Natalie Portman: 'Step by step guide to toppling the patriachy', Variety Power of Women - 2018

12 October 2018, California, USA

We’ve had an incredible week at Time’s Up, the organization I am here to talk about. Because this week, we welcomed our first President and CEO, Lisa Borders, who comes to us after heading the WNBA. Lisa is a brilliant, compassionate and strategic leader with vast experience in business, activism and government, and we are so lucky and grateful to have her come guide our path.

I came to the first Time’s Up meeting, almost exactly one year ago, after the shattering reports by Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor and Ronan Farrow were published about Harvey Weinstein. I had heard the stories but was horrified to learn the extent of his abuse. However, a part of the story I had never considered before was how many women were forcibly removed from our industry because of his retaliatory behavior.

The articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker, as you all know, detailed his active character assassination of the women he assaulted — telling directors the actresses he had abused, were difficult or crazy and not to work with them. Harvey’s lawyer, David Boies, signed contracts with spy firms to surveil the women who reported his crime — to try to make them out as whores, and track their movements.

He did this, as many harassers and assaulters do, to take power away from their victims, because if they have less work, they have less money, and then they have less power, and eventually they have less credibility and less reputation, and again, less power to get him in trouble for the crimes he committed. And it’s working! Harvey is STILL on the loose and the NY County DA Cy Vance just dismissed one of the cases against him yesterday. Harvey Weinstein, the man whose name has become synonymous with serial rapist, might not ever suffer any legal consequences because our legal system and our culture protect the perpetrators of sexual violence, not its victims.

As Jodi Kantor noted, Weinstein’s abuse was so pervasive, that a whole generation of actresses had been pushed out of our industry and had been deprived of decades of work and the payment that accompanies it. What other women in our industry and in other industries had been silenced and shut out in this way?

I had always wondered why there was still unequal representation in nearly every industry, and particularly in positions of leadership and power, when graduate schools have been consciously enrolling equal amounts of men and women. I wondered why do women graduate 50/50 from law schools and yet make up only 20% of law firm equity partnerships? Why do women graduate 50/50 from all business schools and yet make up only 10.6% of Fortune 500 boards and 4.8% of fortune 500 CEOs? Or that in our industry, women graduate 50/50 from film schools yet only 11% of the top 250 films last year were directed by women?

There’s a theory that’s often cited that women drop out of the workforce to focus on motherhood, or because the workplace isn’t conducive enough to rearing children. And I used to believe that too. But it always seemed suspicious as a reason — like a woman would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on law school, and all the time and hard work to graduate, and all the hours and stress to pass the bar, and then work for years at a law firm, and then give up her 6 or 7-figure job that she loves and has invested so much into, because she didn’t ever consider she might have to find childcare for her kid? A woman who can probably easily afford childcare? It was confusing, but I bought it, cause, well, I don’t know. I’m a sheep.

Now, I would like to dispel that myth.

First of all, there are too many women who either don’t choose to have children, do not yet have children, or who have grown children, to account for the gaping lack of women in leadership positions in almost every industry, if it was really due to incompatibility with motherhood.

Second, there are many professions that might be considered incompatible with motherhood that are nearly all female. Think about gynecology. Gynecology is one of the most time-consuming, emotionally intensive fields of medicine, and they are on call around the clock. Today, almost all gynecologists are women. And many of them have kids. So what is this oft-repeated rumor about women not being able to do hard jobs with kids at the same time?

In gynecology, there is uniquely a demand for females. Women are asking for other women to be doing the job — so that affects hiring. Also, women are the primary people the doctors have to deal with, so you have to assume that harassment and assault goes way down. If there’s a lesson to be learned from our vagina doctors, it’s that with increased demand for women, and increased physical and emotional safety on the job, women will flock to a field that is emotionally and intellectually intense, and also that is incredibly time-consuming.

Similarly, in our business, people make the argument that we see so few female directors, DPs, camera departments, VFX supervisors, stunt coordinators — wait almost every job — because set life isn’t conducive to family life. Well, what about the hair and makeup and wardrobe departments? They’re almost entirely female. They figure out how to work on movies and take care of their families, if they have chosen to have families.

It’s much more likely for a woman to stay in a job for her children than to leave it. Consider all of the women in the restaurant or domestic industries sometimes work many jobs at once, in order to support their kids. So let’s please stop saying that women are choosing to drop out of the workforce because of their families.

The rumor is wrong.

Of course, many women simply have a personal preference for being full-time parents, and that’s a beautiful and admirable choice — but not ALL of them. Sure, sets and offices and every workplace can improve A LOT when it comes to helping working parents, both male and female — allowing more family leave, creating spaces at work for daycares or preschools, creating reasonable work hours and post-work expectations so people can live their lives. But gynecologists don’t have longer maternity leave or daycare at work, and they’re a nearly all-female profession now. These are not the reasons women are leaving the workforce. Let’s be clear.

The reason women in nearly every industry are not represented in powerful positions is because women are being discriminated against or retaliated against for hiring and promotion. When they do get jobs, they are often being harassed and assaulted, and they are being paid less than their male counterparts — all of which coerce self-preserving women into finding safer options for themselves and different ways to feel valued. Many women are further oppressed by intersections with other marginalized identities — whether by sexual orientation, race, age, class, religion, physical ability — and are subject to multiple avenues of discrimination and harassment at work at once. If they try to report it, there is often a second harassment — their reputations are smeared, their future hiring is jeopardized and they are further harassed.

So that’s part of why our first action at Time’s Up was to start the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund with the National Women’s Law Center. Because women need to put food on the table. And in order to do so, they need to be able to do their work in a safe, equitable and dignified environment.

In its first year, our Time’s Up legal defense fund has served more than 3500 people from workers at McDonalds, to prison guards, to military personnel, to women in our own industry, who have faced gender-based harassment, discrimination, coercion and assault. Recently, our lawyers helped Melanie Kohler triumph against Brett Ratner and his lawyer, Marty Singer, who tried to use Brett’s enormous financial advantage over her to legally bully her into silence. Melanie did not have to retract her claims of assault against him. And he dropped his case of defamation because he saw that she could not be bullied legally just because he has hundreds of millions of dollars and she does not.

At Time’s Up we want ALL people — men, women and those who identify as neither and both, to lead the charge to make hiring more fair, make wages more equitable, and make the workplace environment safe and dignified for all. We now have Time’s Up chapters in tech, finance, advertising, journalism, medicine, and we have sister organizations among restaurant workers, domestic workers, and farmworkers — we are thousands of women across multiple industries internationally joining together to make the same demands of the world.

What can YOU do?

First, MONEY: You can give or raise money for the Legal Defense Fund.

Second, GATHER: Meet with other women and see what changes you want to make. Through Time’s up, or on your own, gathering has been the central principle of what we do that has created every action we’ve taken.

Third, LISTEN: If any group you’re in has people who only look like you — change that group. It’s an awakening to hear from women who have different experiences of marginalization.

Fourth, DEMAND: The women in this room are the most powerful women in our industry. All you in this room have the power to negotiate for equal pay, or grant equal pay, or popularize equal pay in the culture. Be embarrassed if everyone in your workplace looks like you. Pay attention to physical ability, age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity and make sure you’ve got all kinds of experiences represented.

Fifth, GOSSIP WELL: Stop the rhetoric that a woman is crazy or difficult. If a man says a woman is crazy or difficult, ask him: What bad thing did you do to her? It’s code that he is trying to discredit her reputation. Make efforts to hire people who’ve had their reputations smeared in retaliation.

Sixth, DON’T BE SHY: Don’t shy away from Consequences for those who abuse their power. Those who abuse power are not going to have a change of behavior out of the goodness of their hearts — they are motivated by self-interest and will only change their behavior if they have to worry they will lose what they care about.

Seventh, and this is a united challenge to everyone in this room: TELL A NEW STORY: What if we took a year off from violence against women? What if for one year, everyone in this room does everything in their power to make sure that all entertainment produced just this year will not depict a rape or murder of a woman. In the projects you write, produce, direct, act in, package, market, do not harm women this year, and let’s see how that goes.

I want to leave off with a reminder that our family of animals — mammals — is named after us, women, because of our mammary glands. Yes, the most remarkable thing about our whole type of animal is our boobs. We know that. Men know that. Babies definitely know that. In fact, at our first Time’s Up meeting, I was breastfeeding my daughter during the meeting, in a room that not only allowed it, but welcomed and applauded it. Anyway, our boobs are amazing. But there’s a message in our mammary glands:

Many men are behaving like we live in a zero-sum game. That if women get the respect, access and value they deserve, that men will lose theirs. But we know the message of the mammaries: the more milk you give, the more milk you make. The more love you give, the more love you have. And the same can be said of fire — when you light someone else’s torch with your own, you don’t lose your fire, you just make more light and more heat.

So my last challenge to everyone in this room, is to spread your fire. Use your fire to light other women’s torches and make more light and more heat for all of us. If every powerful woman in this room pledges to hire at least three women in jobs this year that women don’t usually get — directors, cinematographers, VFX supervisors, composers, stunt coordinators, board members — I mean almost all of the jobs are jobs women don’t get. Just pick three jobs you get to choose, and light a woman’s torch. The light will multiply and the heat will intensify for all of us.

Do all of you pledge with me?

Hannah Gadsby: 'All men believe they are good', THR Women in Entertainment - 2018

5 December 2018, Los Angeles, California, USA

I wsant to speak about the good men.

I want to speak about the very big problem I have with the good men, especially the good men who take it upon themselves to talk about the bad men. I find good men talking about bad men incredibly irritating, and this is something the good men are doing a lot of at the moment. Not this moment, not this minute, because the good men don’t have to wake up early for their opportunity to monologue their hot take on misogyny. They get prime-time TV and the late shows.

I’ll tell you what, I’m sick of turning my television on at the end of the day to find anywhere up to 12 Jimmys giving me their hot take. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the Jimmys and the Davids and the other Jimmys — good guys, great guys. Some of my best friends are Jimmy. But the last thing I need right now in this moment in history is to have to listen to men monologue about misogyny and how other men should just stop being “creepy,” as if that’s the problem. “If only these bad men just knew how not to be creepy!” Is that the problem? Men are not creepy. Do you know what’s creepy? Spiders, because we don’t know how they move. Rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness; it is misogyny. So why can’t men monologue about these issues? Well they can, and they do. My problem is that according to the Jimmys, there’s only two types of bad men. There’s the Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species to the Jimmys. And then there are the FOJs: the Friends of Jimmy. These are apparently good men who misread the rules — garden-variety consent dyslexics. They have the rule book, but they just skimmed it. “Oh, that a semicolon? My bad. I thought that meant anal.” Sorry to the vegans in the room.

My issue is that when good men talk about bad men, they always ignore the line in the sand — the line in the sand that is inevitably drawn whenever a good man talks about bad men: “I am a good man. Here is the line. There are all the bad men.” The Jimmys and the good men won’t talk about this line, but we really need to talk about this line. Let’s call it Kevin. And let’s never call it that again. We need to talk about how men will draw a different line for every different occasion. They have a line for the locker room; a line for when their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters are watching; another line for when they’re drunk and fratting; another line for nondisclosure; a line for friends; and a line for foes. You know why we need to talk about this line between good men and bad men? Because it’s only good men who get to draw that line. And guess what? All men believe they are good. We need to talk about this because guess what happens when only good men get to draw that line? This world — a world full of good men who do very bad things and still believe in their heart of hearts that they are good men because they have not crossed the line, because they move the line for their own good. Women should be in control of that line, no question.

Now take everything I have said up until this point and replace “man” with “white person,” and know that if you are a white woman, you have no place drawing lines in the sand between good white people and bad white people. I encourage you to also take the time to replace “man” with “straight” or “cis” or “able-bodied” or “neurotypical,” et cetera, et cetera. Everybody believes they are fundamentally good, and we all need to believe we are fundamentally good because believing you are fundamentally good is part of the human condition. But if you have to believe someone else is bad in order to believe you are good, you are drawing a very dangerous line. In many ways, these lines in the sand we all draw are stories we tell to ourselves so we can still believe we are good people.

Virginia Woolf: 'But this freedom is only a beginning--the room is your own, but it is still bare', Professions for Women, National Society for Women's Service - 1931

21 January 1931, London, United Kingdom

When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage--fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago--by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot--many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare--if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.

But to tell you my story--it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right--from ten o'clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all--to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month--a very glorious day it was for me--by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat--a beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved me in bitter disputes with my neighbours.

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her--you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it--in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all--I need not say it---she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In those days--the last of Queen Victoria--every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money--shall we say five hundred pounds a year?--so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must--to put it bluntly--tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object--a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is "herself"? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process Of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that extremely important piece of information.

But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor car. And it was thus that I became a novelist--for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist's state of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living--so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl's fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of--what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers--they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.

These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first--killing the Angel in the House--I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful--and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

Those are the questions that I should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open--when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant--there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see it--here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first time in history I know not how many different professions--is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning--the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers--but not to-night. My time is up; and I must cease.

Sheila E Widnall: 'Digits of Pi: Barriers and Enablers for Women in Engineering', National Academy of Engineering - 2000

Sheila Widnall was the first woman to head a branch of the American military (air force). She is a professor in aeronautics and astronautics and first woman to serve as chair of the MIT faculty. The video above is not the famous speech below.

2000, National Academy of Engineering, USA

In a recent seminar with faculty colleagues, we were discussing the information content of a string of numbers. The assertion was made that the quantity of information equaled the number of bits in the string, unless you were told that, for example, the string was the digits of Pi. Then the information quantity became essentially one. The additional assertion was made that of course all MIT freshmen knew Pi out to some outrageously large number of digits. I remarked that this seemed to me like a "guy" sort of thing, and I doubted that the women at MIT knew Pi out to some large number of digits.

This got me thinking whether there are other "guy" sort of things which are totally irrelevant to the contributions that engineers make to our society but that nevertheless operate to keep women out of engineering. These "guy" things may also be real barriers in the minds of some male faculty members who may unconsciously, or even consciously, tell women that women don't belong in engineering. I have recently visited university campuses where that is still going on.

Let me make a strong statement: If women don't belong in engineering, then engineering as a profession is irrelevant to the needs of our society. If engineering doesn't make welcome space for them and embrace them for their wonderful qualities, then engineering will become marginalized as other fields expand their turf to seek out and make a place for women.

So let me give you Sheila Widnall's top 10 reasons why women are important to the profession of engineering:

10. Women are a major force in our society. They are self-conscious about their role and determined to be heard.

9. Women are 50 percent of the consumers of products in our society and make over 50 percent of the purchasing decisions.

8. To both men and women today, a profession that does not have a significant percentage of women is not an attractive career choice.

7. Women are integrators. They are experts at parallel processing, at handling many things at once.

6. Women are comfortable in fuzzy situations.

5. Women are team builders. They inherently practice what is now understood as an effective management style.

4. Engineering should be and could be the twenty-first century foundation for all of the professions.

3. Women are a major force in the professions of law, medicine, media, politics, and business.

2. Women are active in technology. Often they have simply bypassed engineering on their way to successful careers in technology.

1. Women are committed to the important values of our times, such as protecting the environment, product safety, and education, and have the political skill to be effective in resolving these issues. They will do this with or without engineering. They are going to be a huge force in the solution of human problems.

Trends in our society indicate that we are moving to a service economy. We are moving from the production of hardware to the provisions of total customer solutions. That is, we are merging technology and information and increasing the value of both. What role will the engineering profession play in this? One future vision for engineering is to create the linkage of hardware, information, and management. It seems to me that women are an essential part of this new imperative for the engineering profession, if the profession is to be central to the solution of human problems. Another possible future for engineering is to be restricted to the design of hardware. If we do this, we will be less central to the emerging economy and the needs of our society.

The top 10 reasons why women don't go into engineering:

10. The image of that guy in high school who all of the teachers encouraged to study engineering.

9. Poorly taught freshman physics.

8. Concerns that a female with the highest math score won't get a date to the prom.

7. Lack of encouragement from parents and high school teachers.

6. Guys who worked on cars and computers, or faculty members who think they did.

5. Lack of encouragement from faculty and a survival-of-the-fittest mentality (e.g., "I treat everyone badly" attitude or constant use of masculine pronouns describing engineers).

4. Lack of women faculty or obvious mistreatment of women faculty by colleagues and departments.

3. Bias in the math SATs.

2. Lack of visible role models and other women students in engineering.

1. Lack of connection between engineering and the problems of our society. Lack of understanding what engineers do.

These issues of language, expectations, behavior, and self-esteem are still with us. Until we face them squarely, I doubt that women students will feel comfortable in engineering classrooms. No, I'm not talking about off-color stories, although I'm sure that goes on. I'm talking about jokes and innuendo that convey a message to women that they're not wanted, that they're even invisible. It may be unconscious, and it may come from the least secure of their male classmates or teachers—people whose own self-esteem is so low and who lack such self-confidence that they grasp for comments that put them at least in the top 50 percent by putting all of the women in second place. Also, many men express discomfort at having women "invade" their "space"; they literally don't know how to behave. When I was a freshman advisor I told my women students that the greatest challenge to their presence at MIT would come from their classmates who want to see themselves in at least the upper 50 percent of the class.

These attitudes are so fundamental that, unless they are questioned, people just go about the business of treating women as if they're invisible. I remember one incredible incident that happened to me when I was a young assistant professor. I was teaching the graduate course in aerodynamics with a senior colleague, and I was to give the first lecture. So I walked into class and proceeded to organize the course, outline the syllabus, and give the first introductory lecture. Two new graduate students from Princeton were in the class. One of them knew who I was. The other thought I was the senior professor's secretary and was very impressed at my ability to give the first lecture. I think you can all see the intellectual disconnect in this example. It never occurred to this student that I might be a professor, although I'm sure I put my name and phone number on the blackboard. So he thought there were two professors and one secretary. I did in fact eventually become a Secretary—but that is another story.

I once got a call from a female faculty colleague at another university. She was having trouble teaching her class in statistics. All of the football players who were taking it were sitting in the back row and generally misbehaving. If she asked me for advice on that today I don't know what I'd say. But what I did say—that worked—was that she should call them in one by one and get to know them as individuals. This evidently worked and she sailed on. Today she is an outstanding success. I doubt if many male faculty members have had such an experience. But this clearly was a challenge to her or she wouldn't have called me. I believe that all women faculty members have such challenges to their authority in ways that would never happen to a man. Students will call a female professor "Mrs." and a male professor "Professor." I told one student that if he ever addressed Sen. Feinstein as Mrs. Feinstein, he would find himself in the hall. If it is happening to women faculty members, I'm sure it is happening to women students, this constant challenge to who they are.

Attitudes That Impact Effectiveness

We all have unconscious attitudes that impact our effectiveness as educators and cause us to negatively impact our women students. I remember one incident when I was advising two students on an independent project—a guy and a gal (the gal was the better student). We were meeting to discuss what needed to be done and I found myself directing my comments to the guy whenever there was discussion about building, welding, or cutting. I caught myself short and consciously began to direct my comments evenly. I went to my departmental colleagues and said: "This is what happened to me. If I'm doing it, you surely are." Do male faculty members welcome the appearance of female students in the classroom? Do some resent having to teach women and feel that their departments are diminished somehow when women are a significant fraction of their students? You might think so when you notice the low percentages of women among the engineering graduate students, when the selection of candidates is more clearly controlled by such biased male faculty members.

And then there is the issue of evaluation and standards. I don't think that we as a profession can just sit by and evaluate women to see if they measure up to our current criteria. We have to reexamine the criteria. As an example, one of my faculty colleagues, whose daughter was applying to MIT—thank God for daughters—did a study of whether admissions performance measures, and primarily the math SAT, actually predicted the academic performance of students, not just as freshmen but throughout their undergraduate careers. He did this differentially for men and women and got some surprising and very important results. He found that women outperform their predictions. That is, women perform better as students than their math SAT scores would predict. The effective predictive gap is about 30 points.

Thus the conditions were set to change admissions criteria for women in a major way. The criteria for the math SAT for women were changed to reflect the results of the study. In one year, the proportion of women students in the entering class went from 26 to 38 percent.

And it worked! We have been doing this for close to 20 years now and the women have performed as we expected. Women are now about 50 percent of the freshman class.

"Critical-Mass" Effects

Along the way, we have identified some very important "critical-mass" effects for women. Once the percentage of women students in a department rises above about 15, the academic performance of the women improves. This suggests a link between acceptance and self-esteem and performance. These items are under our control. I am convinced that 50 percent of performance comes from motivation. An environment that truly welcomes women will see women excel as students and as professional engineers.

At this point, all of MIT's departments have reached this critical mass. Women now comprise 41 percent of the MIT undergraduate population and outnumber men in 3 of the 5 schools and 15 of the 22 undergraduate majors. The women are still outperforming the men.

At MIT, women are the majority in four of the eight engineering courses: chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, civil and environmental engineering, and nuclear engineering. With the possible exception of Smith College, which is starting an engineering program, I have not heard of another engineering department anywhere in which women are a majority of the undergraduate students. Women are 34 percent of the undergraduates in the entire MIT School of Engineering.

Anyone who has taught in this environment would report that it has improved the educational climate for everyone. We in aeronautics see it in our ability to teach complex system courses dealing with problems that have no firm boundaries.

The top 10 reasons why women are not welcome in engineering:

10. We had a woman student/faculty member/engineer once and it didn't work out.

9. Women will get married and leave.

8. If we hire a woman, the government will take over and restrict our options.

7. If you criticize a woman, she will cry.

6. Women can't take a joke.

5. Women can't go to offsite locations.

4. If we admit more women, they will suffer discrimination in the workplace and will not be able to contribute financially as alumni. (I kid you not; that is an actual quote.)

3. There are no women interested in engineering.

2. Women make me feel uncomfortable.

1. I want to mentor, support, advise, and evaluate people who look like me.

So how do we increase the number of women students and make our profession a leader in tackling tough societal problems? What do we need?

Let me give you my list of the top 10 effectors:

10. Effective TV and print material for high school and junior high girls about career choices.

9. Engineering courses designed to evoke and reward different learning styles.

8. Faculty members who realize that having women in a class improves the education for everyone.

7. Mentors who seek out women for encouragement.

6. Role models—examples of successful women in a variety of fields who are treated with dignity and respect.

5. Appreciation and rewards for diverse problem-solving skills.

4. Visibility for the accomplishments of engineering that are seen as central to important problems facing our society.

3. Internships and other industrial opportunities.

2. Reexamination of admissions and evaluation criteria.

1. Effective and committed leadership from faculty and senior administration.

Technology is becoming increasingly important to our society. There may be an opportunity to engage media opinion makers in communicating opportunities and societal needs to young girls. I don't believe that the engineering profession alone can effectively communicate these messages, but in partnership we can be effective. These issues are important for our society as a whole, not just for engineering as a profession.

However, we do have a good bit of housecleaning to do. We must recognize that women are differentially affected by a hostile climate. Treat a male student badly and he will think you're a jerk. Treat a female student badly and she will think you have finally discovered that she doesn't belong in engineering. It's not easy being a pioneer. It's not easy having to prove every day that you belong. It's not easy being invisible or having your ideas credited to someone else.

What I want to see are engineering classrooms full of bright, young, enthusiastic students, male and female in roughly equal proportions, who are excited about the challenge of applying scientific and engineering principles to the technical problems facing our society. These women want it all. They want full lives. They want important work. They want satisfying careers. And in demanding this, they will make it better for their male colleagues as well. They will connect with the important issues facing our society. Then I will know that the engineering profession has a future contribution to make to our society.