Cracking the Ivory Tower's Glass Ceiling

How 16 women scientists banded together to prove unequal treatment—and informed lasting change

- ΚΑΤΕ ZERNIKE

Women in academia and the sciences are finally getting their due: The key to mRNA vaccines which helped bring COVID-19 vaccines to market so speedily-came from the lab of 65-year-old Katalin Karikó; Rochelle Walensky leads the Centers for Disease Control and this fall, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and six out of the eight Ivy League universities will be led by women presidents. While opportunities for women in academia and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers have a long way to go, things are significantly better, and that is a result of an unparalled group effort by 16 female members of the MIT faculty to bring about change. Their work resulted in a groundbreaking admission by the school in 1999 of a pattern of marginalization of its female faculty. As a result of the report, the ranks of tenured women faculty at MIT grew significantly: universities across the country began fixing the gender gap in salaries which many called "Nancy Hopkins raises" after the ringleader in the MIT group; the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE program spent $365 million over the next 25 years nationwide to establish programs to identify and address gender disparities and many other inequalities were addressed. The story of Nancy Hopkins and how she and her 15 colleagues fought for fair treatment is told in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kate Zernike's THE EXCEPTIONS (Scribner, February). In the excerpt below from her book, Zernike shares the roots of how she came to research this triumph.