[waves splashing]
[Jane Willenbring] The word people often use is that I was triggered.
I had a three-year-old daughter
and she came to the lab with me one weekend.
I had told her that I was a scientist before
and I don't think it had really clicked in her mind
that I was actually a scientist.
[laughs]
And so she came to the lab with me and I had my booties
and I was wearing a Tyvek suit, gloves, and goggles,
the whole getup.
And she looked at me and she was just like,
"You really are a scientist, Mommy."
And then she said, "I want to be a scientist just like you."
And that was the horrible,
like, sort of, lose it,
triggering moment that I have ever had.
And I actually started crying at the time
and she's three, so she doesn't understand why I'm crying.
And so I told her that they were happy tears.
But they weren't just happy tears.
I was thinking about someone treating her like trash
in 20 years, like I had been treated like trash.
The one thing that I could do to help her the most
is to try and make the whole enterprise something
that is welcoming to women,
and that was something that I hadn't done.
[Nancy Hopkins] We all have images in our head.
We have images of what a woman is like,
what a man is like.
When you ask somebody, "Draw a picture of a scientist,"
it used to be all men.
[Nancy Hopkins] We were just trying to be scientists.
We certainly didn't want to be seen as troublemakers
or activists.
[Raychelle Burks] The big picture is that women are extraordinarily
underrepresented in science.
[Jane] The message that's given is that
you somehow don't belong here.
[Raychelle] There's a playbook, and it was written by men.
And the men pick up on it.
They know what the plays are
and I always felt I didn't have the playbook. [chuckles]
I'm just sort of feeling my way through this game.
[passing traffic]
[Nancy] There's your standard striped version.
Beautiful, beautiful little fish.
You see the males are very slender
and the females have the large belly.
Generally a good sign they're going to lay eggs.
I'm Nancy Hopkins and I was professor of biology at MIT
for 40 years and I retired three years ago.
[laughs]
This is a picture of Greta.
So this was, this was the first experiment we did really
in zebra fish.
We were still just learning the system.
At the time, I was taking care of the fish,
so I was in the fish room,
I was literally in the lab 365 days of the year.
This is actually looking down on a fish embryo
and about this time there's about a thousand cells.
I think about a thousand.
And four of those thousand cells are going to go
and become the sperm or the eggs of that fish,
and those are the four cells.
And then they begin to divide.
When I was about ten, my mother got cancer.
In that generation, the word cancer was so terrifying.
You didn't say the word.
And so she was terrified
and it certainly made a big impression on me,
and I'm sure that's partly why
I was interested in cancer research later on.
I went to a small private girls' school in Manhattan.
They didn't teach a lot of math and science
to girls in my generation
because people thought girls didn't like
or need much math or science,
but I took everything they offered and loved all of it.
I went to Radcliffe.
I was 16, I guess, when I started.
In the spring of junior year
I signed up for this course called Bio 2.
Jim Watson came in and one hour later
I was a different person.
He and Francis Crick had won a Nobel prize
for discovering the structure of DNA.
This genetics, this molecular biology,
it was the answer to all of the questions
I'd ever had about everything.
This is what life is, this is how it works.
It's going to explain everything that
living things do and can do.
I couldn't imagine going on without being near this science.
I just had to be near this.
I started working in Jim Watson's lab as an undergraduate.
It was absolutely thrilling, and I thought,
"Well, I'm happy."
However, there was this odd, funny thing that happened.
Francis Crick was coming to visit the lab and he was going to give a talk.
And this was enormously exciting because, of course,
Jim just thought Francis was a genius. I thought Jim was a genius.
Jim thought Francis was a genius.
Wow, how smart could this guy be?
So I was very excited Francis was coming
and I was sitting at my desk in this little lab,
which was adjacent to Jim's office
and the door flies open.
I was in the room alone and there's standing Francis Crick.
He comes flying across the room,
puts his hands on my chest-- breast, and says,
"What are you working on?"
You know he looks at my notebook and says, "What are you working on?" [chuckles]
And I was so startled.
I didn't quite know what to say or do.
So I sort of straightened up and said,
"Oh, well here, let me show you this.
"I'm doing this experiment somehow, I'm trying to do this."
And at the time the word sexual harassment didn't exist,
wouldn't have crossed my mind.
So I just didn't want to make a fuss.
I didn't want Francis to be embarrassed. I didn't want Jim to be embarrassed.
So I just tried to pretend nothing had happened.
[waves splashing]
[seagull squawks]
[Jane] Not losing the keys to the car
is the most important part of field work. [chuckling]
And hiking. [laughs]
This is an area of coastline in California
that is really being impacted by cliff retreat.
[hammering]
We're really interested in figuring out
how fast sea level rise
is going to impact the coastal zones.
I'm Jane Willenbring, I'm an associate professor
at Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
which is part of UC San Diego.
One of the things that I think is great about being
someone who studies how landscapes change over time
is that it is so incredibly important
for maintaining our way of life, basically.
One of the ways that we're trying to create
resilience and adaptability to climate change impact
is through figuring out what will happen to coastal areas.
One of the things that drew me to earth science
when I was starting my degree was
you get to use all of the different kinds of science
to really understand how we are impacting the earth,
and people were arguing at the time
about whether there was going to be
this massive deglaciation of East Antarctica,
if we warmed the earth just a couple of degrees.
Fieldwork in Antarctica seemed like a perfect trajectory
for my science life.
I decided to go to Boston University
to get a Master's degree.
I started the program in 1999.
I was going to work with Dave Marchant,
looking at the glacial history of a part of East Antarctica.
He was a really important person in the field.
He even had a glacier named after him,
and I was incredibly thrilled to get the opportunity to go.
It was like a dream come true, actually.
So we were going to head out in the field in early December.
[engine roaring]
It actually takes a long time to even get there.
We went from Boston to New Zealand, New Zealand to McMurdo,
and then finally we go out with all of our tents,
via helicopter, into the field
and then we were just there.
It's such an incredibly blue sky.
The bluest sky, maybe, that I've ever seen in my life.
You just have rock and mountains
and ice as far as you can see.
It is like nowhere else.
There were four people in the group.
So there was Dave Marchant, his brother,
and then also a master's student
from the University of Maine, Adam Lewis.
The order of things, in some cases,
is quite jumbled in my mind.
I do know that there was a definite break
between when we were in McMurdo,
when we were surrounded by other scientists
and program officers from the National Science Foundation,
and it wasn't until we got to the field
that sort of the filters were off.
There was some Saturday Night Live skit…
[Dan Aykroyd] Jane, you ignorant slut.
Dave would start off from that sort of pop culture reference
to just calling me a slut, and then slut went to whore,
and then whore went to cunt.
We'd have to deal with all of these stories about
how slutty I was and how I'd be good for this person
who is a helicopter pilot, or this person who is his brother,
and I just wanted to talk about science.
At one point he decided to just--
every time that I had to go to the bathroom
just throw rocks at me.
Little tiny pebbles most of the time.
So there are no trees to hide behind,
no bushes or anything like that.
It was so embarrassing and demeaning
and so I stopped, um…
I stopped drinking water during the day
so that I wouldn't have to go to the bathroom as much,
and I ended up getting a bladder infection
and eventually there was blood in my urine.
I've actually had, had sort of, bladder problems
ever since that time.
[wind blowing]
We were looking for ash
inside of these belts of sediment and boulders
that form on the margins of glaciers.
These ashes can be dated and so they're great to find.
So he had a little bit of ash on this little metal scoop.
He motioned to lean in.
And so I looked, got down really close
to be able to see the individual crystals in the ash.
And at that point
he just breathed onto the spoon really quickly.
And the glass shards went into my eyes.
While I was doubled over in pain,
Dave looked at everybody and sort of shrugged and said,
"Oops, that went a little too far."
I remember I was trying to get up a really steep slope.
It was covered with moveable debris.
So every time I would try to take a couple of steps up,
I would just naturally slide down one step worth.
So it was incredibly frustrating to go up and down this thing.
Dave was at the top at one point
and I had just gotten about three-quarters of the way up the hill
and he grabbed the back of my backpack
and just pushed me down the hill.
I remember just sort of weeping at the bottom of this hill
and I just decided at that moment to just sort of
let everything kind of wash over me
and that I was just going to decide to do something later.
I didn't know how long that later would be
because my future was still in his hands.
After we got back and then the year after.
And so it just became sort of this like,
later, like this point on the horizon.
[indistinct chatter]
[Victor Dzau] I'd like to welcome all of you to this convocation
on a most important topic.
Together we can do better,
certainly, addressing sexual harassment.
[Paula Johnson] The best estimates are about 50% of women faculty
and staff experience sexual harassment,
and those numbers have not really shifted over time.
If you think about science,
right now we have a system that is built on dependence,
really singular dependence of trainees,
whether they are medical students,
whether they are undergraduates
or if they're graduate students
on faculty for their funding, for their futures.
And that really sets up a dynamic
that is highly problematic.
It really creates an environment in which harassment can occur.
[Kathryn] Generally speaking,
sexual forms of sexual harassment like come-ons,
unwanted sexual advances,
those are actually the rarest forms of sexual harassment.
They actually don't happen very much.
Mostly you see put-downs.
[Paula] We use the metaphor of an iceberg
to really get across the various forms of sexual harassment.
What's gotten most of the attention
is unwanted sexual attention, coercion.
Those are in the public eye, and I think everyone would agree
we absolutely need to address those.
[Kathryn] And then you have all the stuff that's underneath.
Those are actually more than 90% of the sexual harassment.
You know, the subtle exclusions, being left off an email,
not being invited to a collaboration where you're the clear expert.
Just these little moments that make a woman feel like she doesn't belong.
That's a really common experience.
[Paula] We found that consistent gender harassment
actually has the same impact as a single episode
of unwanted sexual attention or coercion.
So it is not something to be ignored.
[birds chirping]
[Raychelle] This is our shared lab facility.
So all of the chemistry professors have lab space,
some corner of it here.
I'm Raychelle Burks.
I'm an assistant professor of chemistry.
So we make sensor arrays.
When they're exposed to different environments
they have chemical reactions that they'll undergo.
So it might be something like phenolphthalein,
which anyone who's watched like the crime shows
and it's like, "We found this."
They swab something and then it's like, drop, drop,
another bottle, drop and they're like, "It's blood."
And it's gone from being colorless to being bright pink.
The things I'm trying to find
are usually the nefarious things.
So biological and chemical weapons, explosives.
I design systems to find those.
The types of tests I'm building are for natural disaster,
war zone situations, where you try to do a quick screen
and it could be Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Harvey,
especially Flint.
[reporter 1] Flint residents filed a federal lawsuit
accusing the city and state of endangering their health
by exposing them to dangerous lead levels in their--
[reporter 2] Flood waters in New Orleans
are full of sewage and bacteria that can make people sick.
Federal officials joined local agencies…
You know, from a social justice angle,
people still need some kind of testing metric
and to get an answer,
especially in that kind of environment.
You know, is there some type of test where
you're not pricing the user out of it?
That's what my group does.
By using all of this information and statistics,
get to the point where the final product can be handed off to the user
and what they get is a simple-to-use test
like kind of on the pregnancy test where it's like,
okay, so double lines means what again?
Single line means-- You know? [laughs]
But you have like that little diagram.
I grew up in the L.A. area, very big high school, 3000.
And the classes are packed.
I don't remember any teacher
in high school being like,
"You can do it," in the sciences in any way,
but I just kept showing up.
It's funny, a lot of the scientists I think of growing up
are actually fictional characters.
[Captain Kirk] To boldly go where no man has gone before.
Like Uhura was a scientist.
Progress report.
I'm connecting the bypass circuit now, sir.
[Raychelle] And she was in charge of comms,
but really she was scientist.
Going through college,
there were no Black woman chemistry professors that I had.
I heard that they existed though…
[laughs] but I never had any.
I went to get a PhD in chemistry
so I would have more employment options.
There are lots of things I love about the sciences
and I love about academia and my job.
But then there's also some real bullshit.
In academia, as women of color,
we're going to have different types of abuse
from different people.
I remember when I was in my office once
sitting at my desk, at my computer,
like I've got, you know, papers spread out.
Someone comes into my office, and for some reason
assumes I'm the janitor.
I mean, I've been in meetings where you've made a suggestion
or said, "Well, what about this?" And it was like you'd never spoken at all,
but if a white guy says it, you're like,
and now it'll magically be heard, everybody watch this.
Sometimes you get these critical emails
and criticism is something that, as a scientist,
you have to get used to.
But I think, is it appropriate?
There's been some cases where I'm like,
"Wow, this is wildly inappropriate."
You don't get to just say what you'd really want to say.
Like, "How dare you?"
I'm going to be seen as the angry black woman trope anyway,
but you have to like, "Okay, how do I minimize that?"
So you spend all this time trying to craft a response
or an approach of how to deal with it.
It may not seem like a long time,
five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes.
I think about all of that time added up.
That's time I'm not spending on grants,
on writing papers, on networking with my peers,
on just doing research with my students,
because I'm trying to navigate these oppressive systems
that people who are not in the marginalized communities,
not only do they not have to do that, they don't even--
It doesn't even register.
It's not something that they even think about,
let alone it being a time-suck in their schedule.
You have to remember that, because I'm like,
"How's this person able to do all this stuff?"
And then you're like… [laughs]
"That's because they're not having to do any of that stuff."
You know, and that-- That's the other thing you have to kind of remember.
[Nancy] When you're starting out in science,
it's kind of like getting an airplane up off the ground, you know.
You've gotta get-- You've gotta get going.
Make enough discoveries that you can become known.
So I just kept working.
A couple of years passed and suddenly I was called by MIT
and asked to apply for a faculty job.
But I did begin to have trouble as a junior faculty.
These postdocs, I think, saw you more as a technician
than a faculty member.
The reagents you made and so forth they saw it as just a…
they could just take anything they wanted, because after all, what were you?
You were just a technician, I guess.
To have to wait to use my own equipment
and they would take things out of the incubator,
just take them, and I didn't want to tell them not to
because in that era, women had to be nice to everybody.
They had to be polite to everybody.
You couldn't you know, be unpleasant or people would say,
"Oh, there's that nasty, difficult woman."
And then everybody would avoid you, so I didn't want to do that.
And the other thing I found is, I started publishing papers
and then I found you'd publish the papers
and you would have trouble getting credit for the discovery.
Everybody feels that way in science.
Everyone thinks their work is undervalued.
And everyone feels that way.
But I thought, no, this is somehow different.
And again, I didn't tell anybody that
because, who's going to believe you, you know?
Nobody.
So I just kept working
and I got promoted to associate professor
and I guess the letters were very, very good that came in.
So I got tenure.
I began to have these significant problems.
It was probably about 1990, roughly.
I was going to set up zebrafish.
You can do genetics in fish, genetics of behavior,
and I needed to get 200 square feet of space
to put the fish tanks in, and I couldn't.
One man said to me,
"You don't think you could really handle a bigger lab, do you?"
And I went to the people administering the space,
said I'm senior faculty
and I had less space than some junior faculty.
The man said, that's not true.
So I literally thought, okay, I have to show him it's true.
I took a tape measure and I would go around the building
when there weren't people there and go into the lab,
and I would measure the lab, write down the space,
and I would color in the spaces that each person had.
So I could tell how much space, and I'd keep a chart
and I'd add it up, so it took a lot of time.
My idea was that then I would demonstrate,
"Here's the data, I have less space,
so how can you argue with this?"
But when I got the measurements
and showed them to the person who was in charge of space,
he refused to look at them.
And that's when I became a radical activist, I guess. [chuckles]
Um, against my wishes.
You know, I expected science to be working really hard for something,
and I was completely sort of set up for that being the case.
And, in fact, I enjoyed the struggle and hardship
of doing field work, especially when I was younger
and my bones didn't creak so much. [laughs]
And so I was accustomed to that kind of struggle,
and adding to that with a kind of struggle
that's completely unnecessary and gratuitous
was hard to handle
and did make me think about quitting a couple of times.
I had… I had other jobs picked out.
I would see a bus pass
and think, "Bus driver, that sounds pretty good."
The things that really got me the most
were him telling me that I'm fucking stupid
and that I'll never have a career in science.
Those things that sort of got under my skin
in terms of my competence and my abilities as a scientist,
I never really stopped thinking about those.
I didn't really tell many people at all.
It was really something that I didn't talk about.
So I just kept doing my work.
I finished my PhD, then I did a postdoc
and then took a faculty position.
And the whole time I'm thinking,
a little bit in the back of my mind that, you know,
remember, you sort of told yourself
that you were going to do something about this?
And I just never did.
[Sylvie] Look at that structure on the beach.
[Jane] Oh, yeah, they're doing some construction on that building. Mm-hm.
Yeah.
[seagull squawks]
It's been a while since we've been on the beach, huh?
It's been raining so much.
[laughs]
[inhales]
Oh, we should remember where our shoes are.
Remember we made that mistake before. [chuckles]
I knew he was still a faculty member there,
and I had heard through the grapevine that, um,
he was still harassing women.
After that day with my daughter in the lab,
at that point I realized that, you know,
I had tried to create an environment
that was very science-friendly for her
and done all of the things that women do
to try to get other women or their children into science.
The one thing though that I could really do
was something that I hadn't done.
I went and wrote the Title IX complaint,
the first draft of it, that night.
[sighs] And it was-- It was a bit liberating, I have to say.
It was 17 years after the fact.
I definitely waited until after getting tenure.
I told Adam Lewis, the person who was in the field with me,
I had always imagined saying something
about how badly I was treated during that field season
and I was expecting him sort of to say,
"I don't want any part of this."
And instead he said that he's always felt guilty about
that field season, and that he'd be happy to write a letter.
[indistinct chatter]
[Raychelle] This conference, like a lot of science spaces,
there's always a bit of discomfort.
It's not designed for my comfort
and it's not designed for a lot of people's comfort.
It can be, you know, very majority heavy.
Um, and you'll have things like,
people will call out like, "That's a manel," you know,
like all men on your panel.
"That panel is whiter than the cast of Friends."
As a field, we have not made the place very accessible and inclusive.
[waves splashing]
[Raychelle] I remember I was parking in the faculty lot
where you need a faculty sticker,
which was on the front of my car,
and I pulled in to a faculty spot
because I am faculty with a faculty sticker. [laughs]
And this other person who was clearly,
I mean I'm assuming maybe she was on staff,
she leans out the window and yells at me,
"Do you work here?
Are you faculty?
'Cause this is a faculty lot."
And I said, "Yes, I have a faculty sticker
and I'm going to park here."
And she looked so-- she was like,
"Well, I've never seen you before."
And I like went, "And I've never seen you,"
and I just pulled in and then went.
[laughing]
I think the higher you go up the ivory tower,
the whiter it gets and the more male and the more hetero,
the kind of majority dominant viewpoints come out.
I mean the fact that you can still report on how many,
you know, women presidents there are of institutions,
um, how many chairs, how many deans.
You know, the numbers are so low that you're reporting on them.
You know, academia is especially historically marginalized.
You can be very isolated.
You get used to being underestimated.
You get used to being treated a bit shabbily.
People can insult us to our face with inappropriate language
and derogatory terminology,
but we're the ones that are supposed to be respectful and civil.
It's not that you take it personally…
you just don't expect any different.
[choking up] You know, for a long time you try to fit,
or put the face forward that you are this,
whatever they've built science to be.
And you talk a certain way and you look a certain way
and you try to fit in to that.
And even when you do all of that,
you're still not considered one of them.
But you just get used to that.
You get used to being invisible in the sciences.
It's weird 'cause you're invisible in that way,
but then you're hyper-visible 'cause people are like,
"But why are you here?"
[sniffs]
[elevator bell dings]
[Nancy humming]
Wow. Oh wow.
Okay, so this was my office.
And that was my lab when I was a junior faculty member.
I spent so much of my life there. [chuckles]
Yeah, so I was doing these measurements, and I tended to do them at night
because I really thought, you know, people would think it very odd.
What are you doing? I didn't really want to explain to anybody,
so I would go at night and odd times,
dinner times when people weren't around with my little tape measure here.
And I would measure all the spaces.
And I do remember one night I was in this room,
which I guess no longer exists in the format it used to.
And I had my measurer out, I was doing the measuring,
and somebody unexpectedly, it was very quiet,
but somebody unexpectedly walked into the room
and saw me and I remember freezing and thinking,
"Uh-oh, uh-oh, my cover is blown.
Now they're going to wonder what am I doing here."
So it was an odd thing. I was a full professor.
So what was this woman doing creeping around in the night
with a tape measure, measuring the lab space?
I expected to fight alone.
I didn't expect anybody else to fight with me,
but I really knew then I was right.
I decided I was going to give MIT a last chance.
I didn't go back to the provost because I was embarrassed,
at first I had this problem and then I've got another problem.
So I wrote to the president of MIT and I said,
there's a kind of systemic and invisible discrimination against women.
And I wrote this letter and I showed it to, um,
another woman faculty member so she can see whether
it would be understandable to the president
and if she approves of that, I'm sending it.
And the woman that I chose was of course
this woman I had revered for so long,
and that was Mary-Lou Pardue.
[Mary-Lou Pardou] From time to time,
Nancy and I would get together and talk about things,
and so she had wanted me to see what I thought about the letter.
[indistinct chatter]
[Nancy] I asked her to have lunch.
We went to Rebecca's Cafe, which was just down the street.
We sat in this little corner table,
noisy lunchtime crowd, and I had my letter.
She looked very serious.
And we've never talked about gender issues,
and I think she's going to think I'm just some loser,
you know, who really isn't good enough.
Maybe she thinks I'm not good enough
and that's why these things are happening to me.
I had no idea. So it was very embarrassing and humiliating
to ask her to do this.
She reads the letter slowly
and I'm watching and I'm so anxious
because I think she's thinking badly of me.
She gets to the bottom and she says,
"I'd like to sign this letter,
and I think we should go and see President Vest,
because I've thought these things for a long time."
[Mary-Lou] I had seen enough of the kind of things
that go on that I really wanted to support her.
[Nancy] I suddenly realized, "Gee, if you get it and I get it,
there might be other people who also have figured this out."
[Mary-Lou] So then she and I, we went around and talked
to each of the tenured women in the School of Science.
[Sylvia Ceyer] I didn't know her. She came to my office in the spring of '94
and wanted to chat about what it was
to be a female in the chemistry department.
It became evident that there were
very, very few women in the faculty at MIT.
[Nancy] Fifteen women in six departments of science,
and 197 men.
They were such high-profile women.
Half of them were in the National Academy of Science.
Most of us didn't really-- We knew of each other,
but we didn't really know each other.
[Sylvia] And we made sure this meeting
was in a remote location so nobody could see us. [laughs]
I have this feeling it was a very small room,
and half of us were sitting on the floor.
I wanted to know if this was something
that was just a biology department problem,
or whether this was a bigger problem.
[Penny] At the beginning,
nobody really wanted to jump right in and go there,
because you don't want to be perceived
as, you know, weaker than,
but it all just came out in little trickles, and suddenly
you know, everybody was just letting it all hang out.
[Sylvia] There were comments from my male colleagues like,
"Well, she really isn't as smart as she's given credit for."
No woman had ever taken family leave and gotten tenure.
Women were afraid to take it
because of the stigma attached to it.
A guy said that we were a bunch of hysterical women.
[laughs] Yeah.
At that time, the problem was women were not listened to,
and this was going to be the place
where every woman's opinion counted.
I just remember us all marching as a pack
to the Dean's office together.
[Nancy] We felt intimidated, as if somehow, you know,
we didn't belong there.
We asked if we could have a committee that could document the problem.
[Sylvia] What we wanted to do was we wanted to see the data.
[Nancy] It was very scary. I mean, for me it was the future of my life,
and science was on the balance there.
And the Dean came in
and he said, "You can have the committee,
but I don't think it can fix this problem
because I don't know how to fix it.
I think the problem is the nature
of a very male-dominated culture."
[Adam Lewis] I went to Jane's house in Mandan, North Dakota.
It was her wedding, and so she'd been graduated
for a couple of years or whatever,
and I was in the house and her brother was standing there,
and I was talking to her brother, and I introduced myself.
I say, "I'm Adam."
And I said, "I went to Antarctica with her,"
and he just stiffened.
He went…
and just stiffened like a board.
And instantly I thought, "God, something is…"
And he goes, "You were in Antarctica with her?"
And I was like, "Yeah."
He said, "So you were there when all that took place."
And I was like, "What?
What took place?" Like, what do you mean?
He said, "When Marchant treated her like shit
and tried to just ruin her. You were there."
So for the next few minutes I had this realization,
at Jane's wedding, in Mandan, North Dakota,
after talking to her brother.
I was kind of standing there by myself with like a drink in my hand going like,
"Holy shit, that must been really bad for Jane."
My name is Adam Lewis, and I met Jane,
uh, when I became a graduate student.
So we went to Antarctica together.
I'm just in my office one day just working, and an email pops up.
Jane says, "Hey, I've decided it's time
to come out and file this report
about how Dave's treatment of women has been."
And you know, she's like,
"I know he's done it to other women
and I just think it needs to be dealt with."
She said, "You might need to write down
what your experience is, what you remember."
So I don't have a choice.
My only choice is to just sit down and tell the truth.
That's my only choice.
I view Jane as a colleague and a friend.
And so why wouldn't I support her?
[Sangeeta Bhatia] It feels like a really special moment in time.
We're making inroads, but it's just too darn slow.
So, when I was a freshman in college,
my best friend, who was also an engineer,
and we were sort of like together through the experience,
which I think was really important
for both of our retention in the profession.
We looked around and we noticed
that the classroom was about half women.
And, you know, I remember very clearly that we had
a conversation about, what is all the fuss about?
Like, "There's plenty of women in this classroom.
Maybe it's just a matter of time."
And this is something I still hear. "Oh, it's just a matter of time."
And we looked around again senior year
and there was, out of a hundred students, seven of us left.
And we sort of realized like, "Oh, this is the leaky pipeline."
This is disproportionate attrition.
[Paula] In STEM, we have spent a lot of resources and time
to get young girls focused on STEM.
Um, so we know that we've been filling the pipeline.
The problem is that sexual harassment
actually creates many leaks in that pipeline.
So we're doing a lot of work,
but some of that work is actually being undone.
Why do you move away from a profession and choose a different one?
You know, that's sort of a collection of personal choices,
but part of it is the culture.
There's a whole body of social science that has emerged
where this is actually no longer a mystery.
[Corinne Moss-Racusin] I assumed that the study that we ultimately did
or something similar would already have been done.
I was just interested to see
what is the experimental evidence of whether or not
there's gender bias amongst the scientific community.
And I was surprised to see
that that study had not yet been conducted.
So that's really what we immediately dug in to pursue.
The methodology of the study is really simple.
We describe a student who's applying to be a lab manager, in this case.
But the qualifications, the thing that participants read,
you know, their application is identical.
Except half of our participants
are told that the student is a woman, Jennifer,
and half are told that the student is a man, John.
So any differences at all in our conditions
or how the participants react to these two students
is attributable solely to the student's gender.
We worked hard to recruit a representative sample
of STEM faculty from around the country
and we sent half of them the application from Jennifer
and half the application from John.
We told them that this was a student
who had actually applied to be a lab manager
somewhere in the country over the course of the last year.
And that for this new mentoring program,
we needed their candid assessments of the student.
I remember the day, I was sitting at my computer
doing the first pass of data analysis for this,
and I thought I had something miscoded
because I just didn't expect to see
the same picture over and over again.
The female student is rated as inferior to the male student
on every dimension that we assessed.
She's rated as less competent.
She's less likely to be hired for a lab manager job,
less likely to be mentored by a faculty member
and given a lower starting salary
than the identical male student.
The only difference between them is their gender.
And so we're really quantifying gender bias.
Not every woman contends with this identically.
Women of color are targeted in ways that are more complex,
more insidious, and just more common.
It's not always who you might think
is going to be demonstrating these biases.
Bias comes from normal cognitive processing mechanisms.
And what that means is that really well-intentioned folks
tend to display these sorts of very pervasive biases.
It's not sort of an evil cartoon
of someone who's delighting
in thwarting the progress of smart women.
It's all of us.
Consciously, I could say I have zero bias.
To me, men and women who perform the same are equal.
But I think we're in those very early moments in the science
where we're able to actually get snapshots
of what's inside our mind of which we don't know.
So what we're going to do today is you are participants
in a couple of little exercises.
I hope you find this
as intriguing as I did when I first took this test.
This test is called the IAT,
or the Implicit Association Test.
The IAT has a very simple idea that underlies it.
The idea is that if two things have something in common,
we'll be more easily able to put them together.
And sometimes this just happens in our experience.
Salt and pepper go together.
They're opposites in one sense,
but they go together because we combine them.
The word king and queen go together.
This is not a hard idea to imagine.
And so we use this idea to argue that if two things
have come to be associated over and over again,
in our experience, whether we know it or not,
we will be faster to put them together.
Nobody has any trouble understanding why this might be.
It's a no-brainer, as a neuroscientist might say. [chuckles] Okay.
So imagine that in the test you're asked
to do something very simple.
A word is going to pop up in the middle of the screen.
You're going to see names of men and women.
You're also going to see words that are in two categories,
family and career, and the career part that I've chosen,
think scientific career.
Words for career are words like scientist, laboratory, biologist,
words for home are going to be words
like marriage, kitchen, children.
All you have to do is put the two together, right?
So if the name is a male name,
or the word is a career word,
you will say, "Left,"
and if it's a female name or a home word,
you will say, "Right." Okay, you got it.
Keep that in your mind.
Oh, and you have to go super-fast to do this.
By super-fast, I mean like 700 milliseconds.
Meaning faster than a second to make each response.
Okay, so simple.
Ready, go.
[class, in unison] Left, left, right, right,
left, left, left, right,
right, right, right, right,
left, left, right, left,
right, left, left, left,
right, right.
[Mahzarin] Excellent.
The trouble arises, this is what makes it a test,
that we now flip these.
And now we'll do the other version.
If it's a female name or a career word,
like scientist or that you'll say left,
if it's a male name or a house word,
you will say, right, okay.
Everybody ready to go?
Go.
[class, slowly] Left, left, right,
left, right, left, right,
left, right, left, right, right,
left, left, right, left,
right, left, left, right, left,
right, left, left, left.
-[class member] Whoo. -[Mahzarin] Okay.
So, as a colleague of ours said,
you don't need a computer to measure this bias.
-A sundial will do. -[all chuckling]
And that's because the effect is palpable.
Now, if you were one of the first people in the world
to ever take this test and you made the test,
your first reaction when you take this test should be,
something's screwed up with the test.
At least that was my view.
I thought I could do this.
So I take the test and it turns out I can't do it.
When I say I can't do it.
I mean that I can, but with a lot more time
and more errors in what I'm doing.
And the feeling you get as you take this test
is one of utter despair.
I ought to be able to associate female and male equally with science.
I am, after all, a woman in science.
This should not be so hard for me to do.
To discover that I cannot do that,
I think is profound.
[Nancy] Recently somebody had shown me
an email they'd received from a very distinguished scientist
who happens to be a colleague of mine.
So I was particularly upset by it saying
that he had looked very carefully
and had seen no bias or prejudice against women
during his entire career, and therefore he was confident
that such a thing did not exist.
And I guess, you know, at this point in time,
2019, this email was a few months ago.
I just was shocked by this.
These are great scientists.
How can they not know this? How can they not believe this?
If they know it, don't they believe it? This worries me a lot.
So when I hear stories like the one you tell
that your male colleague believes that he's never seen it,
I have two kinds of responses to it.
One, I understand that he may be truly unaware
and genuinely believing that he's looking for it
and just not seeing it.
It's in the nature of this beast
that we're trying to identify.
It's invisible.
But then I also feel that he has no business
saying what he did because today the evidence
is so much more clear that he need not rely
on his own personal experience.
He just needs to look at the data.
That's what he'd want us to do for his science.
He'd say, "Mahzarin, whatever you may think about turbulence
or whatever, that doesn't matter.
That's your intuitive experience of the physical world.
But you need to know the research."
And I would say the same to him,
because the time has passed now
for saying, "I don't see it anywhere."
And that's why we should be concerned
that anybody who says it's not happening,
or not happening anymore,
is just made to retract those words
'cause they can say, "I'm not going to change my behavior.
I don't care about it." All of that. That's their opinion.
But they cannot say that the evidence doesn't exist.
My field, broadly speaking, is discovering that human beings
may not be the people they think they are,
but they are far more fallible than they may have thought.
Who's competent?
Who has potential?
Who's brilliant?
We find very clear evidence that men are preferred to women
for the same accomplishments.
Implicit bias is something that we all carry in our heads.
How could we not?
We are creatures of our environment.
We are creatures who learn.
When I see a certain set of patterns,
that impinges on me in some way that leaves a trace.
Bill Nye the Science Guy!
Okay, now let's let that cook there for a while
and make some more hydrogen…
And that trace is now a part of me.
This is where the power of technology actually
can be used to advantage to, in a sense,
program our minds to be what we want them to have in them.
[Raychelle] Before junior high, I would've been
really hard-pressed to name a woman scientist.
I would have been extremely hard-pressed to name
a woman scientist of color, 'cause I didn't see any.
And science is a way to view the world.
It's also everywhere.
You can find it anywhere.
Yes, even in Game of Thrones.
Beyond the bench, I'm also a science communicator.
Video games can be complicated,
but they're not rocket science.
I'll be on podcasts and different videos
and sometimes I get to be on television.
[director] Roll cameras A, B, and C.
[camera assistant] Tape one, take one.
[Raychelle] Representation always matters.
You know, there's the whole saying of if you see it,
you can be it, right?
It's getting better but there used to be a time, right, when you would say,
"Okay, what does a scientist look like?"
And it was like, you know, white guy, crazy hair,
you know, whatever. And now it's like,
"No, it's a black woman with crazy hair."
You can only report your sample then in a significant…
By its very nature, science itself should always be evolving.
Who is asking the questions and how they're asking them
and who gets supported does determine the field.
The diversity of people in science can really set the outcomes.
So that's actually emboldened me to just be more authentically myself.
-I did it. -[Raychelle] Yes!
It took me a while 'cause Raf kept distracting me,
and then Joseph did.
And so I'm going to blame them and not me.
-Okay. -[student laughs]
Yeah, this is what I have right now.
I might as well have more fun,
wear silly clothing and talk about zombie chemistry
and wear my hair the way I want.
Not trying to chase this mythology of what a scientist is.
[birds chirping]
[knocking on door]
[door creaks open]
-Jane! -Hello!
Hey, Sylvie.
-Hi. -Good to see you.
Oh it's been a long time.
-What a great house. -Oh, yeah.
It's going to be great someday.
[Adam] Do you remember walking back that time?
When you and I and Brett were out there
walking back into the wind?
-Yes. -My nose froze, right?
Yeah, and I got frostbite on my tuchus.
Yeah, going to the bathroom. That's the worst.
-Oh, God. -I'd still be going there.
I would still be a college professor
and I'd still be going there
if I didn't have to go to the bathroom in Antarctica.
-[both laughing] -Yeah.
You know, when I was writing my Title IX complaint,
it was incredibly cathartic.
I just like wrote it and then just started balling.
When you're writing them all out, one after another,
you know, it's like, yeah that happened
and then that happened and then that happened.
And then you start thinking, like, "How did this even…"
And it's like, well, they were different days
and, you know, I had thought it would get better.
And, you know, you have like this whole mindset
of like hoping for the best even though you really think
that it's probably not going to go well.
I never knew how much it bothered you.
I didn't know.
You didn't show it to me.
So I didn't know.
I mean I knew he was being a complete dick to you,
but I didn't know that it was getting to you.
Yeah, it was hard to navigate.
Like, I knew-- I mean, it obviously was an issue,
but it just was like,
"Okay, Jane's kind of dealing with it."
And whatever.
[Jane] I do sort of have a tough cookie
sort of bravado about me.
I mean, I should have seen it more.
I feel a major regret, 'cause I didn't help.
When I wrote that out, I was like, "God, the pattern is so clear."
Some of the things that you tell me
and that I've heard from other women,
I just-- it's unfathomable. I didn't know.
And most of the men that I know,
all these guys that I went to Antarctica with
-and all my professor friends, whatever… -Mm-hm.
…we, they would not do that.
-Right. -Mm-hm, mm-hm.
So when you hear these stories, you're just like, "What?"
Right.
I'll tell you a story. I think I've told you this before.
So, I was in Europe
and I was at this glacial conference thing,
this EU-run thing with a whole bunch of students,
and there was this old glaciologist, he was about 60 years old.
Anyway, we were all out in Italy and we're all out at the bar.
He takes his hotel room key
and he starts just going down the line,
and you couldn't really hear what he was saying,
but he would go up to a female student and be like… [mutters]
And then he would put the key on the table
and they would all be like, "Yeah, yeah."
And they'd just flick the key right back to him.
A couple of minutes later he would sit down
at the next table with a girl,
[mutters]
Key goes out on the table, and every time the girl
just was like… [laughs] "Yeah." Slaps it right back at him.
But it didn't deter him at all
and he just went to the next one, right?
-Uh-huh. -And he's obviously like lecherous
and all that kind of stuff.
But I always, I was always impressed with those women
that they didn't seem to take any…
They didn't take it in on themselves.
They were just like, "Yeah, no. No thanks."
Right. But it's also bad to sort of be proud of them
for just laughing it off and not making
a big scene about it because really someone should do that.
But what we have is a selection bias
of all of the people who make a big scene like that
are kicked out of science.
And so it's only the people who like… [fake laugh]
and push the card away that actually are able
to be the women who stay.
[Adam] I see, yeah.
Imagine getting hit on at a conference,
and then someone else says,
"Hey, do you want to talk about your poster
over a beer across the street?"
You think nothing of it, right?
You're like, "I'll try to ignore
that being hit on earlier in the day.
I'll go across the street, have a beer with this,
you know, big name guy."
And then you go across the street and you have a beer
with this guy and then he hits on you too.
And then you walk back to your room
with someone who was your lab mate and they say,
"What did you think he wanted?
Do you think he was interested
in talking about science with you?"
[laughs]
How does that make you feel?
-[Adam] Yeah, yeah. -You know?
And then you actually have someone who, you know,
like, behaves completely professionally, values your opinion.
And then you have some success in life,
and then that same lab mate is like,
"Oh, I know why she got that.
She had a beer with the guy
and then she probably slept with him later on that night."
And then even though nothing happened,
you've been hit on twice, you didn't do anything wrong,
and now you have this reputation for having some success
because you were seen having a beer with someone.
That's the kind of crap that,
like that second group of people does.
It's sort of like-- what is it?
A ton of feathers is still a ton.
[Adam] Looking back on it, these really, really capable women
are walking into a headwind that I didn't have.
And sometimes they come up against a real brick wall
in a guy like David Marchant.
You know, I saw that Dave was taking some special joy in tormenting her,
calling her Crazy Jane all the time.
"Hey, Crazy Jane, Crazy Jane."
And I think one of the reasons that he got really into it
is that she really was good
at not showing that it was bothering her.
So then he turned the dial up.
Didn't seem like it bothered her. He turned the dial up.
It didn't seem like it bothered her.
And so I'll be honest, I honestly did not--
I mean, I knew he was being a dick.
I knew it, but it just didn't seem to bother her.
She seemed to just laugh it off.
With the Dave and Jane thing, it comes back to me.
Many, many other times in my life,
I have jumped to the defense of the weaker person.
But with Jane, I didn't see it, and it's just pure stupidity.
It was pure…
I just didn't open my eyes to what was going on.
[Azeen Ghorayshi] I have reported on sexual harassment
in the sciences since 2015.
The frustration with inaction is,
is why we saw this wave of women coming forward
to publicize their stories.
I don't think that most people's first option
is to, you know, go to a reporter
and talk about the problems they dealt with as a graduate student.
You know, I think that very much happened as a result
of a lot of other failures along the way.
Many of the women that I've spoken to
in the stories that we've reported here
about sexual harassment have left the field,
and they have said very clearly
that this is why they've left the field,
that it was either the experience itself
or it was the process of trying to do anything about it
that eventually made them throw their hands up
and be like, "Screw it.
This is not-- I don't have to deal with this."
[ground control operator] …lift off of America's first space shuttle.
And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
[woman] I was seven when the space shuttle first went up.
I decided right then and there
that I wanted to be an astronaut.
I don't think I realized how obsessive I was about it.
It turns out most people didn't spend their nights
listening to the same recordings
of all the Apollo missions, you know, time after time.
[operator] 2,500 feet. Clear.
[woman] I just also loved science in college.
I wanted to take all the sciences, which I did,
like took a class in every science along the way.
I enjoyed a lot of the other sciences,
but geology was my passion.
[crowd clapping]
One of the unspoken rules was that you needed to have
either a PhD or be coming out of the military as a pilot.
And so that's what put me on the track of "Must get my PhD."
[operator] Two, one, nose gear is 10 feet.
[woman] When I got the call back from B.U.,
they said they would love to have me,
I was admitted, and I could work in the program
that I had applied to, but they also had
this new professor who had just come in
and was going to be doing Antarctic work.
So I was the first grad student of Dave Marchant.
So I arrived in September.
In my second week, Dave told me that he did not want
a woman as a graduate student.
I said, I don't have a gender-neutral name,
so it was clear that I was a woman when I was applying.
I can't remember exactly what he said,
but it was more or less that the department had foisted me upon him.
My experience when I was in Boston was fairly atrocious,
but I really wasn't mentally prepared for what would happen
when I got down into Antarctica.
It was bullying from day one.
He was using epithets all the time, "whore," "bitch,"
and then I remember the first time he called me "cunt."
Later on he would tell me that he did not believe
that women should be on the ice in Antarctica,
and we're altering the science on the ice for worse.
In order to do scientific work down in Antarctica,
you need to apply for funding
through the National Science Foundation Polar Programs.
So there aren't alternate sources for funding
if you want to do work there.
And part of how Dave derived his authority
was because he helped to decide who got the funding.
It was the middle of the summer in Antarctica,
and we walked outside of the camp
because he indicated that he had something that he wanted to tell me.
He told me that he had decided that I would
have no future in any polar studies
and that they would make sure that I got no funding.
My whole world was disintegrating.
And then he grinned at me and walked off.
And when we got back,
I went to the chair of the department at the time
and explained all the circumstances, and it was a woman.
She was sitting behind the desk in a fairly darkened room,
and it was a big wooden desk.
She said, "You can go through this,
but Dr. Marchant has a sterling reputation,
brings a lot of money into this department,
and wouldn't it just be easier
if you just finished your master's degree and left?"
And I was floored.
The department judged that running one woman out of science
was much less of a hassle than running a man out.
Leaving without a PhD meant not applying to be an astronaut.
And it was the end of the dream that I had had.
Who knows if I'd ever actually have become an astronaut,
but if it was going to end,
I would have wanted it to end on my terms.
[door creaking]
[water splashing]
[Nancy] For me, it was a conflict that was never to be resolved,
even though I loved the sciences that was happening,
so I just couldn't do it any longer.
I was about 50 and I thought there are two choices here.
Either I could retire,
but I'm not rich enough to retire and never work again,
and there's no other thing I'd rather do except science.
I just loved it.
Somehow I-- This is worth fighting for.
I'm going to fight enough that I can go in the lab
and do an experiment and I'm not--
and somebody's not going to come and make it
impossible for me to do it or ruin it
after I have done it or take all the credit for it
once it's done, or make sure that something bad…
I'm going to fight for that because I just have to do this.
I want to be a scientist.
If you believe that passion for science,
ability in science is evenly distributed among the sexes,
if you don't have women, you've lost half the best people.
Can we really afford to lose those top scientists?
[Mahzarin] Often people talk about the cost to women.
For now, I want to put that aside
and just talk about the cost to the world of science.
I mean, how much are we costing ourselves?
How many great discoveries have just been lost to us
because we didn't have the eyes to see?
[reporter 1] A study of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology was launched by female faculty members,
-fed up with unequal treatment. -[reporter 2] At MIT,
female professors have been learning lessons the hard way.
When the women compared notes,
they found they all had similar problems.
That triggered a five-year study.
What they found were salary inequities, lack of advancement…
[Marcia McNutt] As the evidence started coming in,
it was really clear that there were major discrepancies.
[Sylvia] On the average, the laboratory space for women
was significantly less than the laboratory space for men,
and it was clear that the women
were paid a lower salary than the men.
[Leigh] MIT was losing female faculty hires
because of the childcare issue.
There was no childcare anywhere in the central campus.
I think it took all of that
to make it a comprehensible story.
It came to be known as the MIT Report.
It was just a summary of what we'd done with some data in it.
I said, we've got to ask Chuck Vest if he'd like
to put a comment to go with the report.
We don't want anyone to think that we blindsided them.
[Robert A. Brown] It was a long time between the full report
and then the decision.
I would think it's almost months, definitely weeks.
It was very complicated for the university.
You have to, I think, put this whole thing in the context of a university
that really prided itself on being a meritocracy.
[Nancy] You thought no president of any university
would ever understand, much less acknowledge publicly.
He struggled with exactly the criticism
that I think everyone knew we would get.
[Nancy] But then something really amazing happened.
He endorsed the report.
He wrote this comment, which really is I think the reason
the MIT Report became so well known.
"I have always believed
that contemporary gender discrimination
within universities is part reality and part perception,
but I now understand that reality
is by far the greater part of the balance."
[Sylvia] He came out and said
there has been discrimination and there has been bias,
and we're going to go forward and rectify this.
What the report made us do is own the problem
[Sylvia] Because it was based on data,
you can't refute it.
[Robert] It was a ripple, that you could feel
that resonance, and that's because it was real.
[Sylvia] We all were amazed at the response.
[Nancy] After the MIT report, I was invited to give so many talks,
and I went around the country and I met so many women
who had put so much time into this problem.
[Marcia] Women everywhere could go to their department heads,
to their provosts, and say,
why are we not doing this?
And they did.
[Sangeeta] The last 20 years for me have been
sort of a slow continuous change.
I was a graduate student at MIT in the '90s.
I was one of very few women.
And then when I came back to be on the faculty in 2005,
every step of the way,
someone has been quietly watching my salary,
making sure that it was equal.
So I have benefited from the work that they did.
And I try to do, you know, that for the next generation.
[Robert] It was a turning point for me as a university administrator.
I remember going to a meeting of provosts not long after that
and getting browbeat by a number of provosts.
I'm not going to say who,
who said, "It's not in my institution."
There still is bias.
People still have implicit bias and explicit bias.
You know, these are tough societal problems,
and you can't lose the energy,
because you won't solve the problem unless you build in,
you know, systematic structural change
that can keep working over a long timeframe.
-[woman 1] Nancy, hi! -[woman 2] How are you, Nancy?
So good to see you.
I love you, I love you.
-[Nancy] You're in different costume. -[laughing]
[chattering]
Nancy, this is such a crazy thing.
[Nancy] It took that group working together
to take this problem on,
it really couldn't have been done otherwise.
Sylvia, myself, Penny, Nancy, Wiki,
we were much younger.
-[all laughing] -Everyone was. Twenty years.
You know, this kind of thing takes somebody
who's passionate, who's willing to give their life to it
and who has tremendous courage.
-The first toast is to Nancy… -Yes--
…and the second toast is to all of us.
-[all laughing] -Cheers.
[indistinct chatter]
If you go back and read the things that we wrote,
-they're brilliant! -[women laughing]
[indistinct chatter]
[Raychelle] So we are in Quebec City
for the Canadian Chemical Society meeting.
I am speaking at the meeting.
I always get really, really nervous.
A skosh of it might be imposter syndrome, which a lot of people get,
but I also think part of it
is the expectations sometimes for speakers
from historically marginalized groups are higher.
The Washington Post, Chemistry World,
and Scientific American have all featured
her pop culture-chemistry writing.
And if you haven't yet checked out her blogs and podcasts,
they make really excellent content for lectures.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Raychelle Burks to the stage.
[audience applauding]
So I want to kick off my talk
by first talking about code switching.
So how many folks are familiar with code switching?
Right? And so it's a linguistic term.
Oftentimes in linguistics,
it's considered between languages.
Definitely when you're learning a new language, right?
But in the last 10 to 15 years,
this has really been expanded, and this is actually
a great visual of what code switching is.
So look at how he's doing this handshake,
and then with Durant, right?
There's a familiarity there.
You code switch, right?
If you're at work, talking to your colleagues,
talking to the Dean or at home,
you switch your styles, you may also switch your language.
Even though we all do it,
the historically marginalized do it sometimes
for a different reason, right?
We do it because we're told in implicit and explicit ways
that basically everything you are from the top of your head
to the bottom of your toes needs to change,
your hair, your ethnic dress,
your mannerisms, they got to go, right.
And we often do it by calling it "professional"
or "professional standards."
And what we need to realize is that our so-called
professional standards or professionalism,
who got to decide that?
Who got to make those rules, right?
Right?
'Cause I don't recall making the rule
that my hair needed to be straight.
And I've absolutely been told, you know,
"Before you go to that talk,
are you going to make your hair look more professional?"
K through 12, college, graduate school,
and now we hear this kind of thing.
Science is apolitical, right?
It's objective. It's free from bias where only the best rise to the top.
And I did believe that.
And maybe there's some of you sitting in the audience
that are like, "No, that's absolutely true,
and I refuse to hear differently."
And it's not true because science is a human endeavor,
and that means that it contains
and is subject to all of our brilliance and all of our bias.
And we tend to focus on the brilliance part,
but remember there's an "and bias."
This is advice that I've gotten, and I'm passing it on.
Take care of yourself, take care of you,
take care of others.
You cannot do everything on your own.
You need enough of your allies,
well-positioned, to make something happen.
It's about doing. The correction requires action.
We can do better, we can get better,
and we will be better together.
Thank you.
[audience applauding]
[inaudible]
Awesome.
-There you go. -Perfect.
[Jane] So we're going to take a sample,
take it back to the lab and crush it,
and then we do all kinds of things to it.
[chuckles]
So you'll take that tiny little powder that you end up with,
and you'll pack that into a little target
that you send to the accelerator mass spectrometer
and the whole sample that you end up with
is like the head of a pin.
Sometimes we use kilograms of samples
and we'll end up with just this little tiny thing
that will disappear if you sneeze, so we don't do that.
[all laugh]
One of my goals in mentoring is to be someone
that I needed when I was younger.
Okay, should be measure--
[Jane] Maybe a little bit more.
[Emma Harrison] Jane's a great advisor.
She really is somebody who I can admire and look up to
and take as a role model in many different ways.
[Jane] Oh, that's the money right there.
Ah, perfect.
If you hit it a couple more times.
I think about what would have led the faculty committee
to have come to that decision to let him back on.
They said that he would be able to resume
his normal activities after a certain period of time,
so I was in sort of disbelief…
but the president fortunately thought something different.
I'm Bob Brown, I'm president of Boston University
and before that was provost at MIT.
[reporter] Boston University has fired a professor
accused of sexual harassment.
In a letter to the faculty Friday,
B.U. President Robert Brown announced
that after a 13-month investigation,
the board of trustees voted
to terminate Dr. David Marchant's employment.
[Jane] When I heard the news, I was a little bit conflicted,
because on the one hand it was great that he was fired
and wouldn't be able to do anything
to other female trainees.
But on the other hand, in so many cases,
there's not that justice that happens.
[laughing]
A lot of people, especially male scientists,
you know, when they heard about my story,
I received a diversity of responses.
Some people avoided eye contact,
some people wanted to have nothing to do with me.
Some people wanted to talk about it
and ask what they could do,
which I think is a great response.
One thing that's been really impressive
has been how much people have wanted to make change as a result.
The Science and Technology Committee opened an inquiry.
They were shocked that someone who'd been harassing women
for decades had received millions of dollars
in National Science Foundation funding.
[Barbara Comstock] The committee on Science, Space and Technology
will come to order.
And I now recognize Dr. Clancy for five minutes to present her testimony.
"We scientists do this work
because we want to give the best of ourselves
to the advancement of science.
Women keep trying to give us their best
and we blow ash in their faces and push them down mountains.
The way we've tried to fix this problem isn't working.
We have decades of evidence to prove it.
Let's move away from a culture of compliance
and towards a culture of change."
[music crescendo]
[Nancy] Despite all the progress,
and it's tremendous progress,
women still grapple with these problems.
People had never really looked at the data
in the way that we looked at it as a committee.
So I kept memos, just copies of memos.
And what's astonishing to me when I look at all of this
is the amount of time and the amount of work
that went into doing this,
asking people to come to meetings
and the amount of effort it took to try to see.
And I think about, you know, it makes me realize,
you know, that at the time I was spending 20 hours a week
or something on this and then doing my job the rest of the time.
It makes me sad.
It really does.
You know, you sort of wonder in your life,
would you have done it differently?
And, gosh, I don't know. I couldn't have lived without science,
but I wouldn't live through this again. I'll tell you.
So I don't know what the answer should have been,
would have been. I still don't know.
I can still, even now just thinking about it,
you know, that it was this way,
such a waste of time and energy
when all you wanted to do was be a scientist.
What on earth?
Look at the talent of these women.
This is what you lose when you do not solve this problem.
That's really what it's about.
It's about the science.
["Never One Thing" playing]
♪ I'm the underbelly, I am the claw ♪
♪ Never one thing, no Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm a street fighter I'm a prayer for peace ♪
♪ I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee ♪
♪ I am the truth, I am a lie ♪
♪ I am the ground, I am the sky ♪
♪ I am the silence, I am the call ♪
♪ Never one thing, no Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm the underbelly, I am the claw ♪
♪ Never one thing, no Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm a street fighter I'm a prayer for peace ♪
♪ I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee ♪
♪ I am hope, I am defeat ♪
♪ I am broken, I am complete ♪
♪ I am the grace, I am the fall ♪
♪ Never one thing, no Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm the underbelly, I am the claw ♪
♪ Never one thing, no, Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm a street fighter I'm a prayer for peace ♪
♪ I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee ♪
♪ I am the beggar, I am the queen ♪
♪ I am the end, I am the means ♪
♪ I am the hammer, I am the wall ♪
♪ Never one thing, no Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm the underbelly, I am the claw ♪
♪ Never one thing, no, Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm a street fighter I'm a prayer for peace ♪
♪ I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee ♪
♪ I am the victor, I am the loss ♪
♪ I am a profit, I am the cost ♪
♪ I am the salve, I am the sting ♪
♪ Never, no never, no never one thing ♪
♪ I'm the underbelly, I am the claw ♪
♪ Never one thing, no Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm a street fighter I'm a prayer for peace ♪
♪ I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee ♪
♪ I am a mother, I am the child ♪
♪ I am the meek, I am the wild ♪
♪ I am the witch, I am the saint ♪
♪ I am alive, never one thing ♪
♪ I'm the underbelly, I am the claw ♪
♪ Never one thing, no Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm a street fighter I'm a prayer for peace ♪
♪ I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee ♪
♪ I am the lion, I am the swan ♪
♪ I am the bull, I am the fawn ♪
♪ I am a woman, I am the ring ♪
♪ I am my own, never one thing ♪
♪ I'm the underbelly, I am the claw ♪
♪ Never one thing, no Not one thing at all ♪
♪ I'm a street fighter I'm a prayer for peace ♪
♪ I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee ♪
[vocalizing]