Life/Work - Issue 35

No one did that more openly than Robert Birgeneau, a physicist who had been the dean of science at MIT for eight years and who later described his first meeting with Hopkins as "akin to a religious experience." Even before he tried to assess a factual basis for the complaint, Birgeneau recognized that there was a serious problem. "If these outstanding and high-achieving people -- in the top 1% of women in the country by any measure -- are miserable, that is a crucial kind of data point," he told "Science" magazine. With support from Charles Vest -- but over initial objections by five of the six male science-department chairmen at MIT -- a committee composed of women and men was established to investigate the complaint.

"The key conclusion that one gets from the report," wrote Lotte Bailyn, a longtime faculty member at MIT, "is that gender discrimination in the 1990s was subtle but pervasive." In fact, much of the discrimination was not so subtle. The percentage of tenured female science-faculty members at MIT -- about 8% -- had not changed significantly in two decades. In general, salaries for senior women remained substantially lower than those for comparable men. In some departments, women had 50% less laboratory space than their male counterparts had, and they were far less represented on key committees than males were.

These statistics are borne out nationally, both in science and in medicine. Women now constitute 43% of all U.S. medical students, for example, but their representation within academic medicine drops precipitously throughout their careers. They make up 37% of residents, 27% of full-time medical-school faculty, and less than 11% of full professors. In the natural sciences and in engineering, only 12.5% of senior faculty members are women. Those percentages have not changed appreciably during the past 15 years. Women are also less likely than men are to have dedicated lab space, grant support, and protected time for research.

While the subtler forms of discrimination that tenured women experience are harder for advocates to quantify and easier for critics to disparage, they're often compelling. For Kathryn Reed, 49, a tenured professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, the turning point came when a female colleague's contract was not renewed on the grounds that she treated subordinates badly. "Her behavior was very similar to the behavior of male faculty," Reed told me. "I didn't like the behavior of either gender, but it was tolerated in men and not in women. I figured that if I went to the authorities and pointed that out, they would repent and behave equitably. That shows some naivete on my part, but I had been working under the assumption that life was fair. Instead, I was told, 'It's not your problem. You are a good woman, and she is a bad woman.' "

Hopkins's crusade has helped to inspire women across the country. And MIT's actions have inspired universities such as Caltech, UCLA, and the University of Arizona to study discrimination issues more formally.

Other institutions are slower to respond. At Stanford, for example, John Hennessy, the university's provost, has said that he sees no "systemic problem," even though women represent only about 19.8% of the school's faculty -- far below the national average of 28.3% -- and even though the university is the target of a formal discrimination complaint by a group of its most senior women. But Stanford has earmarked a fund that's designed in part to recruit female faculty members and has launched a series of campus lunches at which female faculty members can air their concerns. At Harvard, where only 11 of 163 tenured professors in the natural sciences are women, a subcommittee of the Board of Overseers is trying to find a reason for the disproportion.

Even at MIT and other institutions committed to addressing the gender issue, inequalities are far from resolved. MIT has redressed salary and research-space disparities in the school of science and has increased by 40% the number of tenured female professors. But women still remain a small minority of senior faculty, and not one of them heads a department in the sciences. Hopkins bluntly describes the chairman of her own department, Robert Sauer, as "clueless when it comes to this issue." (He declined to comment.) "I don't think that anyone knows how to fix the underlying attitudes that marginalize women," Hopkins laments.

But light does produce heat. The most powerful formula for change occurs when senior women gather together, marshal persuasive evidence, and find at least one sympathetic person at the top -- almost inevitably a man. The mostly male executives running corporations across America would do well to take note. News travels at warp speed in the new economy. The same sort of senior women who are finally rising up at academic institutions are more and more likely to rise up at corporations, where they remain woefully underrepresented and grievously undervalued among top management.