting coffee.

While those things seem small and are easy to brush off and simple misunderstandings or oversights, it is symbolic of the sex discrimination that continues to persist in some professions.

And that was in the 2010s. I cannot even imagine what it was like in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Nancy Hopkins doesn't need to imagine it, she lived it.

Despite being in science and now living in Boston where I drink my morning coffee on my balcony looking directly over the Charles and onto the MIT campus, I am ashamed to say I didn't know more about this story at MIT.

The book follows primarily Nancy Hopkins, though also a larger cast of female scientists as well, as she breaks social expectations to get her PhD, get a professorship, and run her own highly successful lab.

Hopkins always heard about discrimination, heard stories from the generation of women ahead of her (of which there were a mere handful and there was no such thing as two generations of women ahead of Hopkins), but never thought she herself was discriminated against. Never questioned the actions of male colleagues, many of whom she considered friends. Always assumed that the university was supporting every one equally.

Until a seemingly simple dispute over needing more lab space for tanks to house the zebrafish serving as the model organism for her groundbreaking genetics research led her to take out her tape measure to physically measure the space of her lab compared to her comparable male colleagues.

I think we all know what she found.

Hopkins joined the "women's work" (her words, not mine) late in her career, after she was established, successful, and lauded. But her efforts, along with 15 other tenured female scientists at MIT managed to achieve the unthinkable -- they got MIT to not only cease many of its discriminatory policies, but to publicly admit they were discriminating.

This book made me angry. It made me see absolute red at how Hopkins and her female colleagues were treated, it made me sick to my stomach that many of the lines hurled at her in the 80s were the same that I heard in 2010.

It made me dumbfounded that somehow MIT came out looking like the heroes for admitting they had a problem -- all the more so because the white male university president at the time got the gold star for taking a stand and not the women who worked tirelessly to not only combat the daily death by a million papercuts but to bring it to the president's attention and convince him to do something!

My one star (really half star) deduction is on me, not the author. I went into this book thinking that it would primarily be about Hopkins's time at MIT and her fight against discrimination. But, instead, it was more a biography of Hopkins with substantive forays into the personal and professional lives of other female scientists, and the fight against MIT was just a handful of chapters at the end.

It was still unbelievably compelling and readable, but I think I would have had a different mindset when starting.

Either way, everyone should read this book to better understand the not-so-distant (and still often present) challenges that face female scientists in academia.


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