The women who write these reports tell the same story over and over again. When an individual person tries to raise this issue, people don't hear them. There have been hundreds of reports just like MIT's, collecting dust. When the president says 'it's true,' then it's true. Since the study came out in 1999, we now have equity committees in all five schools at MIT, analyzing primary data.
Data has to go together with individual women's experiences.
Sometimes that's not easy for people to hear, and sometimes that's not believed the first time around. Dr. Vest said the eight hours of intense discussions and brainstorming among the 15 men and 25 women in the Faculty Club yielded a great many suggestions. Howard Georgi, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard, said the problems were similar everywhere. Problems at Harvard are different, but no less severe. The marginalization is there, but the ways in which the marginalization manifests itself is different.