I was asked to speak about the MIT report, and, particularly, events since then.  But what I'd like to do is begin with a brief personal account of how I became involved to my extreme surprise in these events. And then I will talk about what has happened at MIT as a result of this report, including mentioning a meeting that is going to be held this weekend at which the presidents of eight similar research universities, including Berkeley, have been invited to come to MIT by our president, President Vest, to address these issues.  So if you can come up with some solutions today, that would be extremely helpful.  I could suggest them on Sunday to these people, and we can maybe get them to suggest them to the rest of the United States.  So people are trying, that's for sure.  The question is, how do you fix it?

To begin how I happened into this peculiar situation, I will say the following.  I joined the MIT faculty 27 years ago.  I absolutely believed that civil rights and affirmative action had solved the problem of gender discrimination.  I was absolutely certain I would never encounter it in my lifetime.  So I was extremely surprised over the next 15 years to gradually find out that I was wrong.  And the way I discovered this amazing fact was by watching how other women at MIT were treated, other women faculty.  Of course, there were so few of them that it took a very long time.  I think this is why it took 15 years to figure this out.  But at first the women who were there, of course, were a little bit older than I was.  And so the fact that they were badly treated seemed to be explained by the fact that they had come in before civil rights and affirmative action had solved this problem.  So I wasn't so surprised by that.  It was very surprising, however, as time went by and every five or ten years they would hire another woman, to discover that those women who were younger than I was were also not being treated equally with men of their peer group. 

As I say, because I was a scientist, I had to be absolutely sure that people of equal merit were not being treated equally.  It took a very long time; you had to compare case by case.  But after 15 years, I was absolutely certain that men and women of equal ability and even, more surprising, equal accomplishment in science, were not valued equally in our system.  And I cannot tell you how demoralizing and depressing this was.  It really was extraordinarily discouraging to me.  But what kept me going was the good news that I knew I was the one exception.  Now, it's very interesting that I thought this because my life at MIT was really hard.  I mean, really difficult.  For the first 20 years, I have to say, it was kind of hell, actually.  What was interesting was I just thought that the problems I was having was really different from the problems that other women were having.  And I thought that in my case, each incident that happened was a superior incident that resulted from the fact that I had either made a tactical error or some political mistake.  Maybe I wasn't good enough as a scientist, or maybe I ran into a difficult person, a particularly difficult person.  The thing that was really strange was how many difficult people there seemed to be in my existence.  Now, at one point, I was told I was underpaid, and MIT raised my salary and that of other women in my department about 20% across the board.  And I thought that was so gracious of them, and I thanked them.  And so I still didn't get it. 

So when I look back on these events and wonder what I was thinking, I conclude that I really was in denial.  And I have to say that I think denial is a superb way of dealing with the situation, and I really recommend it to you.  I was happy in my denial. 

Well, then about eight years ago, a series of events occurred that began to open my eyes to the reality.  And what happened was I had changed my research direction, and I needed to get some resources for my work.  And these were really modest resources.  I mean, I had less faith than a starting assistant professor, so I asked for a few hundred square feet.  It took me ten months to get 200 square feet.  And everyday for those ten months, I would get up in the morning and say, 'What can I do to get those 200 square feet of space today?'  And I'd work on that; it took about 50% of my time and energy.  One day, a person who was washing glassware in the kitchen said to me, 'Nancy, how come these men have so much and you have so little?'  And I said, 'Good question.  I don't know.' 

Anyway, this went on for quite a long time.  And, finally, a series of events occurred that just culminated in removing even my denial.  Even I could no longer deny that these things were normal that were happening to me.  And there was one particular one that was just the last straw.  And one day, I was sitting at my computer-it was a Saturday morning, I'm trying to write something.  And it just came crashing down on me, and I realized that I was no different from these other women, that I was viewed the same way they were viewed, which was not really a participant in the system to which I had devoted much of my life.  And that moment was completely devastating to me.  I knew from that moment that I couldn't go on.  I mean, that was it.  And I must say, if I had been a rich person, had I been an older person and closer to retirement, I would have definitely taken early retirement and I would have been out of there because I just couldn't continue to work in the system once I recognized that I too was being treated the way these other women were.

So for about a week, I was completely paralyzed by depression and despair, not knowing what to do.  And then this marvelous thing happened to me, and that was I got mad.  I got really mad.  Really mad.  And that was just as unpleasant as being depressed, it turned out.  So I decided, 'Well, what I have to do is I have to go and fix this problem.'  And I didn't know what fixing it meant, I didn't have the faintest idea.  But I decided that that's what I was going to do.  And what I would do is I would start in my department, and I would work my way up through the layers of administration until I got my problem solved.  And if I couldn't find satisfaction, then I'd keep right on going.  I didn't know what it meant, but I knew I was going to just keep on going. 

Now, I did this, and tried to explain to my local administrator that I was being discriminated against.  And, of course, they looked at me as if I was completely crazy.  And as I worked my way up through the administration, I was able to acquire increasingly more powerful enemies as I went.  Because if you say that you're being discriminated against, it does not make you a lot of friends.  And the other thing that, you know, of course, people really don't know what you are talking about.  And so if you keep repeating it, then you become a difficult woman.  And once you're a difficult woman, you can be dismissed easily.  So this was a problem.

I pretty soon found myself at the level of the president, and I had not been satisfied yet along the way.  So I sat down and wrote the president a letter.  And I said, 'Dear President Vest:  There is terrible discrimination going on in your university, and you really ought to do something about it.'  So I showed this letter to a friend of mine, and he said, 'You couldn't possibly be planning to send that letter, are you?'  And I said, 'Well, I was planning to send it, actually.'  And he said, 'I wouldn't if I were you.'  Because, of course, the president will think you're a nut, and then that's the end of it.  So I decided that I would show this letter to another woman faculty member, and ask her to delete any offensive passages that might offend the president or cause him to think I was not of sound mind and body. 

So I must tell you that this was the most important moment in this whole story, from my personal point of view.  Now, you say, 'Why didn't you go and talk to women about this before?'  And this is the part that's really puzzling.  I didn't because I think that, you know, you grow up believing in science, that if you are really good enough, you can make it to the top.  If you discover the structure of DNA, they're going to give you the Nobel Prize, and you're going to live happily ever after.  So if you have to say, 'I'm having trouble because I'm being discriminated against,' it's just like saying, 'I'm not good enough.'  And that's what prevented me in all the years, from wanting to have anything to do with women's groups, who were dealing with this problem.  Because I didn't want to be seen as a person who had to use that as an excuse for not succeeding.  So the most difficult moment for me-I could tell these men I didn't care about them anymore, but I couldn't tell another woman what I really felt about this.  But now was the moment of critical importance because I was about to present this case to the president. 

So I picked out a woman that I really didn't know; I wanted to make the test as difficult as possible.  I picked out a woman of impeccable scientific credentials, who I was really afraid of and intimidated by because she was so perfect-she never made a mistake, never upset people, was always politically correct.  So I thought, 'This one is going to be really critical, and she's going to really think badly of me.  So I got to bite the bullet and do this.'  So I took this letter, invited her to lunch, and out we went to Rebecca's, which is a little restaurant in Kendal Square near MIT.  And we were sitting there, and she had this letter in her hand, and she was reading it.  And it was a little, tiny table, lots of noise.  It's lunch time, you know.  And I'm watching and I expect to see, you know, this sort of look of horror pass over her face, as she realizes I'm about to commit professional suicide. And she's reading, she's reading, and she's very serious, very serious.  And she gets to the bottom of the letter, and she lays it on the table, and she says, 'I agree with everything you said, and I'd like to sign this letter.  And I think we ought to go and see the president because I've noticed for a long time the senior women here are not treated equally.' 

And that was it, that was the moment that, really, the MIT story was born and that completely changed my life.  I would say that from that moment on, I don't think I was ever really unhappy again.  It was life-changing because if that woman agreed it was absolutely true, and not only was it true, but in the moment a little light bulb was going off in my head saying, 'Whoa!  Power!'  Because this woman could not be denied.  I mean, okay, by then I had acquired my reputation of being a little difficult.  But this woman was not difficult.  And if this woman said there was a problem, there was a problem.

We looked at each other and we said, 'You don't suppose there could be other people who have figured this out too?'  And, well, as you know, there were.  So what happened is we sat down to make a list of the tenured women faculty in the school of science; we thought we would go and pool them and see if anybody else had come to this same radical conclusion we had.  And so we got out the catalog of the departments of science at MIT, and sat down to make a list of the tenured women faculty in the School of Science so we could go and poll them.  And that was when we made this extraordinarily startling discovery.  There were only 15 tenured women in the six departments of science at MIT, and there were 197 men.  And I did not believe it when she said, 'This is it.'  I said, 'That is impossible, that cannot be.  Go back.  Do it again.  Do it again.'  So she went back and we found two more women, who had primary appointments in the School of Engineering, with joint appointments to science.  So we had 17, to increase our statistical base there.  And out we went to poll the women.

Again, what I did was sort of start with the people who were such well known scientists because we read about them all the time in the newspapers, people who were always winning a prize or an award, or was a member of this or that, and went to see them.  And by the end of the first day, we had ten signatures because the people said, 'Do you have something we could sign onto?'  And it was an astounding thing, for all of those years to have thought that you were alone and that no one knew what you were talking about, and then overnight to be part of a group.  And so people said that they wanted to sign on.  And I must say, it was not a uniform thing.  And I think this is one of the things that makes this problem very complex, both for women to understand and for the administrators.  There was one women who said, 'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about.  I've never seen discrimination.  I've never experienced discrimination.'  And she did not sign on to this group.  She was the one out of 17.  So among the other people, there were some people who said, 'Well, I personally haven't experienced it, but I know other women experience it, so I'm signing on in solidarity with them.'  Some people said, 'I have at one time experienced it.'  One woman said, 'I haven't the faintest idea what you're saying, but I'm so miserable I'll sign anything.'  It turned out, by the way, it was exactly what we were talking about that she was experiencing.  She just didn't know it.  And I think this is part of the problem.  A single woman, alone, who has no other women around her, how could she know that she's part of a pattern?  She just thinks she's run into yet another difficult man or woman in her department, or administrator, whatever the problem is. 

Anyway, so here we were.  Now, what's interesting about it, again, particularly, as I stand here in front of all of you, is these women had devoted their lives to science, they also had never wanted to be political people or part of any feminist group.  They didn't want to be seen that way by their colleagues.  And they wanted to operate in total secrecy.  And the question was what could you do?  But we also recognized that, you know, the power within this group, it was a solidarity of this group of highly successful serious women scientists that was going to give us power to influence the administration.  So we decided, and in great fear and trepidation, mind you, that we would ask MIT if they would let us study this problem, and try to document it so we could explain it to our administrators, so that when an individual woman had a problem, instead of having to go inside and convince them that something was wrong, they would know that something was wrong.  And that was really the point of what we were trying to do, is just explain it to people, so they could understand it and then fix it. 

We approached our wonderful Dean of Science Bob Birgeneau, and it was, again, a very frightening moment for these women.  We went as a group, and asked him.  And how he responded was really the second key of this whole story.  Because, as we learned later, often when women do this, the institutions tell them, 'Oh, you're wrong.  There's no problem here.  We've looked.  There's nothing wrong.'  But he did not respond that way.  He listened and he said, 'Well, when Nancy came to see me last spring to tell me she was being discriminated against, how could I know?  It's one woman. What could I tell?  But now that you've all come, it's obvious something is wrong.  You don't have a group of serious women scientists coming and saying something is wrong, unless something is wrong.  So you can have a committee and you can look into it, but I don't know if this problem is fixable.  I talked to department heads and realized this problem runs so deep into the culture of MIT, I don't know what to do about it.'  So we said, 'Wonderful!  We'll fix it.  Just give us our committee, and off we go.'

So we were happy as could be, and off we went to have our committee that was going to review the problem.  And I have to say that at this point there was enormous opposition to the women being allowed to do this.   It's hard to imagine looking back, but many department heads did not want the women to have their committee and look into this.  The idea that women were going to look at data and get information was very frightening.  It's hard to realize from this point of view, but really, the opposition was enormous.  It took six months before we were allowed to have the committee.  And I think without the support of President Vest from the top behind Bob Birgeneau, it probably would have collapsed at that point. 

It took a lot of political maneuvering, but finally the committees were formed.  And Bob Birgeneau insisted we have men on the committee.  I was highly resistant to this notion.  I said, 'Well, what kind of men do you have in mind?'  He said, 'Well, you know, men… maybe powerful men from the system, who might be able to help the women as we study this problem, and become our allies.'  And that is exactly what happened too.  He put three men who were or had been department heads on the committee, and they turned out to be fantastic-a couple of them were; some were a little… anyway.  And so these people were on the committee, and there were six women, one from each of the departments in the School of Science, except for mathematics because there was no tenured woman in the math department at the time. 

What we did was to interview the women and to collect data pertaining to the distribution of resources and compensation, and so forth, particularly, the things that make it easy to do science.  I mean, what is it that makes a career in science successful?  What does an institution do to help people to make their careers successful?  That's what we were interested in because that's what meant the most to these women, was their science.  And, in fact, we started from the problems individual people had had, and looked into each of those issues, documented the men versus women and so on.  So it was an extraordinary experience and it took an enormous amount of work.  I personally spent about 20 to 40 hours a week on it for two years.  And many of these other women spent an enormous amount of time, and many of the men too.  And at the end of it, we ended up with about a 150-page report, single-spaced, typed, data tables, lots of stuff.  And we had it at MIT. 

So what did we find from all of this work?  Well, we found that young women scientists today come to MIT and join the faculty believing that gender discrimination is a thing of the past, was solved many, many eons ago, will never touch their lives, just like the time senior women came to MIT 20 years ago, 30 years ago, believing that same thing.  And this pattern really seems to repeat itself.  Each generation believes this will not impact their lives.  And, indeed, in the beginning, they don't have this problem.  They feel very supported by their departments, and they are very supported by their departments.  Their great concern is the combining family and work for women.  And the difference between that for men and women, they say, makes the playing field in science not a level playing field for a person who wants to be a scientist, be a professor at MIT, and have a family.

But as the women go on through their careers, progress in their careers at MIT, we found that there is a point, usually sometime after tenure, and it varies for different people, where they begin to look around and they see that something is happening in their careers that's causing their progress to differ from that of their male colleagues. And the word that came to describe the thing that happened to them was marginalization.  So the women came to feel more and more pushed out from the center of the system.  And they saw their male colleagues got to move into positions of power in the department, they were taking over the running of things, they were making all the important intellectual decisions, they were out starting biotech companies, they were having families.  So these people's lives began to take on a different path.  And what happened to the women was that as time went by and they were pushed out to the side, they were working harder and harder.  So they were determined to achieve their success because science was everything to them, but to do it they had to work harder and harder as time went by.

And the question is why was this happening?  And when you looked at the data, it was really easy to see why this was happening.  And that was, I think, the thing that came as a huge surprise to me.  Because I thought, you know, this is going to be very hard, I don't really understand this.  But actually, what you found is, as you know, in science, resources and inclusions and networks and so forth are enormously important to your success, and to how easy it is to fatigue.  And so as the women were excluded a little bit here, a little bit there, given less, not an extra post-doc here, an extra spot to pay for a student there, less support for their secretary there, these things accumulated with time.  And they were excluded from joint grants.  Of course, they were never invited to join in biotech companies.  It turned out we felt that 50% undergraduate majors in biology, for example, would drop down to 45% women graduate students, who dropped to 35% women post-doc, who dropped to 15% women faculty, and by the time you look at biotech company founders from our faculty or overall in the United States, it's 1% or less.  So there's this just continuous dropping out and exclusion in the power parts of the system.

It was pretty easy to understand why they had to work harder and harder to write more and more individual grants, to raise enough money to do the science that was at the level of MIT.  And that pattern emerged.  And you can also see what a single woman alone couldn't possibly have seen all this happening or could the administration.  And how, in fact, alone you just think, 'There must be something wrong with me.  That guy who's got it equal with me, I thought we were about the same, and suddenly he seems to be doing all these sorts of things and doing them well, and I'm working harder and harder to achieve.  Maybe I was never good enough.'  And that's where the woman is left.

We handed the report to MIT, and they fixed all the inequities that were documented in this report.  And these were very small things.  And that was fantastic.  And Dean Birgeneau made enormous effort working with department heads to increase the number of women in the School of Science.  And I should say that over the five-year period, four- or five-year period he worked on this, the number of tenured women went form 15 to 22; the total number of women went from 22 to 32 or 33; and as a percent, it went from 8% to 12%, which I think is the first time it ever passed 10% in the history of the school.  So that was terrific.  The women went back to work.  We were all happy as clams, everything was great. But, of course, we knew the problem wasn't really fixed.  Right?  I mean, what they fixed were the symptoms of a problem.  But that was it, and we all wanted to get back to science, and that's what we did. 

Then a funny thing happened, which was that in 1999, a woman named Lottie Baylon was the Chair of the MIT faculty, and she knew about what had gone on in the School of Science.  And our faculty was completely unaware of what had happened.  But Lottie knew about it, and as Chair of the Faculty, she felt it was important for the rest of MIT to learn about what had gone on in the School of Science, because she, unlike us, knew that this was not a problem limited to 15 people.  I must say for myself I honestly believed that this problem existed at MIT, but worse at Harvard, and maybe a few other elite schools, and that was it.  I mean, as we were doing all of this work on this topic, one of my friends kept saying to me, 'Nancy, you're wasting your time.  Nobody's ever going to care about 15 women who want to do some esoteric science over there.'  Anyway, but Lottie knew better, and Lottie asked us to write a report that could go out to the faculty.

So we might as well write a pretty frank report, so we wrote a frank report, not even knowing if MIT would publish it.  Well, not only did they agree to publish it, but we asked President Vest if he would like to write a comment to accompany the publication.  When that comment came over the e-mail and I read it, I just was dissolved, I really couldn't believe in my lifetime I would ever hear the president of one of these institutions say what he wrote.  He said, 'I've always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality, part perception, true.  But I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.'  I knew it was an extraordinary moment.  Again, I thought, who would ever understand how extraordinary a thing it is that this man has just said. 

It happened that just around that time, I was speaking to some reporters who had come to MIT to learn about science and so forth, and we go and talk about our research to them.  And one of them happened to say, 'What's it like to be a woman scientist at MIT?'  I said, 'It's funny you should ask.  An amazing thing has just happened.'  I said, 'You probably wouldn't appreciate it.'  Well, you can imagine what happened.  The next thing we know standing in the office, a nice young woman from the Boston Globe, and shortly thereafter a nice young woman from the New York Times.  And I said, 'You know, I don't know if you could really appreciate what this means, that this man has said this.  But it means so much to me, having spent my life in this academic world, never believing that any man would understand this problem.' 

Well, the next thing we knew, they had put it on the front page of the New York Times.  Now, I have to tell you, if this should happen to you be prepared.  It was astounding what happened next.  I mean, absolutely astounding.  It was like standing in the path of some avalanche.  For three days, first of all, you have nothing but cameras up and down the halls of your place, and people thrusting things in your face.  It was amazing, you know, I just couldn't even figure out what was happening.  But the most astounding thing of all was the e-mail that came from women all over the country, saying, 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.  You're not going to believe this, I have exactly the same problem in my institution.  Let me tell you about it.'  And the dean was deluged; I was completely deluged; the president was deluged.  They had never had anything like this at MIT.  I mean, this is MIT.  Universities don't put out things like this that have this kind of reaction to it.

The next thing I knew, two weeks later, I found myself at the White House, of all things, talking to President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton, and Secretary of Labor, Alexis Herman.  And I said to the president, 'Do you think it's a good idea to go to the White House and discuss this particular issue with this particular president?'  And he said, 'Well, under the circumstances we have this one, I think you should go.'  I went and it was a very, very amazing experience, because we had been operating in total secrecy, you know, for so long, and these women, and suddenly the president was telling people that everybody in the United States should be doing what MIT did, they should be examining data and really getting into these issues.  It was an amazing experience, and you really couldn't imagine you were actually there.

Anyway, there followed, the next thing was in addition to the press, which really stayed on top of this for about 16 months-I think they called everyday for 16 months after the New York Times article-were many, many invitations to travel and talk about this topic at different schools.  And many of these initially came from women in the first six months, saying, 'Please, come to my school and try to convince the administration in my school that this is really happening because I've tried and they just won't listen.'  So I was really curious, and I went around and talked to people.  And what I discovered is that this problem is universal, and it is not every women and it's not every department.  I don't know about Berkeley, I've only been here a few hours.  I know nothing about this place, but I can tell you that most of the places I've visited, the problem is universal.

The question then is what to do about it.  So now I'd like to just say a little bit about what MIT is trying to do to address the problem that's been identified.  So if you summarize, I'll tell you, one of the things that I learned in my travels around the country to talk about this is that MIT, certainly, we were about the last people to figure this out, I was definitely the last.  But there were women who had figured this out long ago, and there were reports just like the MIT report.  There were hundreds of them, and they all say the same thing, and they come to the same conclusions, same recommendations.  So everybody realizes that women come in thinking it's going to be fine, and it turns out it isn't.  We found out it's not because women have children, it's not because they don't work hard enough, it's not because they aren't good enough, it's really because of this problem.  It's this bias which makes them not full participants in the system. 

The question is what do we know about how to fix this problem?  And the first thing that I think is critical is to realize the problem does not just go away with time.  I think everybody thought we have now all these women students in the system, we have a very diverse student body, 'We'll just wait and this problem will go away.'  Well, it turns out it isn't true.  Progress is only made when you really work hard on the problem, and when people deep in the system, including the powerful people in the system, and the people who are affected and understand the problems of the women and the minorities themselves, join forces and work on this problem.  We also found out that, you know, increasing the number of women is enormously important, but that alone is not enough because it's going to be a long time before the numbers are really significant.  And so people's entire career can be damaged by this problem before it can be solved by simply increasing the number.  So you must address the inequities that arise unconsciously, and this marginalization.

Recognizing all of this, what are we doing about it?  So President Vest, who I can't say enough good things about, by the way, he's just amazing, he said, 'Well, I'm never going to have this happen again in my university.'  So the first thing he did was to establish these equity committees in all of the five schools of MIT.  These committees now are chaired by senior women faculty of men and women faculty, and they are reviewing data pertaining to distribution of resources.  For the first time, we have senior women who are reviewing all of the primary salary data, looking at the pitfalls and so on, in collaboration with the dean of the school and so forth.  And this is enormously effective, and women are very involved in it, and everybody learns from it.  It's a terrifically valuable thing.  And my guess is it will have to go on pretty indefinitely until this problem goes away. 

But as President Vest has also said, he said, 'You know, fixing the salaries, that's the easy part of this problem.  How do you fix the underlying causes of this problem that lead unconsciously to these inequities?  How do you prevent this marginalization?  How do you get people to work together and so forth?'  And so he established something called the Council on Faculty Diversity, and asked me to co-chair this with our provost, who is also an extraordinary person, named Bob Brown, and with a may named Phil Clay, who is an Associate Provost at MIT.  And this Council on Faculty Diversity is going to deal with true diversities of both women and minorities, and, in particular, women minorities, which is another whole issue.  And so there we are, and now we're an organization, and I now joined the MIT hired administration.  So I do this half-time.  And I sit on the Academic Council, which is chaired by the president and the provost, and consists of deans of the school.  So this is our higher academic organization.  And this council is trying to develop mechanisms to fix this problem.  So we know that these inequities arise.  Now what the provost is trying to do is to figure out what are the things in our system, in the process, that cause this end result over and over and over to happen, that we end up with the same result.

Now, this is a really hard problem, I have to say.  And there are days when I get totally discouraged, and I say, 'Whoa!  I don't know how to fix this.'  And so I said to Bob Brown one day, I said, 'You know, this problem may not be fixable.'  And Bob Brown is an engineer, and engineers have a different view of the world.  And he was very offended, actually.  He said, 'Nancy, this is MIT.  We're engineers.  Engineers solve problems.'  I really am waiting to see how engineers solve this one.  Because what has really interested me, now that I sit on the Academic Council, okay, let me say the following thing about this.  I used to think when I was younger, if I were a powerful person and there was something wrong in the world, I'd just go and fix it.  Right?  So as it turns out, it's not that easy.  So there I am, I'm sitting there, and these are the powerful people, they've really got the power in the university.  And these are good people.  Okay?  So why aren't they fixing this problem? 

The more I look at it, the harder it looks to me.  Okay?  Because what you see is that MIT is working extremely well, things are really going well-money is booming, we've got great scientists.  Terrific.  So it's not in anybody's job description to go out and fix gender bias, or the problem of minorities and under-representation, this and that.  Not only is it not in their job description, but to go out and do it would actually make it very difficult for them to fulfill their job description, which is to make their university, their department, their school number one academically in the country.  That's their only mandate.  And to do this, this is really hard work, it's very complex, and it's not popular.  And the truth of the matter is that this problem resides in the hearts, minds, and hands of all our department heads and really all of our faculty.  So the administration can fix a problem like the undergraduate diversity because they can control the admissions through a central process.  If they start trying to control these powerful men who are really running the science in this country and in these universities, one by one by one, how do you do that? 

I think is the problem that we have come to see.  And it's going to take dissecting that problem piece by piece.  In the long run, the answer lies in raising the consciousness of these people to know that if you don't address this problem and really bring diversity, you're not going to have a great university.  This is not okay.  This is not the way to greatness in the long run.  But in the short run, it is the way to greatness.  It's far simpler to let that powerful club of men who run science to choose all of the next… And what we've learned is that the next powerful generation have already been selected when they are very young.  We see now that the next chairman, the next director of the thing, the head of this or that is selected before they even have tenure, and they are being groomed very early on.  And to break that line of succession, somebody is going to have to come in and ruffle some feathers.  And I see now why even really good well meaning people with power don't easily fix the problem.  And so that's been an eye-opening. 

I might just add one more story that really affected me very much and helped to make me see what was going on.  It has to do with race rather than gender.  But as part of this Diversity Council, one of the most eye-opening and wonderful things has been thinking about the race issue, in addition to the gender issue.  I used to think these things were really different, but the more I look at it, the more I think they're really similar.  Diversity is diversity.  And the following story emerged, both at Harvard and MIT.  It turns out when a person who is African-American goes to rent a house in Boston, it's not so easy.  They go to the house and the landlord says, 'Oh, sorry, you can't live here.'  I was completely horrified and shocked to learn this.  Maybe I shouldn't have been, but, you know, you say, 'Well, this is a tenured professor that this is happening to.'  And then you imagine what about our students and our post-docs who come to Boston and have to go and rent housing in this city, how do they deal with this problem?  So we were discussing this, and we said, 'Well, but what could MIT do about such a thing?'  Well, of course, it's illegal, right?  We all know it's illegal.  And I told this to several faculty, and they go, 'That's illegal.'  Yes, it's illegal.  But, you know, you cannot be a top level scientist and spend your life in court.  And these are the kinds of invisible things that happen that cause over and over the end result we have.  I don't care how many millions of dollars you throw into fellowships and this, that, and the other thing, if you have this going on, how are you going to…?  So people say, 'Well, what could we do about it?'  But the truth is if Harvard and MIT that are very powerful institutions in our city had taken this problem on and somehow fought against it, Boston may be a different city now.  So maybe there's something you can do about it.  But if you don't know this problem exists, you surely can't solve this problem.  So there are so many things like this that are happening and underlie and explain the end result, but I think we haven't really understood it.

But, fortunately, as I say, this weekend, the presidents of nine universities and delegations from their schools, including leading women faculty from the institutions are coming to MIT and are going to sit around and solve all these problems for us.  And I hope they really do come up with something.  Because I can tell you the other thing I've learned is that those of us who work in these great institutions are incredibly privileged people.  What you see is that even with some disadvantages that people have and so forth, we have great students, great resources, and it's a fantastic privilege.  But these women that are in other types of institutions not as powerful and wealthy as ours, aren't going to easily be able to solve these problems without the help and leadership of these great institutions.  Thank you very much.
 
 
 
 

UC Berkeley January 25, 2001

Working Toward Gender Equity in the Academy

Keynote Address - Professor Nancy Hopkins