MIT Admits to Short-Changing Women Faculty

Black Issues in Higher Education, April 15, 1999

CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- Officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently acknowledged a pattern of systematic discrimination against female faculty in the School of Science, one of five colleges at MIT.

The acknowledgment follows a five-year study launched by three women scientists fed up with unequal status and treatment.

In 1994, when molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins and colleagues began their study into the status of MIT women, there were 252 male faculty members in MIT's science departments, compared to 22 females. Today, the ratios are only marginally better: 235 men to 31 women.

"I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception," MIT President Charles M. Vest says in a statement printed in the faculty newsletter and posted on the university's Web site. "I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance."

The university has acknowledged that it shortchanged its female scientists in areas ranging from salaries and promotions to office space and access to research money.

The report got its impetus after Hopkins, a DNA researcher, was told that a course she had spent five years developing was being dropped. She and two female colleagues polled tenured women in the School of Science -- at that time, they numbered 15 -- and discovered that the women had lower salaries and less office space than male counterparts.

"It was easier for a man to get a Nobel Prize than for a woman to get tenure," Hopkins says, referring to three male scientists in her biology building who have been awarded Nobels over the last quarter century.

The inequities were brought to the dean's attention. Since then, MIT has raised women's salaries an average of 20 percent to equal those of men; increased research money and lab space for women; and even increased the pensions of a handful of retired women to what they would have been if the pay inequities had not existed.

The male-female ratio at MIT might have been explained away by the proverbial wisdom that women and science don't really mix. But as the report found, plenty of women were studying science at MIT at the undergraduate and graduate levels. They just weren't being hired.

In 1994, for example, undergraduate women biology majors totaled 147, compared to 142 men. The graduate students that year were 101 women and 118 men. But for biology faculty, the numbers were just 7 women compared to 42 men.