Anita Hill, a visiting professor in RLE, leads conversations about Title IX

Anita F. Hill, Visiting Professor, RLE 

EECS Staff

The Gender/Race Imperative – a speaker series led by attorney and author Anita F. Hill – continues with a look at co-education at MIT in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The talk by MIT Emeritus Professor Robert M. Gray ’64 will be held from on Oct. 25 from 4 to 6 p.m. in 10-250, with the doors opening at 3:30 p.m. The session will describe life at MIT in the mid-20^th century, a much less-diverse time in the Institute’s history: in the 1950s, only about 1 to 3 percent of MIT’s students were women. By 50 years later, women accounted nearly half of MIT’s students.

The session will also describe the roles that two MIT professors and a long-time administrator played in this sea change, and it will conclude with “an epilogue on the enduring bottleneck of women engineering faculty,” according to program coordinators. The event is free; no registration is required.

Hill, who is University Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, is a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor for the 2017-2018 academic year. Her visit is hosted by Muriel Médard, the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and head of the Network Coding and Reliably Communications Group at the Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE).

While at MIT, Hill is developing and moderating presentations and workshops for the Gender/Race Imperative. The project marks the 45^th anniversary of Title IX – formally known as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 – the groundbreaking law that mandated equal educational opportunities for women.

The series kicked off in early October with a panel discussion on the future of Title IX. In addition to Hill, speakers included Catherine Lhamon, chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; Deborah Slaner Larkin, former CEO and current Chief Advocacy Officer at the Women’s Sports Foundation; and Fatima Goss Graves, CEO and President of the National Women’s Law Center.

The third session in the series is scheduled for Nov. 15. For more details, visit the Gender/Race Imperative website.