A Conversation with Kate Zernike

Nadine Lee:  You're listening to Mobility in Motion, a podcast produced by Dallas Area Rapid Transit. I'm your host, Nadine Lee, president and CEO of DART.

Nancy Hopkins was 19 when she heard a lecture by Nobel Prize winner James Watson, the co-author of a paper suggesting the double helix structure of DNA. It was the early 1960s, and she was inspired to start a career in science.

By the late 1990s, she was a geneticist and tenured professor at MIT. Despite her success, she was seeing a difference in the way she and other female colleagues were being treated. Her lab space was smaller, she was cut out of opportunities.  Discrimination can be vague and subtle, so she took her science skills and started measuring her space versus the space of men who had lower ranks.

She gathered evidence, and with 15 other female colleagues who had similar experiences, made an appointment with the dean to present their case. Their work triggered a national dialogue around sexism in science. A quarter of a century later, this story still feels familiar to me. Right now, I'm an executive of a major public transportation system, but my education and early career was as a civil engineer.

I've always seen myself as a scientist first, and it's through this lens that I connected to this episode's story.

In 2023, I heard an interview with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Kate Zernike, who documented Nancy Hopkins story in her book, “The Exceptions, Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science.” In her book, Kate Zernike writes about how women are often marginalized in the workplace and sometimes unconsciously pushed to the sidelines by their male co-workers.

I got a chance to speak with Kate Zernike at a recent conference.

Kate, I'm so happy to have you here.

Kate Zernike: I'm so glad to be here. Thank you, Nadine.

Nadine Lee: So let's talk a little bit about Nancy Hopkins. Let's talk first about marginalization generally.

Kate Zernike: I think that is the word that resonated with a lot of people. And, you know, I'll say by the time I had finished reporting for the book, I knew exactly what the title was going to be. I knew it was “Th e Exceptions” because that word kept coming up, you know, exceptions exceptional. But I didn't have a subtitle, and I like to joke that the subtitle should be “The Exceptions, A Universal Story,” because it really isn't just women in science. There's a scene in the book, a very pivotal scene that was the lead of the story when I first read about Nancy Hopkins in The Boston Globe in 1999.

And it's Nancy, who's a tenured professor of biology at MIT, and she's taking her tape measure around the labs. And she measures and she figures out that she has less lab space, less office space than even men of less stature than she is. And I think for a lot of people, the tape measure really resonates.

Like the tape measure is now in the MIT museum, because it gave people a way to talk about something, as you say, that we've all been feeling. Right. And so marginalization was a really new concept to me, when I first heard about this. I was a young reporter at the time. I was 30 years old, and it really was the sort of this gradual thing that's happening. Right. Like many of the things that happened to Nancy Hopkins in this book are not things where most of us would raise our hand and say, hey, I'm being discriminated against. But it's this pattern. It's this, you know, subtle, like you're just kind of shoved aside a little bit and then suddenly you find yourself way, way you know, completely off the field, essentially.

So I think marginalization is really, you know, it can come down to really small things like the email that you're not included on or the project that you're not included on or somebody thinks, you know, they develop a project and it's developed over a dinner and will Oh, they didn't invite you. Oh well, because you're not in the usual group, right?

So it's the small slights that add up over time. But I think it's really like it's a very profound concept because so many of us do find ourselves especially sort of mid- and late-career like, well, wait a minute, how do I end up here? And there's this feeling of like, Oh my God, I was put out to pasture and I how did I not raise my hand?

Nadine Lee: Or how did I not notice? Right?

Kate Zernike:Exactly.

Nadine Lee: And not just seeing it, because the other piece in the book that I find very interesting is that it's not that Nancy didn't see things.

Kate Zernike: Yeah,

Nadine Lee: She just actually thought maybe. Maybe it's just me. She blamed herself.

Kate Zernike: Exactly.

Nadine Lee: Yeah, maybe. Maybe I'm the exception. Or maybe. Maybe, you know, like, you could see it happening in other people. She just didn't think it was happening to her.

Kate Zernike: What this story really taught me was that it's not just about opening the door for women or for any marginalized group, right? It's how you treat people once they get in the door.

But, you know, when you talk about kind of understanding and seeing how this happens to Nancy, like sleight by sleight by sleight, that was kind of the trick. The challenge and the opportunity of the book.

At the time, the women talked about marginalization, what they also described as unconscious bias. Right. Which is, now we're so familiar with that term. At the time, it was a new term. The first big academic paper on unconscious bias was in 1995. So when these women talk about it, 1998, it was like, oh, wow, that's a revelation to me.

But then I come back to write this book 20 years later, and it's like, how am I going to get this across to people when many people think unconscious bias is either nonexistent or we've cured it or, you know, Oh, that's just wokeism, right? Like, don't talk to me about that.

But so I think it's really important, it was very important to me to tell the story of how this marginalization happens and how it affects Nancy's personal life, her professional life, how it affects her view of herself, and how it does really make her it turns her into an activist, which is kind of remarkable. But again, so trying to sort of get across to people how this happens on a day to day level.

And I do think it resonates with women. And I have a lot of women who say, you know, thank you for this. That was so painful. And I always feel like I just said like, I'm so sorry, you know. But like, thanks a lot. I'm glad you like the book.

Nadine Lee: Well, I think, you know, it may be painful to relive experiences through the eyes of Nancy Hopkins. I know I've had conversations with some of my female executives, and they really for a long time refused to believe that some of these things were happening.

Kate Zernike: Yeah. One of the questions I get most from women and as I've spoken about the book in the last years since it came out, is what's the right response in that moment right?

Like, do I respond to this person? Do I shut them down or is that too confrontational and they'll become alienated? Do I talk to them afterwards? So I do think it's really tricky. But when you talk about, some of the women literally described what it was like, they said they had blinders on because they were so afraid that if they paid attention to this or that, they would get thrown off track.

There are so many of the critical moments in this book, are those moments of connection, right? There were 15 women with tenure at MIT in 1994 when these women started and 197 men, because there were so few of them, they were all working in different buildings and there weren't women in their departments. There were women in the department, but there weren't women in their buildings who they could talk to and compare notes with.

When they do finally start to compare notes, it's like, Oh my God, someone else feels the way I do. And it's so empowering.

And so there's this one moment where Nancy, she first has a conversation with one woman who's about, I think, 15 years older than she is. And that woman says, yes, I've seen this, too. And then Nancy says, Do you think there might be others? And it's like the whole world opens up to them, you know, and suddenly they have a path forward.

Nadine Lee: Part of this is connecting the dots for women of today. Faster than it happened for Nancy. Right.

Kate Zernike: Yes.

Nadine Lee: And so I want to get to that at some point in this discussion. But I want to go back to this idea of the meritocracy, too,

Kate Zernike: Yeah,

Nadine Lee: because we do all very genuinely want to believe that we can get by on our own merits.

Kate Zernike: Yeah.

Nadine Lee: And that's really just not the case.

Kate Zernike: We all have this idea that meritocracy is like gravity, right? Like an equation, and we can figure it out. The reality is merit is conferred, right? Like people are making those judgments. They're human beings.

Kate Zernike: And so the easiest thing to do is what we all do. We kind of revert to what everyone's done in the past. One thing that Nancy was very worried about when I started doing this book was she was very worried. She wanted me to use—she was like, Do you have to use real names? When I was talking about the men in the various things that happened to her? And I was like, Well, yeah, I'm a journalist. I do, you know, use real names. But I promised her, I'm going to talk to all of these men and anyone who will talk to me, and I'm going to get their side of the story and I'm going to tell people their side of the story.

And in the end, the compliment that she paid me that I really appreciated was that it sounds kind of funny, but she said, I never understood my own life until I read your book. Meaning she was really wondering, like, why did these men treat her this way? Was she really even to this day was like, was it something about me? And when you read the book, you really understand that this is everyone was playing the role, that culture assigned to them. We're all acting the way we've been raised to act in some cases, like it's not unconscious bias, it's pretty egregious. But but I do think, like, if we understand that, that like this is all something about our culture, I think it makes it easier for people to take.

Nadine Lee: I want to talk about MIT, because not only was it very remarkable that Nancy and the other scientists took such a scientific approach to making their case, but holy cow, MIT owned it,

Kate Zernike: Totally.

Nadine Lee: You know, and so let's talk a little bit about how important that was

Kate Zernike: Yeah.

Nadine Lee: and how groundbreaking that was and what that meant.

Kate Zernike: Yeah, these women had come together, suspected discrimination, and then they were like, Huh, let's investigate that. And they did what scientists do, which was to gather the information and gather the data. And they also gathered stories because there is power, you know, huge power in stories. And those stories did make a difference particularly in bringing men along.

So they present that they gather all these statistics and they present them to the dean, and then they ultimately produce this thing called the Report on the Status of Women faculty. The interesting thing was that this was not supposed to become public. It only became public because of my newspaper story. So they weren't thrilled about that. But they write this report and then the chair of the faculty just happened to be a woman, who had since the 1960s been studying the issues for women at work.

She felt like this report could be a real lesson to the rest of the faculty at MIT. So she's like, Why don't we publish this in the faculty newsletter? So they write a version of it for the faculty newsletter, and Nancy Hopkins happens to be speaking to the Knight Fellows in Journalism at MIT, which is a program that MIT has run for years.

And one of the reporters who was a fellow in that program raised her hand and said, What's it like to be a woman in science? And she said, interesting, you should ask, because we've just produced this report. And the most remarkable thing is the president, who's a guy named Chuck Best, an engineer. He wrote two paragraphs at the top of this report, but they're widely quoted. I have always believed that gender discrimination in contemporary higher education is part perception and part reality.

True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance. So in other words, he was like, “This is real.” And so to have the president and a man and this prominent institution say it, that was huge. And the guy who leads that fellowship program, he said to her later, like, this is really incredible. Do you mind if I call people I know at The Boston Globe and The New York Times. She was like, Oh, no, don't do that. And so then she thought about it and she was like, Actually, this is really remarkable that MIT is doing this. And so she called them and said, sure, if you want to spread the word, you can.

So that guy phoned someone at The New York Times, phoned someone at the Boston Globe, and someone relayed this tip to me. They said there's something going on with women and discrimination at MIT. So that's when I called Nancy and found that I started researching the story and I said I wanted to do the story. And then this woman, the chair of the faculty, got word of this, and she was like, oh, we don't want, we don't want this to happen. I said, Well, we're going to write the story anyway. And so then they were like, okay, we just really don't want the faculty to read about this in the Boston Globe before they read about it from us.

So we struck this deal that they would publish it in the faculty newsletter at midnight on Friday, and our story would go live at noon the next day or something like that. I guess I wanted to go live. I'm not even sure we were online at that point, but it was going to be in the paper. But again, MIT did not see what was coming. What was coming was the story runs on Sunday, March 21st, 1999. The next morning, the dean of Science, a guy who's been very helpful to these women, arrives in his office. There's a film crew from the CBS Evening News outside of his office. Nancy picks up her phone. It's like, you know, Radio Australia is calling her like they were just besieged with phone calls and camera crews.

On Tuesday of that week, The New York Times put the story and its front page and then suddenly they were getting emails not only from women across the country,   but women around the world saying, you know, as we've been talking about, “Oh my God, I thought I was the only one who felt this way. It's I'm so glad to hear that I'm not so alone.”

So at that point, yeah, at MIT, when Chuck Best, the president was like, “Oh, okay, now we're famous for this. We have to do something about it.” So someone, you know, someone commented like only MIT could get credit for discriminating against women, right. But again, they did the right thing. And there was the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Ford Foundation gave them money to work with other universities to do similar kinds of investigations at other universities, particularly top universities in the United States. So, yeah, I really do credit MIT with moving forward and taking credit for this.

Nadine Lee: Yeah, definitely. Kudos to them. I want to kind of move our conversation a little bit to what do we do about it, because, you know, we have all these sort of complex, you know, emotions and opinions and behaviors and attitudes that contribute to the experience of women…

Kate Zernike: Yeah.

Nadine Lee: … in any industry. Right. And so one of the things that I often struggle with, how do you really put together a really clear case for what's happening to women so that you can not only articulate it to people, to develop some awareness around it, but also start to move everyone to solutions, right?

Kate Zernike: Yeah. So. So the data again, the tape measure let's just use the tape measure the, you know, emblem of the data. The tape measure, the data was really important. But the other thing that changed minds at MIT, you know, among the men were these stories.

So just to take the first example, you know, these 16 women come together and they write a letter to the dean of science and they say, we want to have a committee to look into, you know, whether there are discrepancies between men and women. And they're you know, they're worried. They spent a long time writing this letter. They're very worried about it. They you know, they send it to them and they make an appointment to go see them. And they're convinced that like, oh, my God, we we use the D word. We talked about discrimination. He's going to he will have told the president he will have called the university's lawyers like we're going to be in trouble.

And they go to his office and he's like, he he doesn't even it's the end of the summer. He's been away. He doesn't know why they're there. He hasn't read their letter. There's six of these women sitting around his conference room table, and he knows because he's the dean of science and these are all scientists in his school. He knows each one of those women and he knows their story. And he says later, had any of those women come to me individually, I would have said I would have explained it as the exception. Right. Like I would have explained it by the circumstances or, oh, that one has a personality conflict with this guy. That one was shut out of that project. So she didn't get the money Maybe she should have had.

But hearing them and seeing them one after another. These six women, they tell their story, what their career has been like at MIT. And again, just like with the data he sees the pattern. The more we can establish patterns for people, that's really compelling. But if we all we also have to be kind of honest and self-reflective and maybe perform like these little mind shifts with ourselves are like, you know, thought experiments. Like when you hear information from a woman, stop and ask yourself, okay, if it were a guy delivering this information, would I think about it differently. Why would I take it differently?

When you hear a guy saying something and you're like, Oh yeah, he's right. Things like, Wait a minute, if it were Nadine telling me this, would I take it as seriously? Right? Like, so I just think it sounds so basic, but I do think it's just like we all have to kind of perform these little thought experiments with ourselves.

I think, you know, just the fact of having more numbers and having more women who you can see in these roles and who are going to maybe have different styles of leadership, like it's going to it's going to change the culture and therefore the biases will pass. Like it's no longer going to be the exception when there's a woman running a large transportation system. But again, we have to change that culture. And one of the ways we do that is just sheerly through numbers.

Nadine Lee: Yeah, that's actually exactly right. I think because I can tell you that, you know, in my role, I regularly explore, you know, what are the things that I'm making assumptions about.

Kate Zernike: Yeah.

Nadine Lee: So I, I'm so bummed because we're running out of time. But I'm wondering, you know, what advice do you have for women who are, you know, just starting in their careers? And I mean, we hope they never experience the things that Nancy experienced. But, you know, what are your thoughts about that?

Kate Zernike: Yeah. You know, sometimes I think I worry that the message is like, raise your hand and object to every little slight. That's not my message. But I do think the message is like, I just hear a lot of like, really painful. You know, I'm thinking of two women in particular, when I did my book talk in Cambridge last year, when the book first came out and these two women got up and they talked about their enormous self-doubt and they wanted like, how do you deal with self-doubt?      

So I guess if I had to boil it down, it's like, take yourself seriously. Ask yourself why am I thinking that I don't have the potential to do this. Why is that? Who's telling you that? Is that you? Is that what society? No. Believe in yourself. I mean, I think that's really like you belong there, right? Like you really. You can do this. You are enough.

The the first female graduate of MIT was a woman named Ellen Swallow Richards. She's really incredible. She. She was the first person to develop water sanitation in this country. Really amazing. She was also a founder of the American Association of University Women. She was the founder of the field of Home Economics, which is what women scientists did at the time. And she used to sign her letters, Keep thinking. And I just love that because it's just like, stay curious. Right? Like. Like. Question when something happens to you. Question: Like, just think about what's happening to you. So whether it's your self-doubt or something that happens to you, what's going on here? What can I do about this?

Nadine Lee: That is awesome.

Nadine Lee: I love the idea of, you know, just take yourself seriously, you know, because I've been struggling with, you know, how do we you know, how do we how do we share with, you know, especially young women, you know, how do we share with them that they're going to be fine no matter what happens?

Kate Zernike: Yeah.

Nadine Lee: Like, they've got to just keep going and having courage, right?

Kate Zernike: Yeah, Yeah. Keep calm. So for my first book, not this one from her first book I had, I had a little post-it note. My husband loves to remind me of it, and I just on the Post-it note — I would I would refer to so often that I actually took to, like highlighting over it. So it was like black and pink and pencil marked by the end.

“Keep going.” That doesn't mean that you do what Nancy and  a lot of these other women did, keep going and don't pay attention to the stuff that's happening to you. Do you do need to pay attention to it, but you also just need to like keep remembering the thing that makes you passionate about what you do. And don't forget that because that is really such a motivator. It was a motivator for these women. It's a motivator for me and honestly, it's like we just got to hang on.

Nadine Lee: Wonderful words of wisdom. Kate Zernike, thank you so much for taking time with us. I'm so happy to meet you. And really, it's such an honor.

Kate Zernike: It was such a pleasure, Nadine, and thank you.

Nadine Lee:  That was Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Kate Zernike, author of the exceptions, Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the fight for women in science. 

You're listening to Mobility in Motion. I'm your host, Nadine Lee. This episode was produced by The Glue and Sasha Woodruff, edited by Jim Gates with music by B. C. Campbell. 

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