Review of THE EXCEPTIONS
Fighting sexism in science at MIT
This is my 100th book review posted on Bookmarked Reads! I’m grateful for all my readers of my small but mighty book newsletter. Thank you for your support.
Today’s colleges campuses are full of women: women make up a greater proportion of college students than men and earn more degrees than men; faculties in many departments are female dominated; and women regularly earn top prizes and are praised for their accomplishments. But women’s equality in academia, and especially science, looked very different until quite recently. Women were excluded from elite institutions until very recently – women undergraduates couldn’t earn Harvard degrees until 1963 and couldn’t enter the main library until the 1967. Tenure-track faculty were almost never women, and sex-based discrimination in hiring was common and accepted.
The recency of sexism in the academy and science is made crystal clear in the story of Nancy Hopkins, an accomplished biochemist at MIT. In The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science, Kate Zernike tells the riveting story of how the reality of sex discrimination in science at MIT went mainstream in the 1990s – and started a new movement.
The Exceptions centers on Nancy Hopkins, documenting her education as an undergraduate at Radcliffe (Harvard’s school for women before the university went co-ed) working with the famed James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. She went on to graduate school at Yale before returning to Harvard to complete her PhD. She eventually went on to work at MIT where the story really begins to take off.
The entire book reads almost like a narrative crime story with a third person perspective of what Nancy was missing. For years, she was sure that she was treated equally to her male peers. She had supportive male supervisors and mentors. But once she became faculty, all bets were off. She was now competition. She was regularly excluded, her ideas and lab space taken without consideration, and removed from teaching assignments, despite publishing at a high rate, earning more grant money than her peers, and switching research fields three times throughout her career – and excelling each time.
Eventually she teamed up with other tenured women at MIT to do what scientists do: collect data to show the patterns of sex discrimination across pay, space, teaching assignments, grants, and decision-making power at the university. No longer could individual incidents be ignored or written off as idiosyncratic events. This whole section of the story is downright exciting as a reader. The work, the organizing, the impact — you can’t wait to keep reading.
I don’t want to give away all the juicy details because this book as an incredible reading experience and I don’t want to ruin it for those who want to read it. It’s engrossing, a book you won’t want to put down, with an incredible climax to the story. A brilliant example of why I love history of science. Zernike is a fantastic writer and I hope I get to read more from her in the future.
Published: February 2023
Publisher: Scribner
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix by Howard Markel (2021) | Read my (first) review
An Academic Life: A Memoir by Hanna Holborn Gray (2018) | Read my review
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