PG on Nostr: Early in her career, Hopkins thought she knew why so few women chose to go into ...
Early in her career, Hopkins thought she knew why so few women chose to go into science: because running a lab was time-consuming and hard to combine with motherhood. (She herself had made the difficult decision to forgo having children to focus on science.) But she came to realize that this wasn’t the whole story. While some scientific colleagues were supportive, “there was a kind of invisibility,” she says. “You would do experiments and publish them, and it was like you were invisible, your work was invisible, what you said was invisible.”
Initially, she blamed herself for not being aggressive enough. Then she noticed that other women’s discoveries were being coopted by men, who won the resulting accolades and leadership positions. She had hoped leaving the cancer field would help, but in the early 1990s, Hopkins had to fight to get 200 more square feet of lab space for her zebrafish, even though she was a senior scientist. That is when she found herself becoming a crusader against gender inequity. She famously took a tape measure and compared the size of her lab to those of male colleagues. She found she had less space (1,500 square feet) than the average for male junior professors (2,000 square feet) and far less than fellow full professors who were male (3,000 to 6,000 square feet). Around the same time, she had been removed from teaching a class she’d spent years co-developing—MIT’s first biology course—when her male colleague took it over. “I decided that I was going to dig in my heels and fight back,” she says.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/meet-the-biologist-who-got-mit-to-examine-its-treatment-of-women-researchersPublished at
2024-11-15 12:07:00Event JSON
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"content": "\n\nEarly in her career, Hopkins thought she knew why so few women chose to go into science: because running a lab was time-consuming and hard to combine with motherhood. (She herself had made the difficult decision to forgo having children to focus on science.) But she came to realize that this wasn’t the whole story. While some scientific colleagues were supportive, “there was a kind of invisibility,” she says. “You would do experiments and publish them, and it was like you were invisible, your work was invisible, what you said was invisible.”\n\nInitially, she blamed herself for not being aggressive enough. Then she noticed that other women’s discoveries were being coopted by men, who won the resulting accolades and leadership positions. She had hoped leaving the cancer field would help, but in the early 1990s, Hopkins had to fight to get 200 more square feet of lab space for her zebrafish, even though she was a senior scientist. That is when she found herself becoming a crusader against gender inequity. She famously took a tape measure and compared the size of her lab to those of male colleagues. She found she had less space (1,500 square feet) than the average for male junior professors (2,000 square feet) and far less than fellow full professors who were male (3,000 to 6,000 square feet). Around the same time, she had been removed from teaching a class she’d spent years co-developing—MIT’s first biology course—when her male colleague took it over. “I decided that I was going to dig in my heels and fight back,” she says.\n\nhttps://getpocket.com/explore/item/meet-the-biologist-who-got-mit-to-examine-its-treatment-of-women-researchers",
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