In The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kate Zernike expands on her front-page March 1999 Boston Sunday Globe article about MIT's long history of undervaluing its female faculty. This is an in-depth, revelatory, enraging and ultimately triumphant account of a group of women who brought to light the insidious ways in which bias undermined their careers in science. Surprisingly, MIT's admission was not the result of a lawsuit, but rather because 16 women, "who had started as strangers, working in secret, and gathered their case so methodically--like the scientists they were--that MIT could not ignore them." Leading the charge was Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist who was trying to identify the genes essential for development. When she requested more room for her zebrafish tanks, she was denied. So Hopkins painstakingly measured every square inch of the laboratories in her building, bringing hard data to the dean showing that on average the male faculty had much more lab space than their female counterparts.
Hopkins granted Zernike access to the papers she'd kept during this time, and the result is an intimate look at her life and career, at a time when "unconscious bias" was not yet in common parlance. In Zernike's hands, this is a thrilling story: we know the outcome, but the ride is both frustrating--how could Hopkins put up with this for so long?--and then exhilarating when she becomes radical in her fight for equality. --Marilyn Dahl