Why MIT’s Epstein Problem Is ‘Clearly a Women’s Issue’

Nancy Hopkins, an emeritus biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traveled to Cambridge, Mass., this week in order to attend a faculty meeting.

It wasn’t just any meeting of faculty members. This was their first meeting with the university’s president, L. Rafael Reif, since the news broke not only that MIT had accepted money from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein but also that, as The New Yorker reported, the MIT Media Lab’s director, Joichi Ito, had sought to hide a longstanding relationship with the disgraced financier.

The news was devastating to Hopkins, if not surprising. In the 1990s she spent several years working with other MIT faculty members and the administration to improve the working lives of women on the campus. Her efforts led to drastic changes at MIT and other universities, but Hopkins said her institution is still plagued by gender bias.

“To me, from the moment this Epstein stuff came up, it was clearly a women’s issue,” she said. According to The New Yorker, Epstein helped coordinate $7.5 million in donations to the Media Lab, and his identity was hidden on Ito’s calendar. He visited the Media Lab in 2015 and brought with him two young women, who the lab’s staff was told were his assistants. Epstein committed suicide in jail in August while facing charges that he had trafficked in and sexually abused young girls.

For many of the women now on MIT’s faculty, the idea that Epstein was courted on their campus was symptomatic of a larger problem there. At the faculty meeting, on Wednesday, two of them read aloud a letter addressed to Reif and to Martin A. Schmidt, the provost, asking the university leadership for a review of its development practices and more support for women on campus.

“The fact that this situation was even thinkable at MIT is profoundly disturbing, and is symptomatic of broader, more structural problems, involving gender and race, in MIT’s culture,” said the letter, which was signed by more than 60 senior female faculty members. “It is time for fundamental change.”

The letter mentioned Hopkins’s work on gender equity at MIT in the 1990s. In an interview she said it was particularly hurtful to learn about Epstein’s connection to MIT, given the efforts she and others had undertaken to make it a better place for women to conduct research.

“We’re doing all this extra work to fix it,” Hopkins said. “Then someone brings a pedophile rapist to campus, and we say, Enough is enough.”

Pioneering Work on Equity

Hopkins’s work on equity started when she realized that some of the obstacles she had faced when she tried to advance her career were not unique to her: They were shared by other women in the sciences at MIT. She documented that, to begin with, very few women were on the faculty, and their numbers had not changed in years. Many felt marginalized in their departments. They also had less lab space and funding, and earned lower salaries, than did their male peers.

In 1995 a committee of 15 MIT faculty members presented those findings to their dean. A study of gender bias against women in science at MIT, published in 1999, urged the administration to hire more women to the faculty.

Hopkins said many of the problems she identified were fixed quickly. Some of the women who had complained were given raises, while others got more money for research or improvements in their labs. Hopkins and Charles M. Vest, the president at the time, gave talks about the improvements on campuses all over the country. Hopkins also met with Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, at the White House, and went on to earn major research grants and become a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine.

But the harder-to-define problem remained.

“Vest said, ‘I know how to fix anything I can measure, but I don’t know how to fix the culture,’” Hopkins said.

To make MIT a better place for women to work, Hopkins said, the culture outside the university will have to change too. Still, though she saw Epstein’s connection with MIT as proof that a “Silicon Valley bro culture” still exists, she said the response at the faculty meeting was evidence that something major had changed since she started her work.

“I was very moved by it,” she said of the women who spoke up at the meeting. If she’d tried to do that 20 years ago, she said, she would have been “carried out in a straitjacket.”

“These women,” she said, “are courageous enough to speak out.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.