The Exceptions by Kate Zernike

This is a story that doesn't need to be told to too many women in academics, because most if not all of us have lived some version of the story. I loved Lessons in Chemistry, which puts a somewhat sardonic spin on the unbearable uphill battle that women, some quite brilliant, like Nancy Hopkins, and some more ordinary, like myself, have faced in trying to be respected, included, and effective. I found myself seething through the entire book, which undoubtedly made it seem longer than it actually is, but the accuracy is astounding, and there are many seemingly unbelievable details in here that I have experienced myself. This is a chronicle of discrimination against women in science. And because of her extraordinary achievement, Hopkins will go down in history as a champion who fought to make things more equitable for women in STEM. But the story is more than that. More accurately, it is the story of a scientist who wanted nothing more than to do her research. And she wasn’t willing to let anything stand in her way. Nancy Hopkins has an unbelievable pedigree for a woman in science. Harvard educated, her scientific training started when she was an undergraduate student working with Nobel laureate James Watson in Harvard College labs, and continued when she was a graduate student working with Mark Ptashne. She joined the faculty at MIT in 1972, and was so successful in science that she her mentor and collaborators have taken the highest honors--she is a superstar. Sadly, MIT did not treat her like one, and while she had international fame, she almost didn't get tenure because a guy didn't like her. She took it all, let it roll off her, lost her marriage, didn't have kids, all because she saw that it would get her exactly nowhere in the atmosphere she was in. It was the unfair allocation of lab space when she really need it that turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. And because square footage can be readily determined, Hopkins had a clear course of action. In a classic story, she spent nights crouching in the dark, measuring the amount of lab space occupied by the faculty members in her department. Those data, in combination with other evidence, served as the basis for the report that would be shown to the MIT administration. She found other women on the MIT campus who were experiencing similar discrimination—the 15 other tenured women in the school of science at MIT--and together they fought back.