MIT has posted Nancy Hopkins’ talk at the recent women in science meeting at MIT. The title of her talk: “A Celebration (with caveats.)”
In 2005, Hopkins called out then Harvard president Lawrence Summers for suggesting that innate differences between men and women might be the cause of women’s failure to excel in science and engineering. Her public reaction won her lot of support and quite a bit of hate mail. Despite the latter, she still uses the incident to make her point. She sees it as an example of the societal bias that persists, despite recent, positive changes for women in science.
In her talk, she called Summer’s 2005 comments “a stunning, public declaration of where this problem comes from. It comes from us and the society around us… It is unfounded,
unconscious bias itself that needs to change — men and women’s undervaluation of
women and women’s undervaluation of themselves.”
The only defense, she said, is to keep the issue on the table and to keep dealing with it.
More here:
Also, a sample of NNB tweets from this session::
Panel Discussion I: Effective Practices for Recruitment, Mentoring, and Retention
■Lotte Bailyn, T Wilson (1953) Professor of Management Emerita, MIT Sloan School of Management
■Mildred Dresselhaus, MIT Institute Professor Emerita
■Cherry A. Murray ‘73 PhD ’78, John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Professor of Physics, Harvard University
■Abigail Stewart, Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan