Work Together to Complete

a Social Revolution, Says

Baccalaureate Speaker
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http://www.bu.edu/today/2014/baccalaureate-
speaker-work-together-to-complete-a-social-
revolution/
Molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen, Inc., Professor of
Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recalled
personal trials as a female scientist and challenged graduates to
overcome invisible barriers in an inspiring Baccalaureate Address to
the Class of 2014 at Marsh Chapel Sunday morning.

She mentioned some of the great breakthroughs of the last 50 years:
the internet, the Higgs particle, and notably, the discovery of
unconscious biases and the extent to which stereotypes about gender,
race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and age deprive
people of equal opportunity in the workplace and equal justice in
society.

Hopkins was later awarded an honorary Doctor of Science at BUs
141st Commencement.

She spoke before a packed audience at Marsh Chapel and was
enthusiastically applauded for her remarks. President Robert A.
Brown, University Provost Jean Morrison, Marsh Chapel Dean Robert
Hill, and Emma Rehard (CAS14) also addressed the graduates and
their families. Scott Allen Jarrett (CFA99,08), director of music at
Marsh Chapel, led the Marsh Chapel Choir in Clarissima and For
the Beauty of the Earth.

Early in her career, Hopkins worked in the lab of James Watson, the
codiscoverer of the structure of DNA. She earned a PhD at Harvard and
became a faculty member at MIT, working at the Center for Cancer
Research. There, she focused her research on RNA tumor viruses, then
considered to be a likely cause for many cancers in humans. Hopkins also
studied developmental genetics in zebra fish, and helped to design the first
successful method for making insertional mutagenesis work in a vertebrate
model. That accomplishment enabled her team to identify genes essential
for zebra fish development, with implications for better understanding
development in other species.

While advancing science in the lab, Hopkins was discouraged by some of
the systemic problems she observed in academic research. When a man
and a woman made discoveries of equal scientific importance, she told the
Baccalaureate audience, the man and his discovery were valued more
highly than the woman and her discovery.

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Hopkins cited research by psychologists who documented the
irrationality of our brains, and our inability to make accurate
judgments of even simple numerical facts if the conclusions
contradict our unconscious biases.

You can demonstrate gender bias, she said, simply by making copies of a
research article, putting a mans name on half the copies and a womans on
the other half, and sending the two versions out for review: reviewers judge
the identical work to be better if they believe it was done by a man.
Surprisingly, it doesnt matter if the reviewers are men or women.

For years, Hopkins said, she avoided calling attention to the problem, for fear
of being accused of whining. Then on a whim, in 1994 she measured all of the
labs in her building at MIT and found that female scientists had less lab space
than male colleagues. She needed more quantitative data and discovered that
only 8 percent of MITs science faculty were women (Harvard and BU had
similar statistics). At MIT, her findings led to a university-wide examination of
possible gender bias against women scientists.

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We learned that the unconscious undervaluation of womens work can
cause women of equal accomplishment not to be hired, and cause
women who are hired to receive fewer resources for their research,
she said. The women were marginalized. No wonder there were still
so few women science professors 20 years ago. More amazing was
that the ones who were there were so successful.

When the results were published in 1999, Hopkins started receiving
emails from women around the world writing that they had experienced
the same problems. Hopkins was named cochair, along with BU
President Robert A. Brown, then MIT provost, of MITs first Council on
Faculty Diversity. MIT went on to write new family leave policies, and in
2001, the schools new computer science building was designed to
include a large day-care center. Today, many junior women faculty at
MIT have children, proving they can be both scientists and mothers,
said Hopkins, who famously walked out of a 2005 speech by Lawrence
Summers, then president of Harvard, when he suggested that intrinsic
aptitude might explain why there were relatively few high-achieving
women in engineering fields.
In her parting words, Hopkins told the graduates that while they should
first care about finding work they love, men and women must work
together to complete a social revolution.

If you look around and see that the people you work or study with all
look like you, youll know somethings wrong, and work to change it,
she said. Completing this revolution wont happen by the passage of
time, but because you make it happen.


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