MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins ’64 is no stranger to media attention.

“I have been for one week at the center of a hurricane,” Hopkins said in an interview Saturday. “It’s like getting hit by a swarm of locusts.”

Over the last week, Hopkins has faced intense scrutiny for her decision to leave in the middle of University President Lawrence H. Summers’ speech at the National Bureau of Economic Research conference and for criticizing the comments to the media.

While some have attacked Hopkins for publicizing Summers’ remarks given at a private conference, she defended her decision to talk to the media, even though she says she had no intention of inspiring a media circus.

“I do not think I have [ever] heard of an academic conference that was off the record,” Hopkins wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “Nor did it cross my mind that the public comments of the president of Harvard should be kept secret.”

Hopkins received a similar burst of press attention in 1999 after a committee she chaired on the status of female faculty at MIT released a report demonstrating discrimination against female senior faculty members.

For ten years, in addition to scientific research, Hopkins has become one of the leading advocates for women in higher education.

“This is a dedication to future generations of women,” Hopkins says. “I knew that I was able to get a job because women who came before me were willing to work on this issue. So I knew someday my turn would come.”

Hopkins’ work has been heralded by the Clintons and women worldwide.

BATTLING DISCRIMINATION

Hopkins says that her passion for research—she has worked on cancer and now investigates the developmental genes in zebra fish and their similarities to human genes—prevented her from realizing that she faced discrimination within her field.

“When you love science as much as I do, you just don’t want to be distracted from it.  You try to ignore these problems,” she says.

But after years of unequal treatment, she says the discrimination was too painful and demoralizing to ignore.

“I had to address it,” she says. “It didn’t occur to me I would be addressing it for anyone other than myself.”

She surveyed other women in MIT’s School of Science—and found that there were only 15 female senior faculty members, compared to 197 men. The survey led to the creation of a Committee on Women Faculty in 1995, tasked with studying gender discrimination at MIT, which Hopkins chaired.

After five years, the committee released its ground-breaking report, finding discrimination in resources ranging from salary to office size.

But not everyone supported the report’s findings.  University of Alaska psychologist Judith S. Kleinfeld compiled her own study, in which she described the MIT report as a “political manifesto masquerading as science.” And The Wall Street Journal editorial page called it “junk science.”

MIT Professor Mary C. Potter, who served on the committee with Hopkins, says that Hopkins’ commitment to the issue of discrimination has allowed her to advocate on behalf of her female colleagues while furthering her scientific career.

“She can be laid back on particular occasions, but by and large she is really intensely involved in things,” Potter says. “She is really strongly committed, so when she speaks for herself, she speaks with enormous conviction.”

WELCOMING DEBATE

For Hopkins, what constitutes “science” in studies of gender differences is an open question—one that has been answered with both “discouraging” arguments and “meaningful” debate.

Hopkins says she saw Summers’ remarks at the conference as unconstructive in the context of psychological research.

“When he came into this conference, we thought he was coming to tell us what Harvard was doing about this issue. But he chose instead to give his personal views…and it’s not really his field,” she says. “He wasn’t presenting ideas that were up for discussion, and he didn’t attend the meeting where experts spoke.”

Summers says the views he presented were “a purely academic exploration of hypotheses.”

Hopkins says she believes that Summers’ remarks will negatively affect young women.

“If you tell people that their probability of reaching the sky is very low, then, as we know from research in this area, that probability will be lower,” she says.

Hopkins adds that some of the research Summers cited in his remarks—from Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker—does not represent the most current information in the field.

“Steven Pinker is a popularizer of this particular area I believe,” Hopkins says. “Some people do real research and some people popularize the discoveries of other people.”

She cites several female psychologists, including Cabot Professor of Social Ethics Mahzarin Banaji and Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Spelke, whose research has demonstrated that gender variations are too small to explain the differences in men’s and women’s success in the sciences.

“Currently, the best research that exists has ruled out gender differences as explaining the under-representation of women,” Hopkins says.

Her interest in the genetics of behavior has led Hopkins to think about doing research on gender differences.

“I’m actually thinking of changing fields to work on this myself,” she says.

“It’s something I’ve spent much of my life thinking about….Do I think this should be investigated?  Absolutely.”

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.