In 1999, as part of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kate Zernike broke the story of 16 female scientists who forced MIT to admit it had been discriminating against female faculty for decades.
That shaped this reporter’s work over the next several decades until she finally wrote a book to tell the story of these women, the focus on noted molecular geneticist Nancy Hopkins, a senior scientist at MIT who began to notice discrepancies in the pattern of how resources, pay and promotions were given to men vs. women.
Kate Zernike’s new book is called, “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science.”