02/26/2026
Jeffrey Epstein didn't just abuse women and girls -- he actively used his power and money to keep women out of the rooms where scientific careers are made. "The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry," he wrote in a 2018 email to literary agent John Brockman, demanding that the only two women on the guest list of an elite academic retreat in Connecticut be removed.
That email, revealed in the latest DOJ document dump, is just one thread in a sprawling web of correspondence showing how Epstein and the prominent scientists he bankrolled treated women not as intellectual peers but as lesser beings to be excluded, mocked, and dismissed.
"I think we all had a sense that the system wasn't super fair, right?" said Nicole Baran, a biologist at Davidson College and member of 500 Women Scientists, a grassroots organization that has worked to confront racism and misogyny in STEM since 2016. "Seeing some of these emails -- and peering behind the curtains of the rooms that we were never invited into -- has really laid bare just how broken and corrupt the system is."
As detailed by the nonprofit newsroom The 19th, the emails reveal how Epstein's patronage worked as a career accelerator -- but only for men. He funneled millions into their research, hosted networking dinners at his homes, invited them to his island and his ranch in Santa Fe, and connected them to wealthy funders and Silicon Valley power players working on emerging technologies like AI. These men got well-funded labs, lucrative book deals, and access to an elite network that compounded their influence. Women, meanwhile, weren't just left out of this pipeline -- they were actively derided by the men inside it.
AI researcher Roger Schank suggested in one email that it's "hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you" -- dismissing women as too preoccupied with appearance and social anxiety to achieve real intellectual focus. Epstein's response was even more blunt: "No really smart women -- none."
The blatant contempt in these exchanges stunned even women who already knew the playing field was uneven. "I think what was most shocking was simply how blatant and explicit the misogyny was," said Lauren Aulet, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts.
"We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the '50s and '60s, " she continued, "and what we have now is implicit bias and microaggressions. I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it's just perhaps behind closed doors."
For some of these men, consequences are finally arriving. Larry Summers -- whose correspondence with Epstein revealed a deeply personal relationship with the convicted s*x offender long after his 2008 conviction -- announced today that he will resign from Harvard at the end of the academic year. He'd already been on leave since November and had stepped down from the OpenAI board and other public positions as the fallout mounted. Harvard has also placed mathematician Martin Nowak, another scientist with deep Epstein ties, on administrative leave.
The interactions revealed in the files are "very dehumanizing" for women, Baran said. "These are men who had colleagues and mentees that were women. And I think what was so clear is the way in which women in particular were just not spoken about as people with equal intellectual capacity and power."
As a professor, the revelations have made her think about the young women she sees entering the sciences today. "Will their ideas be taken seriously?" she wonders. "Will their creativity, brilliance or ingenuity be taken seriously? Or will it be dismissed or ignored?"
Those are questions the scientific establishment can no longer afford to wave away. The Epstein files didn't reveal a few bad actors making off-color jokes -- they exposed a system in which some of the most powerful men in science actively worked to keep women out, mocked their intelligence behind closed doors, and used a convicted s*x offender's money and connections to consolidate their own power.
The curtain has been pulled back. Whether that translates into real change -- or just a few high-profile resignations and a return to business as usual -- won't be determined by institutions alone, though their complicity runs deep. The funders who kept writing checks, the colleagues who stayed silent, and the wider scientific community that let this culture thrive all have a reckoning ahead of them.
To read the full piece on Epstein's influence on STEM in The 19th News, visit https://19thnews.org/2026/02/epstein-files-academic-research-women-scientists
To learn more about the work of 500 Women Scientists to combat misogyny in STEM, visit https://500womenscientists.org/
For books to introduce kids to inspiring female scientists from around the world, visit our blog post, "60 Children's Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13914
There are also several excellent kids' books introducing multiple women of science including "Born Curious: 20 Girls Who Grew Up To Be Awesome Scientists" for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/born-curious), "She Can STEM" for ages 7 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-can-stem), and "Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science – And The World" for ages 13 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/headstrong-52-women)
If you'd like to encourage your children's interest in science, you can find many girl-empowering science toys and kits in our post, "Top Science Toys for Mighty Girls" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10528
For books about both real-life and fictional girls and women who confronted s*xism and gender discrimination in a multitude of forms, visit our "S*x Discrimination" section at http://amgrl.co/1jdxKIy
