The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has been found guilty of gender discrimination for firing a female researcher in 2005.
On 28 January 2004, Lynn Hlatky, an associate professor at Dana-Farber who studied radiation damage to chromosomes, learned that her job in the Division of Radiation and Cancer Biology was being eliminated because her scientific interests did not align with the department’s new focus. That focus: DNA damage and repair.
Hlatky cried foul in a lawsuit that would drag out for over five years. On 21 June, a jury at the Suffolk Superior Court in Boston agreed with Hlatky and awarded her $50,000 plus interest and legal fees. Dana-Farber, which is based in Boston and is affiliated with Harvard Medical School, maintains that it did not discriminate against Hlatky.
The case is unusual: gender discrimination lawsuits aren’t often seen in the sciences anymore, says Joan Herbers, president of the Association for Women in Science. Medical institutes are hardly immune to gender bias, she notes, but a spate of discrimination suits twenty to thirty years ago taught most institutions to be more careful in their dealings with female faculty.
Nevertheless, the success of Hlatky’s suit may prompt more women to speak up. “It could spur other cases like this,” says Herbers. “Certainly it will cause people to think about their own situation and whether it’s similar.”
Indeed, Hlatky’s attorneys noted a 2007 report from Dana-Farber which found that women were underrepresented among the institute’s faculty, that endowed professorships were exclusively held by men, and that women were more likely than men to describe the work environment as non-supportive.
Dana-Farber, however, says that it has worked hard to support the women in its institute. “Our commitment to a workplace that is inclusive, diverse and respectful is as important as our responsibility to determine our own academic agenda and scientific priorities,” read a statement sent to Nature by spokesman William Schaller.
Schaller adds that a male researcher, Philip Hahnfeldt, also lost his job when Hlatky’s department shifted its research focus.
UPDATE: Hlatky points out that Hahnfeldt was actually in her lab at the time. “When I was terminated and my lab shut he lost his job —he was collateral damage,” she writes.
But losing her job was only the final link in a chain of discriminatory actions against Hlatky, maintains Lisa Arrowood, one of Hlatky’s lawyers and a founding partner at the Boston law firm Todd & Weld LLP. Hlatky had a smaller lab space and lower salary than her male colleagues, according to her legal complaint, and she published more and brought in more grant money than three of her male colleagues who kept their jobs.
Hlatky now directs the Center of Cancer Systems Biology at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, also in Boston.
Arrowood notes it can be particularly challenging to convince a jury of gender discrimination in medical research. The evidence is often subtle, she says, and the institutions are highly revered in the local community. But gender discrimination is more common in medical research than many people realize, she argues.
“It’s a dirty little secret because the women in these hospitals won’t talk about it out loud,” she says. “Once you say ‘discrimination’, you’re blacklisted.”
Image: Lynn Hlatky via St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center.