In 'The Exceptions,' Zernike chronicles the career of Doctor Nancy Hopkins, a molecular geneticist who, as a postdoctoral fellow, worked with the Nobel laureate Dr. James Watson, one of the co discoverers of DNA. Zernike traces Hopkins research and career from her start as a standout undergraduate in the 1950s at Radcliffe College, through her tenure as a faculty member in MIT's center for Cancer Research.
While focusing on Dr. Hopkins career, Zernike provides the reader with a broader historical perspective on the professional lives of multiple influential women in science post-World War Two. As these women attempted to break academia's glass ceilings, they found their careers and scientific research stymied by both overt and latent sexism. Zernike carefully documents the ways in which multiple generations of women scientists were first denied academic post because of their gender, but were subsequently and systematically denied tenure once they were permitted to join faculty despite the progress in women's rights. A common thread uniting these women's stories is that after they had overcome the endemic stereotype that women were not as capable as men of doing scientific work, they found their tenure cases denied because they were declared hard to work with, denigrated as unfeminine if they did not fit the traditional mold of women as mother, or dismissed as unserious about their scholarship if they did have children.
Zernike shares that earlier in her career, Hopkins herself rebuffed advice offered by female mentors, assuming that the stories of discriminatory treatment must be fabricated because of the progress made in women's rights. However, once Hopkins herself became subject to discrimination as a faculty member and was told she would not be put forward for tenure because she lacked collegiality, she embarked on a decades long battle for women's equality at MIT, the result of which was the university's public admission in 1999, that the institution had engaged in a pattern of sexual discrimination against its female faculty.
If you like stories such as Bonnie Garmus' “Lessons in Chemistry” or Margot Lee Shatterly's “Hidden Figures”, then I think you will enjoy Kate Zerniki's ‘The Exceptions’. However, while I strongly recommend this book, I will admit it was difficult to read, not because of the technical scientific material. Zerniki impressivly explains Hopkins research so clearly that even a mostly scientifically illiterate humanities gal like me could understand. Rather, it was at times painful to read Zerniki's careful documents of the sexism Hopkins faced during her career, and it was frankly enraging to think about what more Hopkins and her colleagues might have accomplished in their scientific research had they not faced these roadblocks.
Until the next episode of Likely Stories. I hope you find a good book that helps you to learn about people and places, both real and imaginary.