Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault
Kathryn B. H. Clancy , Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford, Katie Hinde
Published: July 16, 2014 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102172
Source/Fonte: Equality Archive
Abstract
Little is known about the climate of the scientific fieldwork setting as it relates to gendered experiences, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. We conducted an internet-based survey of field scientists (N = 666) to characterize these experiences. Codes of conduct and sexual harassment policies were not regularly encountered by respondents, while harassment and assault were commonly experienced by respondents during trainee career stages. Women trainees were the primary targets; their perpetrators were predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team. Male trainees were more often targeted by their peers at the research site. Few respondents were aware of mechanisms to report incidents; most who did report were unsatisfied with the outcome. These findings suggest that policies emphasizing safety, inclusivity, and collegiality have the potential to improve field experiences of a diversity of researchers, especially during early career stages. These include better awareness of mechanisms for direct and oblique reporting of harassment and assault and, the implementation of productive response mechanisms when such behaviors are reported. Principal investigators are particularly well positioned to influence workplace culture at their field sites.
Citation: Clancy KBH, Nelson RG, Rutherford JN, Hinde K (2014) Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault. PLoS ONE 9(7): e102172. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102172
Editor: Coren Lee Apicella, University of Pennsylvania, United States of America
Received: April 2, 2014; Accepted: June 14, 2014; Published: July 16, 2014
Copyright: © 2014 Clancy et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: The authors confirm that, for approved reasons, some access restrictions apply to the data underlying the findings. The data used in this project stem from a survey about people's experiences with sexual harassment and sexual assault. The sensitive nature of these data – and the fact that, because so many field sciences are small, combinations of discipline/country of origin/gender/sexuality/ethnicity can make a person uniquely identifying – mean that the Authors will not be sharing this data publicly. The limited, de-identified data may be available by contacting the corresponding author at kclancy@illinois.edu.
Funding: Financial support was provided by start-up funds from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Department of Anthropology and Institute for Genomic Biology (KC), Academic Senate funds from the University of California, Riverside, and start-up funds from Skidmore College (RN), K12HD055892 (National Institutes of Health Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health Program (JR)), and start-up funds from Harvard University (KH). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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