It's Time for Science and Academia to Address Sexual Misconduct
Almost every woman in science has either personally experienced or knows someone who has experienced sexual harassment, racism or assault
By Rukmani Vijayaraghavan, Kristy L. Duran, Kelly Ramirez, Jane Zelikova, Emily Lescak, 500 Women Scientists on December 12, 2017
Source/Fonte: fizkes Getty Images
Why do most academic fields, and science in particular, have such significant gender and racial imbalances? This so-called “leaky pipeline,” where women disproportionately leave scientific and academic careers, is well documented; but the role played by sexual and racial harassment in this process has received little attention. Sexual misconduct is prevalent in any industry where men hold a disproportionate amount of power and women are systematically underrepresented ; academia and science are no different. Women in science are therefore not surprised by the scale and scope of recent reports of sexual misconduct by powerful men in politics, in the media, and in Hollywood, because so many of us have our own stories of sexual harassment. Additionally, women of color also encounter racial harassment—a double jeopardy that the current moment of reckoning with sexual misconduct has not addressed with equivalent rigor and reflection. To address and root out the rampant sexual and racial harassment in science we must enact individual, institutional and policy changes.
Why We Are Long Overdue for a Reckoning
Almost every woman in science has either personally experienced or knows someone who has experienced sexual harassment or assault. In our broader society, the recent resurgence of Tarana Burke’s “Me Too" movement has illustrated just how prevalent and deep-rooted these issues are. In science and academia, as a result of women speaking out and journalists reporting concrete evidence, many egregious stories of alleged sexual harassment and assault have recently been brought to light. The stories are barely the tip of the iceberg—an iceberg of sexual harassers in science and academia floating in an ocean of enablers supported by a system that is all too willing to look away. How many victims of such harassment have been driven out of science as a result? What contributions to science have been lost?
In addition to individual stories, there have been scientific surveys and studies of harassment in science and academia. In a remarkable study, Clancy et al. recently surveyed 474 astronomers and planetary scientists on their experiences with sexism and racism in the last five years. They found that harassment and assault were more prevalent for women of color, who reported feeling unsafe in the workplace as a result of their gender or sex 40 percent of the time, and as a result of their race 28 percent of the time.
Their study quantified the fact that women of color, in addition to having to deal with sexual harassment, have to deal with racism; this cannot be neglected in our larger conversation about sexual misconduct. They also found that 18 percent of women of color and 12 percent of white women lost career opportunities because they did not feel safe attending events where they experienced harassment by other colleagues. Another Clancy study in 2014 found that 64 percent of scientists engaged in fieldwork had experienced sexual harassment and 20 percent sexual assault. Sexism and racism are alive and well in science and are likely strong contributors to the leaky pipeline.
If so many women in science have personally been subject to harassment or worse, why aren’t more women openly talking about it and naming their offenders? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: victims do not hold the power and therefore live in fear of retaliation. In the academic and scientific world, this retaliation can hamstring the necessary ingredients for a successful career: interfering with a victim’s grant funding, preventing publication of peer-reviewed articles, and negatively impacting a victim’s job opportunities , which in small and insular academic fields are heavily reliant on formal and informal confidential recommendations.
Retaliation can be effective because of the entrenched hierarchy of the overwhelmingly white, male academic network and its outsized influence. Adding to the danger of direct retaliation, accusations from women who speak out are often dismissed as false or worse; the women who speak out have to live with the professional consequences of being an accuser and being labeled as someone difficult to work with. One such instance of retaliation was recently highlighted by Sarah Gossan.
As a way to cope with the imbalance of power, many women are forced to resort to whisper networks, sharing the names of offenders and institutes that willingly harbor them. But many young women don’t get access to this kind of information until it is too late, and these networks are never 100 percent effective against preventing harassment. Even with access to information, we can never truly prepare for the experience of being harassed and the professional aftermath. What do you do if you are a young graduate student presenting a poster at a major conference and a famous older man in the field you hope is impressed by your work is instead more interested in staring at your chest? What if this older man follows you to your hotel, or even worse, up to your room? What if your harasser is your thesis supervisor, a person who has the power to destroy your career? What if your harasser happens to be your supervisor and you are working at a remote field site, where you’re stuck for weeks or months? What if your harasser is an academic peer, and the authorities refuse to take action to save your harasser’s career from ruin? Is his career more important and valuable than yours? The manifestation of the existing power structure, where we have to weigh our careers and professional reputations against our health and safety is deeply unfair; we must shift the burden of those decisions and their consequences onto those with the power, not the victims. ...
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