♪
JANE WILLENBRING: The word that 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...
(laughs)
...sort of lose-it triggering moment that I have ever had.
And, um...
I actually... (clears throat)
...started crying at the time.
And I, you know, 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.
♪
WOMAN: 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.
♪
WOMAN: We were just trying to be scientists.
We certainly didn't want to be seen
as troublemakers or activists.
♪
WOMAN: The big picture is that women
are extraordinarily underrepresented in science.
WOMAN: The message that's given is that
you somehow don't belong here.
WOMAN: 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): You know, I'm just sort of feeling my way
through this, this game.
♪
(car horns, distant traffic)
NANCY HOPKINS: There's your standard striped version.
Beautiful, beautiful little fish.
And if 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 M.I.T. for 40 years,
and I retired three years ago.
(chuckles): Ah-hah, 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, like...
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. (chuckles)
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 that 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 and breasts,
and says, "What are you working on?"
You know, looks at my notebook
and says, "What are you working on?"
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, this, I'm trying to do this."
And at the time, the word "sexual harassment"
didn't exist... it 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.
I just tried to pretend nothing had happened.
(seagulls squawking)
(keys jingle)
Not losing the keys to the car
is the most important part of field work.
(laughs)
And hiking.
This is an area of coastline in California
that is really being impacted by cliff retreat.
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 U.C. 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.
Field work in Antarctica seemed like a perfect, you know,
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.
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, in some cases,
is quite jumbled in my mind.
I do know that there was a definite break between
when we were in, even 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.
Jane, you ignorant slut.
(laughter)
WILLENBRING: 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 (bleep).
♪
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...
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,
and I've actually had, had sort of bladder problems
ever since that time.
(wind howling)
We were looking for ash inside of these belts of sediment
and, 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)
MAN: 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.
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.
JOHNSON: 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.
CLANCY: 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.
JOHNSON: 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 BURKS: 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 am 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," you know...
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're trying to do a quick screen.
And it could be Hurricane Maria or Hurricane Harvey.
Especially Flint.
NEWS ANCHOR: Flint residents filed a federal lawsuit accusing
the city and state of endangering their health
by exposing them to dangerous lead levels
in their town water...
NEWS ANCHOR: Flood waters in New Orleans are full of sewage and bacteria
that can make people sick.
Federal officials joined local agencies in urging...
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, we hand it 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, like... (laughs)
But you have, like, that little diagram.
I grew up in the L.A. area.
Very big high school, 3,000.
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.
"STAR TREK" NARRATOR: To boldly go where no man has gone before.
Like, Uhura was a scientist.
Progress report.
I'm connecting the bypass circuit now, sir.
BURKS: And she was in charge of comms,
but really, she was a scientist.
Going through college, you know,
there were no Black women 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 bull(bleep).
♪
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.
And 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 spoke 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 it's, 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, like,
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, like, deal with it.
It may not seem like a long time... five minutes,
ten minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes.
And 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...
(whispers): "How's this person, like, able to do, like, all this stuff?"
And then you're, like, "Oh." (laughs)
"That's because they're not having to do any of that stuff."
You know, and that's, that's the other thing
you have to kind of remember.
♪
HOPKINS: When you're starting out in science,
it's kind of like getting an airplane up off the ground,
you know, you've got to get...
You've got to 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 M.I.T.
and asked to apply for a faculty job.
But I did begin to have trouble as a junior faculty.
These post-docs,
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 go and take anything they wanted,
because after all, what were you?
You were just a technician, I guess.
♪
I'd have to wait to use my own equipment,
and they would take things out of the incubator.
Just take them, you know,
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 was, 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 they're under... Everyone feels that way.
But I thought, "No, this is somehow different."
And, again, I didn't tell anybody that,
because they, 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 zebra fish.
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, you know, "That's not true."
So I literally thought, "Okay, I have to show him it's true."
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,
against my wishes.
♪
WILLENBRING: 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.
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 (bleep) 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 post-doc,
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.
Look at that structure on the beach.
Oh, yeah, they're doing some construction on that building.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
It's been a while since we've been on the beach, huh?
It's been raining so much.
(chuckles)
Oh, we should remember where our shoes are.
Remember, we made that mistake before. (laughs)
♪
WILLENBRING: I knew he was still a faculty member there,
and I'd heard through the grapevine
that 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.
♪
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'd 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)
BURKS: 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.
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.
(passing traffic)
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 into a faculty spot
because I am faculty with a faculty sticker. (laughs)
And this other person who was clear... 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."
(laughing): And I just pulled in and then went.
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,
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 marginalizing...
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.
And it's not that you take it personally.
(voice breaks): You just don't expect any different.
(tearfully): 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.
That you talk a certain way, and you look a certain way,
and you try to fit into that.
And even when you do all 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?" (sniffles)
♪
(elevator chimes)
Wow, oh, wow, okay, so...
This was my office.
This...
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?", and I didn't really want
to explain to anybody, so I would go at night
and odd times, and 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 was, had my measure 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 that I was right.
I decided I was going to give M.I.T. a last chance.
I didn't go back to the provost, because I was embarrassed.
You know, at first, I had this problem,
now I've got another problem.
So I wrote to the president of M.I.T., and I said,
"There's a kind of systemic
and invisible discrimination against women."
And I wrote this letter, and I showed it
to 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.
PARDUE: From time to time, Nancy and I would get together
and talk about things, and so she
had wanted me to, to see what I thought about the letter.
HOPKINS: 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 looks 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."
PARDUE: I had seen enough of the kind of things that go on
that I really wanted to support her.
HOPKINS: We suddenly realized, "Gee, if you get it and I get it,
there might be other people who also have figured this out."
PARDUE: 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 M.I.T.
HOPKINS: 15 women in the 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.
CEYER: 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.
CHISHOLM: 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.
CEYER: 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 are 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.
♪
CHISHOLM: I just remember us all marching as a,
as a pack to the dean's office together.
HOPKINS: And 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.
CEYER: What we wanted to do was, we wanted to see the data.
HOPKINS: It was very scary, I mean, for me, it was...
The future of my life in 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, I hadn't... 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 them."
And he just stiffened.
He went...
And just stiffened like a board, like...
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 (bleep)
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 (bleep),
that must have been really bad for Jane."
My name is Adam Lewis.
And I met Jane
when I became a graduate student.
So we went to Antarctica together.
And I was just in my office one day, just working,
and an email pops up.
Jane says, "Hey, I've decided it's time to, 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, 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, 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 100 students, seven of us left.
And we sort of realized, like,
"Oh, this is the leaky pipeline."
"This is disproportionate attrition."
♪
JOHNSON: In STEM, we have spent a lot of resources and time
to get young girls focused on STEM.
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.
BHATIA: 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.
(mouse clicking)
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.
(door opening)
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, of smart women... it's all of us.
MAHZARIN BANAJI: 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.
BANAJI: 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 I.A.T.,
or the Implicit Association Test.
BANAJI: The I.A.T. 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.
(laughs): It's a no-brainer, as a neuroscientist might say, okay.
So imagine that in the test,
you're asked to do something very simple.
BANAJI: 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 gonna 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.
STUDENTS: Left, left, right, right, left,
left, left, right, right,
right, right, right,
left, left, right...
(students stumbling and slowing)
Left, left, left, right, right.
BANAJI: Excellent.
BANAJI: 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.
STUDENTS (hesitantly): Left, left, right, left...
(students disagreeing and hesitating)
(continue hesitantly)
(slowly): Right, left, right...
(disagreeing and chuckling)
(responses stop, students exclaiming softly)
BANAJI: Okay.
So, as a colleague of ours said,
you don't need a computer to measure this bias.
A sundial will do.
(laughter)
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.
BANAJI: 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. (laughs)
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.
♪
HOPKINS: Recently somebody had showed 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, I'm not going to change my behavior,
I don't care about it," all of that.
That's their...
But they cannot say that the evidence doesn't exist.
♪
BANAJI: My field, broadly speaking,
is discovering that human beings may not be the people
they think they are.
That 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, and it leaves a trace.
Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Okay, now let's let that cook there for a while
and make some more hydrogen...
BANAJI: 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.
(bird squawking)
BURKS: 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."
BURKS: Beyond the bench, I'm also a science communicator.
Video games can be complicated, but they're not rocket science.
BURKS: I'll be on podcasts, in different videos,
and sometimes I get to be on television.
DIRECTOR: Roll cameras A, B, and C.
Tape one, take one.
BURKS: 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 with 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...
BURKS: 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! BURKS: Yes!
It took me a while, 'cause Ralph kept distracting me,
and then Joseph did, and so I'm going to blame them and not me.
Okay. (laughing)
So, yeah, this is what I have right now.
I have it all prepped and ready...
BURKS: 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.
♪
(wind howling, birds twittering)
♪
(knocking on door)
(door opens)
WILLENBRING: Hello! LEWIS: Jane!
Hey, Sylvie.
Hi!
Good to see you.
Oh, it's been a long time.
What a great house, oh, my gosh.
Oh, yeah, well, it's going to be great someday.
LEWIS: Do you remember walking back that time, when you and I
and Brett were out there, walking back into the wind?
(chuckling): 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. (laughing)
Yeah.
You know, when I was writing my
Title IX complaint, it was incredibly cathartic.
Mm. I just, like, wrote it,
and then just started bawling.
When you're writing them all out, one after another...
Yeah. You know.
It's, like, yeah, that happened,
and then that happened, and then that happened.
And 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."
Yeah. 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. Mm-hmm.
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's...
Obviously, it was an issue.
But it just was, like, "Okay, well, Jane's
kind of dealing with it," and whatever.
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-hmm.
We... they would not do that, right? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
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. Yeah.
With a whole bunch of students,
and there was this old glaciologist there.
He's, like, about 60 years old.
Anyway, we were all out
at the... 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...
(imitating indistinct conversation)
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. Mm-hmm.
A couple of minutes later,
he would sit down at the next table with a, with a girl,
and he'd be, like, "Yeah, so how are you doing?"
Key goes out on the table,
and every time, the girl just was, like...
(scoffing): "Yeah."
(chuckling): Slaps it right back at him.
But it didn't deter him at all,
and he just went to the next one, right?
Mm-hmm.
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, like,
bad to, like, sort of be proud of them for,
like, just laughing it off and not making a big scene
about it, because, really,
someone should do that. Do you think they should have?
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 laughing)
...and push the card away that actually are able to,
like, be the women who stay.
I see, yeah.
Imagine getting hit on at a conference, and then,
like, 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,
you know, 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?
You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then you actually have someone who, you know,
like, is, 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.
♪
(projector clicking)
♪
LEWIS: 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, he turned the dial up.
Didn't seem like it bothered her.
He turned the dial up.
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 in the, 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."
♪
(engines roaring)
REPORTER: Liftoff 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.
ASTRONAUT: 2,500 feet.
MAN: 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.
(cheers and applause)
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."
PILOT: Two, one, nose gear is ten 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.
(traffic noise)
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 (bleep).
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, in any polar studies,
and that they would make sure that I got no funding.
My whole world was disintegrating,
and then he, like, 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 a 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
a 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.
HOPKINS: For me, it was a conflict that was never to be resolved,
even though I loved the science
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.
There's no other thing I'd rather do outside of 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 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?
♪
BANAJI: 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: A study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
was launched by female faculty members
fed up with unequal treatment.
REPORTER: At M.I.T., 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...
McNUTT: As the evidence started coming in,
it was really clear that there were major discrepancies.
CEYER: 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.
ROYDEN: M.I.T. 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 comprehensible story.
♪
It came to be known as the M.I.T. 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 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.
♪
HOPKINS: 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.
♪
HOPKINS: But then something really amazing happened.
He endorsed the report.
He wrote this comment, which really is, I think,
the reason the M.I.T. 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."
CEYER: 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.
CEYER: Because it was based on data,
you can't refute it.
♪
BROWN: It was a ripple that, you could feel that resonance,
and that's because it was real.
CEYER: We all were amazed at the response.
HOPKINS: After the M.I.T. 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.
McNUTT: Women everywhere could go to their department heads,
to their provosts,
and say, "Why are we not doing this?"
And they did.
BHATIA: The last 20 years for me have been
sort of a slow continuous change.
I was a graduate student at M.I.T. in the '90s.
I was one of very few women.
And then when I came back to be on the faculty of 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.
BROWN: 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: Nancy, hi!
How are you, Nancy?
So good to see you. How are you?
I can't remember the last time I saw you.
How are you, how are you? Good to see you.
You're wearing a different costume!
Oh, so good to see you. Nancy, this is such a crazy thing.
HOPKINS: It took that group working together
to take this problem on.
It really couldn't have been done otherwise.
MALANOTTE-RIZZOLI: Sylvia, myself, Penny,
Nancy, Vicki.
We were much younger.
(laughter)
CHISHOLM: Everyone was.
20 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, and the second toast is to all of us.
(laughter, chatter)
If you go back and read the things that we wrote,
they're brilliant!
(laughter)
♪
BURKS: 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 impostor 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.
(indistinct chatter)
WOMAN: "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.
(applause)
BURKS: So I want to kick off my talk
by first talking about code-switching.
So how many folks are familiar with code-switching?
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 ten 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," right?
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?
'Cause I don't recall making a rule that my hair
needed to be straight.
And I have 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, okay?
And maybe there are 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.
(applause)
♪
Awesome.
There you go. Perfect.
WILLENBRING: 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)
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.
(laughter)
WILLENBRING: One of my goals in mentoring is
to be someone that I needed when I was younger.
All right, so do we measure or should we keep going?
WILLENBRING: Maybe a little bit more.
(hammering)
WOMAN: Jane's a great adviser.
She really is somebody who I can admire and look up to
and take as a role model in many different ways.
WILLENBRING: Oh, that's the money right there.
Ah, perfect.
WILLENBRING: If you hit it a couple of 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.
BROWN: I'm Bob Brown.
I'm president of Boston University,
and before that, was provost at M.I.T.
♪
NEWS 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.
WILLENBRING: 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.
(Sylvie speaks indistinctly)
(Willenbring laughs)
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. (gavel raps)
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.
♪
HOPKINS: 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.
It can still... Even now, just, 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.
♪
And that's really what it's about.
It's about the science.
♪
REPORTER: As misinformation and so-called fake news continues
to be rapidly distributed on the internet,
our reality has become increasingly shaped
by false information.
Many people don't know the difference between
something real and something created to deceive them.
SAFIYA NOBLE: I spent about 15 years in advertising and marketing,
and while I was there, Google arrived on the scene.
I understood the transformative effect that this search engine
was having in helping us curate
through all kinds of information.
But I was surprised, having just left advertising,
that everybody was thinking about Google
as this new public trusted resource,
because I thought of it as an advertising platform.
Most people who use search engines believe
that search engine results are fair and unbiased.
The public, and especially kids and young people,
use search engines to tell them the facts about the world.
♪
One weekend, my nieces were coming over to hang out,
and I was thinking, "Oh, let me pull my laptop out
"and see if I can find some cool things
for us to do this weekend."
I just thought to type in "Black girls,"
and the whole first page
of search results was almost exclusively pornography
or hyper-sexualized content.
In 2012, I started to see some of the results changing.
Google had started to suppress the pornography
around Black girls.
Unfortunately, still today, we see pornography
and a kind of hyper-sexualized content as the primary way
in which Latina and Asian girls are represented.
"What makes Asian girls so attractive," "Asian fetish,"
"hot ladies from Asians," "see who we rank number one in 2020,"
"tender Asian girls," "meet world beauties."
♪
This is the study that was done by the Markup
that replicated my study from ten years ago.
They found that Black girls, Latina girls, and Asian girls,
those phrases were... look...
so profoundly linked with kind of adult content.
Zero for white girls, zero for white boys.
There are so many racial stereotypes
and gender stereotypes that show up in search results.
What about actual girls and children
who go and look for themselves in these spaces?
It's very disheartening.
When women become sex objects in a space like this,
it's really profound, because the public generally relates
to search engines as kind of fact checkers.
♪
Before we were so heavily reliant upon a database,
we used something like a card catalogue.
♪
We didn't rank content, it was alphabetical.
It also might be by subject.
It's a summary of the organization system
we call the Dewey Decimal System.
NOBLE: Now when we're in a subject, we know there is
a lot in relationship to that one item
that we might be looking for.
We might go look for a book in the stacks, for example,
and find that there's hundreds of books around that one
that tell us something about that book,
and we might serendipitously find all kinds of other bits
of information that are amazing.
But we can see a little a bit more about the logics of that.
We don't understand the logics of how certain things
make it to the first page in a search.
Google has a very complicated
and nuanced algorithm for search.
Over 200 different factors go into
how they decide what we see.
Of course, they're indexing about half
of all of the information that is on the web,
and even that is trillions of pages.
AD ANNOUNCER: Billions of times a day,
Google software locates all the potentially relevant results
on the web, removes all the spam, and ranks them
based on hundreds of factors, like keywords, links, location,
and freshness... All in, oh, 0.81 seconds.
NOBLE: The whole premise of a search engine is to categorize
and classify information.
A lot of the content that comes back to us on the internet,
it's in a cultural context of ranking.
We know very early what it means to be number one,
so ranking logic signals to us
that the classification is accurate,
from one being the best
to whatever is on page 48 of search,
which nobody ever looks at.
(keyboard clacking)
Part of what it's doing is picking up signals
from things that we've clicked on in the past,
that a lot of other people have clicked on,
things that are popular.
So an algorithm is, in essence, a decision tree.
If these conditions are present,
then this decision should be made.
And the decision tree gets automated
so that it becomes like a sorting mechanism.
Google's very reliable for certain types of information.
If you're using it in this kind of phone book fashion,
it's fairly reliable.
But when you start asking a search engine
more complex questions, or you start looking for knowledge,
the evidence isn't there that it's capable of doing that.
It's this combination of hyperlinking,
it's a combination of advertising and capital,
and also what people click on
that really drives what we find on the web.
This is where we start falling into trickier situations,
because those who have the most money are really able
to optimize their content better than anyone else.
♪
There have been great studies about the disparate impact
of what a profile online says about who you are.
♪
LATANYA SWEENEY: I was the first
African American women to get
a PhD in computer science at M.I.T.
So, I visit Harvard.
I'm being interviewed there by a reporter,
and he wants to see a particular paper that I had done before.
So, I go over to my computer,
I type in my name into Google's search bar,
and upward pops this ad implying I had an arrest record.
He says, "Ah, forget that article.
Tell me about the time you were arrested."
I said, "Well, I have never been arrested."
And he says, "Then why does your computer say
you've been arrested?"
♪
So I click on the ad, I go to the company to show him
not only did I not have an arrest record,
but nobody with a "Latanya Sweeney" name
had an arrest record.
And he says, "Yeah, but why did it say that?"
If you type in the name "Latanya"
in the Google image search,
you can see a lot Black faces staring back.
Whereas if I type "Tanya,"
I see a lot of white faces staring back.
So we get the idea that there are some first names
given more often to Black babies than white babies.
So, I then took a month
and I researched almost 150,000 ad deliveries
around the country, and I found that if your name was given
more often to white babies than Black babies,
the ad would be neutral.
And if your first name was given more often
to Black babies than white babies,
you were 80% likely to get an ad
implying you had an arrest record,
even if no one with your name
had any arrest record in their database.
NOBLE: One specific way that algorithms discriminate
is that they just are too crude.
The idea of if x, then y,
if you have this type of name,
it means you're automatically associated with criminality.
That blunt, crude kind of association,
that is the staple logic of how algorithms work.
The types of bias that we find on the internet are often blunt.
We are being profiled into similar groups of people
who do the kinds of things that we might be doing,
and we're clustered and sold as a cluster to advertisers.
And so there's certainly a commercial bias.
But we also have the bias of the people
who design the technologies.
♪
To think that technologies will be neutral or never have bias
is really an improper framing.
Of course there will always be a point of view
in our technologies.
The question is, is the point of view in service of oppression?
Is it sexist? Is it racist?
SWEENEY: Here I was, a passionate believer in the future
of equitable technology, and if the people,
when they were hiring me at Harvard, had typed my name
into the Google search bar and paid attention to this ad,
it put me at a disadvantage.
And not just me, but a whole group of Black people
would be placed at a disadvantage.
♪
How could these biases of society be invading
the technology that I really had grown to love?
And now civil rights was up for grabs
by what technology design allowed or didn't allow.
Google's ad delivery system is really quite amazing.
You click on a web page, and that web page has a slot
that an ad is going to be delivered.
And in that fraction of a second,
while the page is being delivered,
Google runs a fast digital auction.
And in that digital auction,
they decide which of competing ads are going to be the ad
they're going to place right there.
At first, the Google algorithm
will choose one of them randomly,
but if somebody clicks on one, then that one becomes
weighted more often to be delivered.
So, one way the discrimination in online ads could happen
would've been that society would have been biased
on which ads they clicked most often,
and that this would've represent the bias of society itself.
Our technology and our data sharing are so powerful
that they are kind of like the new policy maker.
We don't have oversight over these designs, but yet,
how the technology is designed dictates the rules we live by.
And this meant that we were moving from a democracy
to a new kind of technocracy.
I became the chief technology officer
at the Federal Trade Commission.
They're sort of the de facto police department
of the internet.
One of the experiments that I had done while I was at the FTC
showed that everyone's online experience is not the same.
♪
What we lose with our hyper-reliance upon
search technologies and social media is,
the criteria for surfacing what's most important
can be deeply, highly manipulated.
One of the hardest case studies to write in my book
was about Dylann Roof.
He went online and he was trying to make sense
of the trial of George Zimmerman.
And the first thing that I guess I can say,
I would say woke me up,
you know, would be the Trayvon Martin case.
REPORTER: Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager,
was shot down by a white neighborhood watchman
who claimed self-defense.
Eventually I decided to, you know, look his name up,
just type him into Google,
you know what I'm saying?
For some reason, it made me type in the words
"Black on white crime."
NOBLE: We know from Dylann Roof's own words that the first site
that he comes to is the Council of Conservative Citizens.
The CCC is an organization
that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls vehemently racist.
And that's, that was it, ever since then.
NOBLE: Let's say he had been my student.
I could've just immediately said, "Did you know that
that phrase is kind of a racist red herring?"
The FBI statistics show us that the majority of white people
are actually killed by other white people.
But instead, he goes to the internet and he finds the CCC,
and he goes down a rabbit hole of white supremacist websites.
Did you read a lot? Did you read books,
or watch videos, or watch movies or YouTube,
or anything like that
specifically about that subject matter?
No, it was pretty much just reading articles.
Reading articles? Yeah.
NOBLE: And we know that shortly thereafter,
he goes into a church, murders nine African Americans,
and says his intent is to start a race war.
♪
This is not an atypical possibility.
When you don't get a counterpoint to the query,
you don't get Black studies scholarship,
or FBI statistics, or anything that would reframe
the very question that you're asking.
This is an extreme case of acting upon
white power radicalization, but this is not unlike
things that are happening right now every day in search engines,
on Facebook, on Twitter, in Gab.
People are being targeted and radicalized
in very dangerous ways.
This is what is at stake when people are so susceptible
to disinformation, hate speech, hate propaganda in our society.
♪
SWEENEY: Racism itself can't be solved by technology.
The question is, to what extent can we make sure technology
doesn't perpetuate it,
doesn't allow harms to be made because of it?
We need a diverse and inclusive community in the design stage,
in the marketing and business stage,
in the regulatory and journal stages, as well.
NOBLE: I am really interested in solutions.
It's easy to talk about the problems,
and it's painful, also, to talk about the problems.
But that pain and that struggle should lead us
to thinking about alternatives.
Those are the kind of things that I like to talk to
other information professionals and researchers
and librarians about.
As a person who has a name
that doesn't sound like Jennifer, right?
Or Sarah, or something.
That paper made the difference for me,
because I was just this grad student,
and you were this esteemed Harvard professor,
and you were having these experiences, too.
When I think about the, like, the, the foundations
of something like ethical A.I.,
I go back to you in that early paper.
I think what I feel most hopeful about
is that there's this new cottage industry called ethical A.I.,
and I know that our work is profoundly tied to that.
But on another level, I feel like
these predictive technologies are so much more ubiquitous
than they were ten years ago.
You know, what I find really painful is that
as we move forward, it's harder to track.
One thing that becomes clear is,
we could use a heck of a lot more transparency.
As a computer scientist, my vision
is, I want society to enjoy the benefits
of all these new technologies without these problems.
Technology doesn't have to be made this way.
NOBLE: That's right, that's right.
I see so many more women and girls of color
interested in these conversations,
and one of the things that I also see is how we see things
because we ask different questions
based on our lived experiences.
Just the fact that the questions are being raised
means that the space is less hostile,
means there's an opportunity for your voice.
And, and the other thing
that's really important about this work,
it means that it's a new kind of way of thinking
about computer science.
It's in this conversation with you that I see a future.
I'm hopeful because it's not one isolated paper,
but in fact, it's a, it's a movement
toward asking the right questions, exposing
the right unforeseen consequences,
and pushing this forward towards a solution.
♪
NOBLE: Some questions cannot be answered instantly.
Some issues we're dealing with in society,
we need time and we need discussion.
How could we look for new logics and new metaphors
and new ways to get a bigger picture?
Maybe we could see when we do that query
that that's just nothing but propaganda,
and we could even see
the sources of the disinformation farms.
Maybe we could see the financial backers.
There's a lot of ways that we could reimagine
our information landscape.
So, I do feel like there is some hope.
♪
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Episodes of "NOVA" are available with Passport.
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♪