These days, it’s not unusual to see women’s names attached to major scientific discoveries. The team of physicists who succeeded in stopping a light beam earlier this year was headed by Harvard professor Lene Hau; astronomer Wendy Freedman was one of the three leaders of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, which measured the expansion rate of the universe.

Nevertheless, science remains an overwhelmingly male field: At some leading research institutions, the percentage of women faculty in science departments is still in the single digits.

Now, as the New York Times reports in its quarterly Education Life supplement, a movement that seeks to remedy bias against women in science is sweeping universities.

But is this effort, which the Times says could “change the face of science education,” based on facts or myth? And is it championing gender justice or gender politics?

A major victory for proponents of women in science occurred in late January when top administrators and professors from nine major universities — including Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford — met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a symposium on gender equity in science and engineering. They issued a terse though vague statement recognizing that “barriers still exist” and pledging to work for change.

The location for the gathering was not chosen randomly. It was at MIT that the gender equity initiative was born a few years ago, from a study that has been both hailed as groundbreaking and assailed as “junk science.”

The Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT, publicized in the MIT faculty newsletter in March 1999, brought the issue of sexism in science into the spotlight. It became a big story for two reasons: MIT’s extraordinary admission that it had practiced unintentional but pervasive discrimination against women faculty, and the claim that the study had uncovered tangible proof of discrimination in pay and work space.

“It was data-driven, and that’s a very MIT thing,” MIT School of Science dean Robert Birgeneau, a champion of the women’s cause, told the New York Times.

Other schools scrambled to follow MIT’s lead; the Ford Foundation shelled out $1 million for similar studies. Columnist Ellen Goodman and others touted the MIT study as a rebuke to anyone who believed the battles for equal opportunity were over. The MIT women who had goaded the school into doing the study were hailed as heroines — particularly biologist Nancy Hopkins, whose complaint started it all.

In April 1999, Hopkins was invited to a White House panel on equal pay, where President Clinton lauded the “courage [of] the administrators and women scientists” who “sought to make things right and … told the whole public the truth.”

But did they?

Anyone looking at the study should have spotted red flags. For one, the two committees that investigated gender bias at MIT were made up primarily of interested parties: aggrieved women professors. More important, the 150-page, single-spaced report that documented the committee’s findings was kept under wraps. What MIT released was a data-free summary that broadly discussed disparities in allocation of resources (with a passing acknowledgment that these disparities did not exist in all departments) and the women’s feelings of “marginalization” and misery. The published report also made no mention of rebuttals offered to specific charges of discrimination by several male professors and officials, which, according to Science magazine, were included in the full study.

In December 1999, the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group based in Arlington, Va., published a sharp critique of the MIT report by University of Alaska at Fairbanks psychologist Judith Kleinfeld, who meticulously analyzed the study’s methodological flaws and accused MIT of producing a “political manifesto masquerading as science.”

MIT officials continue to defend their decision not to divulge information about differences in salaries, lab space and perks because of confidentiality. But that makes it impossible to evaluate the study’s conclusions — for instance, one cannot judge whether differences in rewards were partly due to differences in seniority or achievement. The MIT report angrily brushed aside the merit issue, declaring that “the last refuge of the bigot is to say that those who are discriminated against … are less good.”

However, a new IWF report, “Confession Without Guilt?” released days after the nine-university initiative was unveiled, bluntly states that MIT’s senior women — at least in the biology department, ground zero of the women’s revolt — were indeed less good.

The IWF report’s authors, consulting behavioral scientist Patricia Hausman and Canadian psychologist and statistician James Steiger, looked at six male and five female faculty members who had earned their Ph.D. degrees between 1971 and 1976 and found that on average, the men had published twice as many research papers, received four times as many citations in scientific journals and raised more money in government grants. This cohort was not picked in order to stack the deck: Steiger notes that it didn’t even include two of the department’s three male Nobel Prize winners. (It is encouraging to note, however, that women who earned their doctorates between 1988 and 1993 were far more evenly matched with their male peers — though, as the recent New York Times article asserted, they were not more productive. It is worth noting that according to the MIT study, junior faculty women perceived no unfair treatment.)

Hausman and Steiger concluded that if there were gender differences in compensation and resources at MIT, they may have been merit-based — and that the school had “jumped the gun” in issuing its mea culpa to avoid litigation.

Is it possible that the senior women accomplished less because they were held back by sexism? “That’s a reasonable question,” says Hausman. “But why didn’t they say that in their report? What they said was that there was no conceivable situation to explain [the disparities], that to even suggest that there are productivity differences is bigotry.”

In response to the new IWF attack, some women at MIT have questioned the group’s political motives and suggested that the MIT report was just an internal memo, not a study to be judged by scientific standards. Yet the report was so highly acclaimed precisely because it was supposed to be, as Hillary Clinton gushed at the White House meeting, the work of “some of the best scientists in the world,” who used “scientific method” to get the facts.

Dissenters on the MIT faculty — and they do exist — are keeping mum. In 1999, physicist June Matthews, who sat on the first of the two gender committees, was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education as saying that there was “a lot of hype and hysteria” along with some well-founded complaints. Matthews now says that she “regrets” the Chronicle article and that she was misquoted. (Author Robin Wilson stands by the story.)

Matthews also told me that while she “did not agree with everything” in the MIT report, she “strongly disagreed” with Kleinfeld’s critique — which she hadn’t read.

To Kleinfeld, these comments suggest a climate of orthodoxy and intimidation. Whatever the reasons for Matthews’ apparent retraction, it’s clear that the real story about the gender bias allegations at MIT is shrouded in the kind of secrecy one might expect to encounter when writing about, say, Russian moles in the FBI.

The plot thickens if one tries to pin down the details of the events that sparked the women’s complaint in 1994.

It has been widely reported that after years of struggle, biologist Hopkins felt she’d had enough when she was removed from a course she had founded. She drafted an angry letter to President Vest about MIT’s mistreatment of women, then showed it to female colleagues who asked to cosign it — and the rest was herstory.

But there are several very different versions of these events. According to the initial story in the Boston Globe, MIT told Hopkins that “it would discontinue a course she had designed” and that “a male professor [who] had joined her in teaching it … was going to turn the course into a book and a CD-ROM — without her.” According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Hopkins’ “department took away a course she had helped develop” and gave it to “a male colleague.”

The most recent version, in the New York Times Education Life quarterly, says that Hopkins “was dropped from a course she had developed with a male professor. He wanted to teach it with another professor, a man; they planned to turn the course into a CD-ROM and book.”

MIT will not comment on the episode. But the records of past courses in the catalogs available at the MIT library don’t quite match any of these accounts. They indicate that in the fall of 1991, Hopkins started co-teaching an introductory biology course with a revised curriculum emphasizing “the general principles of biochemistry and modern genetics.” In 1994, she was replaced by a male professor who later published a textbook and CD-ROM on molecular biology. (He was also the principal author of two earlier editions of the course’s textbook.)

A source at MIT told me this was Hopkins’ “stolen” course. Yet it’s hard to tell how much of a role she had in developing the new curriculum. In spring 1991, a slightly different version of the same revamped introductory biology course was taught by two other professors. In 1993, the two introductory biology courses were turned into two units of one course, both based on the same core curriculum but each covering some distinctive material.

Also in 1994, MIT canceled a graduate course in animal virology that Hopkins had co-taught for several years, usually with two men; however, it had existed long before she became involved.

When I e-mailed Hopkins asking for clarification, she declined to comment, saying that she had “no desire to embarrass any individual” — despite my promise not to disclose names or identifying details. Perhaps most remarkably, she suggested that the specific facts were less important than the larger patterns of sexism: “The particular events are almost irrelevant in fact. If it had not been those — it would have been others.”

Hopkins’ story has another curious wrinkle. She has claimed that before her consciousness-raising experience, she “shunned” all things feminist, not wanting to be associated with “angry” women. Yet, for several years before she complained of discrimination, Hopkins had co-taught a reproductive biology course that dealt with sociopolitical as well as biological issues — and was cross-listed in women’s studies. That’s not a crime, but it does contradict Hopkins’ self-creation as a “reluctant feminist” (to quote the title of the New York Times article).

Perhaps Hopkins was ill-used, whether it was sexism or simply academic politics. Clearly, at worst, she was nudged out of a course she had helped develop, not robbed of a course she had single-handedly designed as the early coverage implied. In any case, as Hausman, coauthor of the IWF report, points out, if a male scientist had accused female professors (unnamed but easily recognizable to colleagues) of serious misconduct, it’s doubtful that any media outlet would have unquestioningly aired such charges. Yet Hopkins’ tale of woe became a symbol of the indignities suffered by women scientists.

Kleinfeld, Hausman and Steiger are careful to note that they are not claiming that women at MIT didn’t suffer discrimination, only that there’s no proof that they did. The IWF, known for its skeptical scrutiny of claims of women’s oppression, may have an ideological agenda; but so did the authors of the MIT report, and at least the IWF has been upfront about its numbers and methods.

The MIT study aside, what’s the big picture?

Reliable information on the treatment of women in science is hard to come by, partly because private institutions do zealously guard their data on salaries and benefits. Princeton’s recent statement that its bias investigation found no disparities was just as evidence-free as MIT’s “confession.” State universities are more open. Last fall, UCLA’s gender equity committee released a detailed report showing “small or nonexistent” salary differentials for men and women with the same rank, seniority and specialty. In physical sciences, seniority-adjusted compensation was actually somewhat higher for women; in life sciences, women were paid less but rose faster to the rank of full professor.