What are you reading?

Issue: XXXI.6 November - December 2024
Page: 12
Digital Citation

Authors:
Louise Barkhuus

During a sunny fall afternoon, I found myself with a small break between a meeting and picking up my child. What do you do with half an hour of unscheduled time? I went to the local library to browse the shelves of new and noteworthy books. The topic of The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science immediately hooked me. I also appreciated Kate Zernike's intimate biographical style, describing people I identify with and admire.

The book follows several female scientists coming of age in the 1950s and '60s, from their early life and degrees to their Ph.D.s, postdocs, and early tenure-track road. Some made tenure, others stayed in research assistant roles throughout their careers. Glaring discrimination is initially not the focus of The Exceptions. Zernike instead emphasizes the women's struggles as up-and-coming scientists, including trying to fit in and finding a good place to build a career. Academic careers today aren't that different from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Expectations are that individuals will uproot themselves, first to take a postdoc position and then to take another postdoc or a research assistantship, before being able to find a tenure-track position that might lead to a stable life. In the past, male scientists brought their spouses or fiancees with them, while female scientists' personal lives suffered. This was exemplified by molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins, whose first marriage broke down.

The reader also sees how, after decades of subtle discrimination, Hopkins realized the level of animosity and the different treatment she received in her department, such as denials of lab space requests and having to fund a higher percentage of her own salary through external funding compared to the male scientists. She reached out to other women across the MIT campus within the natural sciences, only to find many similar stories.

In 1996, she and 15 other female scientists wrote a report that they presented to the dean of science and then took to MIT's president at the time, Charles M. Vest. Despite the injustices these women had endured in their careers, they also had accomplished significant scientific advances, and it was clear they deserved both compensation and apologies. Their letter, and the president's reply, was picked up by the press. The coverage, however, didn't focus on the fact that the women had been underpaid, unsupported, and left out of important decision-making processes for most of their careers. Instead, it focused on how MIT leadership admitted to and apologized for their actions. In the following years, other universities began acknowledging gender discrimination among their academics. Almost three decades later, however, many of the same issues women experienced still exist.

Expectations are that individuals will uproot themselves, first to take a postdoc position and then to take another postdoc or a research assistantship, before being able to find a tenure-track position.

While The Exceptions' main story is about the subtle ways that women experience academic and scientific careers differently from their male counterparts, it is not the only story. The parallel narrative that makes the book so gripping is that of Hopkins conducting her research. Hopkins's focus was on the repressor molecule and its role in blocking the expression of other genes, a subject that had fascinated her since her undergraduate days in Jim Watson's lab in the early 1960s. She decided midcareer to switch from studying genes in mice to zebra fish due to their much faster multiplication and the embryos' transparency, which makes observation easier.

Zernike also recounts the 2005 incident when Larry Summers, Harvard University president at the time, suggested the reason so few women were in science could be because they were biologically not adept for math and science. I vividly remember the press reporting his response—and my own anger that an educated person in the 21st century would think that women's brains are fundamentally different from men's—but I did not know that Nancy Hopkins was the one who conveyed Summers's words to reporters.

The book ends with biographies of the 16 female scientists, including their scientific accomplishments. At times The Exceptions reads like a thriller, keeping readers in suspense about whether the women will succeed or quit, like so many of their predecessors did. Here's to more and more women persisting in science and academia.

Class is the second memoir by Stephanie Land. Her first, Maid, which was made into a TV series in 2021, chronicled Land's struggle to escape an abusive partner with her young daughter by making a living as a house cleaner. Class follows her to the University of Montana in Missoula, where, in the same unapologetically honest voice as in Maid, she describes the additional struggles she faced while working toward her degree. What makes it relevant in academia is the detailed and sometimes harsh description of student life as both a mature student and a single parent. Land is fiercely driven to finish her bachelor's in creative writing, with the aim of getting an MFA in creative nonfiction. She has to plan classes around her daughter's daycare schedule and supplement student loans with food stamps and extra work, which she does in the early hours before her daughter wakes up.

The title is not only a dual commentary on Land's environment but also refers to the dissonance that she feels as she socializes with younger, middle-class students who take their access to student jobs, loans, and parental support for granted. Land's poverty is unrelenting, partly due to lack of family support and partly due to the significantly higher costs of being a single mother as well as a student. She struggles between fulfilling her social needs and ambitions and her desire to spend time with her daughter.

While the single mother situation strongly resonated with me, it was also eye-opening to see class and university infrastructure from the student perspective. As teachers, we often become removed from this perspective. In Class we see Land's struggles with money, friends, dating—all intertwined with classwork—while she does her best to keep her young daughter safe and happy. Her memoir provided me, as someone within the world of academia, with a unique perspective from a different yet not uncommon student. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Author

Louise Barkhuus is a visiting professor at Rutgers University and a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on privacy behavior and perceptions within sociotechnical systems, particularly in areas of location-based technologies and AI-mediated contexts. [email protected]