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Thank you for this opportunity to comment on the Reports of the Committees on the Status of Women Faculty at MIT. The first report on women faculty in the School of Science was a watershed report for professional women in the United States pursuing serious careers and scholarly research. The impact of this report has gone far beyond MIT, beyond the U.S., reaching women around the world in many professional callings and reaching many young women students with serious professional aspirations. The subsequent reports from the other MIT Schools confirm the resolve of the MIT administration in support of all of its faculty.
From the beginning, MIT did not deny women the opportunity to enroll for undergraduate and graduate degree programs. In the post World War II era, when almost all universities enforced nepotism rules in their hiring practices, MIT did not. It is for this reason that right after completion of my post-doctoral studies at Cornell University that I first joined the MIT community in 1960 as a research staff member at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Lincoln Laboratory also hired my husband, Gene, at the same time. In that era, women felt privileged to have an opportunity to do science at the cutting edge, and equal opportunity was far from our thoughts.
From my earliest years at MIT, when women undergraduates were only about 4% of the student body and women faculty were less than 1%, I remember being involved in a study that led to equal academic admissions criteria for women and men undergraduates late in the Howard Johnson administration. Shortly after Jerry Wiesner became president of MIT in 1971, he asked me to help improve the academic environment for women students. Under the guidance of President Wiesner, who had a great interest in promoting equal educational opportunities for all students, the committee study process for recommending and implementing reforms for women students and staff developed. The Wiesner approach was to identify issues requiring attention, to appoint a task force to study the issue in a scholarly way, collecting and analyzing pertinent data, and finally writing a report, with the same care and thoughtfulness as "one would use to write a research paper in a physics journal,'' to paraphrase his words on guidance to me. It was my judgment in the early 1970s that with due diligence we might be able to achieve in my lifetime a critical mass for women at MIT (which I argued to be ~15% women) in every academic department, and once this was achieved, I believed that women would experience equal academic opportunities at MIT. By his personal actions, Jerry Wiesner showed the importance of active leadership from the top administration to increase the opportunities for women students, staff, and faculty, and in the implementation of his policies he depended on the active involvement of senior women faculty in moving the programs forward. Through this approach, the percentage of women undergraduates reached a critical mass level in almost every academic department early in the Paul Gray administration. At that point I felt comfortable about the prospects for women to pursue academic pursuits at MIT, and I directed my attention to more general science policy issues at the national level.
It was more than 10 years later, under the leadership of Nancy Hopkins, that we learned that critical mass, though important, was far from the whole story in gaining equity for women at MIT. We are all indebted to Nancy for her leadership and courage in showing us the right way to proceed and to the MIT administration for their proactive support of this approach.
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