Like many women scientists, MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins was focused on research for most of her career. But struggles to get more lab space pushed her to become a gender-equity advocate.

Caitlin Stier

When the story broke about Lawrence Summers’s controversial remarks on women in science in 2005, Nancy Hopkins was surprised at the sensation it sparked. In the Boston Globe article about Summers’s fateful speech, the MIT biology professor and gender-equity advocate—who was in the audience for Summers’s talk—was quoted saying that she would have either “blacked out or thrown up” had she not walked out.

MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins has been a tireless advocate for women in science.

“The reaction just completely overwhelmed me. And it was thrilling in a way, that so many women, so many people could see that this was so awful,” says Hopkins. “Yet, had he said that 10 years ago no one would even bat an eyelash.”

It has taken time for universities to pay closer attention to gender-equity issues in the sciences. Even for Hopkins, it also took her a while to realize the extent of sex discrimination. Early in her career, Hopkins was focused on her research on bacterial viruses and later on switched fields to study DNA and then RNA cancer viruses. She switched again to work on zebrafish, eventually developing a method for insertional mutagenesis in zebrafish, a type of genetic screen that induces mutations using retroviruses to tag and identify new genes of interest.

Yet, it wasn’t until later in her career that Hopkins turned towards advocacy. In the mid-1990s, she spearheaded a study of discrimination against women science faculty at MIT, which later raised awareness of the issue on campuses across the US.

Bold career moves

Hopkins got hooked on molecular biology during her junior year at Radcliffe College after a one-hour class with James Watson. Watson mentored Hopkins and pushed her to continue on to a PhD during a time when few women did so.

By the time Hopkins finished her graduate training at Harvard in 1971, she was ready to switch from the comfortably established field of bacterial viruses to begin new work on cancer viruses at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Only a few years later, Hopkins earned an appointment at MIT’s newly established Center for Cancer Research.

Hopkins dove into her work and was blind to the barriers she faced as a woman researcher. Like many women at that time, she was going to leave science and become a stay-at-home mother. But a divorce and her decision to not remarry helped her career continue.

Fighting for space

For years, Hopkins says, she observed male colleagues harshly critiquing her female peers’ research, not realizing that women were being held to higher standards than men.

“I didn’t understand that that’s what discrimination looked like,” says Hopkins. “You always think, ‘Well, I’ll just work harder. I’ll figure out a way around it.’”

But after 15 years of research on tumor viruses, Hopkins encountered an obstacle she couldn’t work around. Cancer research had progressed dramatically since the discovery of oncogenes, and Hopkins wanted to shift gears and study development using genetic screens in zebrafish. Yet after her sabbatical with Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Hopkins struggled to acquire the additional space at MIT she needed for her experiments, despite being tenured.

Hopkins suspected that male junior faculty members had more lab space. So, as a scientist would, she decided to gather data. She went from the lab to lab, measuring the space of each to prove her case. Consulting with other faculty members about her frustrations, she was surprised to learn she was not alone in her struggles.

Together with 15 other tenured women faculty from MIT’s School of Science, they prompted the establishment of a committee, which systematically investigated differences in salary, lab space, resources, prizes, and teaching obligations between male and female faculty at the school. Evidence of inequality was found in all of these areas. Interviews with senior women faculty also revealed that these women felt increasingly marginalized as they moved up the ranks at the university.

The study made national headlines when MIT leaders, including then-president Charles Vest, admitted that gender discrimination was a problem at MIT. It led to changes at the university, including salary increases, more-inclusive hiring practices, and more family-oriented policies for faculty. Other universities took notice and followed MIT’s example.

“The MIT report and the way in which it was backed by the MIT administration had impact around the world,” says Barbara Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard. “Subsequent to the report, Nancy invested significant time and effort meeting with women on campuses throughout the United States. And, as a result, she has had a significant impact on individual women and institutes of higher education in helping them to understand how to assess and often improve the actual situation for women in science on their campuses.”

Battle not over

Despite the fact that the number of women science and engineering faculty at MIT has increased by 49 percent since the publication of the committee’s initial study in 1999, Hopkins still sees more work ahead.

“Young women today are just the way I was when I was young,” she says. “They don’t understand particularly why we should have a woman president. They don’t see why it matters that someone thinks they are genetically inferior because, after all, they are doing well. They don’t see why that’s an obstacle to them. And it is an obstacle to them.”

Still, Hopkins says she’s seen much cultural change over the past decade. Talking in the workplace about children is no longer taboo, but women researchers still need to advocate for more changes to fully resolve these problems, she says. The growing number of female leaders at research institutions and early-career women scientists have the tools and data necessary to make further progress, she adds.

Newly married last July at the age of 64, Hopkins divides her time between New York, where her husband lives, and her lab in Cambridge. She continues to advocate for women in science, hoping to resolve this issue for future generations. “I would like to see this issue go away in my lifetime. Wouldn’t that be great? It’s something to work for.”