Kate Zernike Illuminates Women in Science in 'The Exceptions'

New York Times reporter and journalist, Kate Zernike, visits us to share her latest book, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science. Based on the story she broke for The Boston Globe, The Exceptions tells the true story of sixteen female scientists who spoke out against the discrimination of female staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although the story came out in 1999, the events in the book took place years before then, beginning in 1963. The book focuses on Dr. Nancy Hopkins, an American molecular biologist, who was a reluctant leader for the cause, but whose papers Zernike had access to and was therefore able to use in her research. “So the book starts with Nancy Hopkins in 1963 when she’s a junior at Radcliffe… and she’s 19 years old, she’s at a total crossroads in her life…she doesn’t know what she’s going to do with her life… and she goes to this one hour biology lecture taught by James Watson… and in that one hour lecture she just completely falls in love with science, with the scientific pursuit, particularly with DNA and the promise and potential of DNA to answer all these questions about people and heredity… and then in 1973, she gets a job at MIT… the book takes you through the 70’s, the 80’s, the early 90’s… what the book shows you is that in a very subtle way that discrimination might look different but it was still very much there.” At the time, Nancy and the other women scientists who were employed by MIT were all working separately and in different buildings alongside their male colleagues. Eventually, each of them began experiencing their own discrimination, unbeknownst to the other women, but dismissed it thinking it may have been due to conflicting personalities or simply working on a competitive floor. However, the discrimination persisted until finally in 1999, Nancy and her female colleagues decided to file complaints to the administration and speak out against the university. This lead to MIT’s admission that they did, in fact, discriminate for years against their female faculty and this event paved the way for several other universities to address their own gender equity issues.

Regarding the women, Zernike remarked, “I’d always remembered these women and what they taught me… and because my father was a scientist, my grandfather was, that whole side of the family, they’re deeply invested in physics and math, this was really a labor of love for me. This book took me… I started reporting in January 2018 and I finished in January of 2022… I really felt like I stewed in this, I marinated in it… So I really felt like I wanted to do these women justice. I wanted to do the science justice…” Additionally, “I thought that if I could tell this intimate story of what it’s like to live with this on a day-to-day basis, as these women did, that I could, sort of, contribute to the larger conversation about discrimination against women and what it looks like now in the 21st century.”