Madame President

MIT President Susan Hockfield has some advice for the young women of today: "If young women want to help invent the future — and change lives and change societies — there's no better way to do it than through science and engineering." In an interview with the Huffington Post's Matthew Dakotah, Hockfield credits the generations of women scientists who came before her with the advances being made by women in science today. In the 143 years since MIT's founding, women have gone from being a nearly non-existent presence at the school, to making up 47 percent of the school's undergraduates. And 85 percent of them — like the male students — will graduate with a bachelor's degree in science or engineering, Hockfield tells Dakotah. The goal, she adds, is for the makeup of the faculty to resemble the makeup of the student body — half women — and "to make sure that places like MIT and the enterprises of science and engineering and mathematics are open and welcoming to women and men and to people of all backgrounds."