“In a new survey of women in technology,” wrote Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell, “84 percent of respondents said they’ve gotten feedback that they were ‘too aggressive.’ Yet 53 percent also said they’ve been told they were ‘too quiet.’ A full 44 percent said they’ve heard both that they were ‘too aggressive’ and ‘too quiet.’” Rampell listed other examples of what she called the “impossible, Goldilocks-like expectations” confronting professional women. She never mentioned another kind of unfairness that’s been drawing media attention concerning science in early 2016: sexual harassment.
A week before Rampell wrote, a Post news report began, “Sexual harassment is everywhere—especially in the sciences.” The embedded link leads to a Nature article that figured prominently in a 2014 media report in this venue, which opened this way:
Journalists at USA Today, Nature, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, and other publications are reporting on the new PLOS ONE paper “Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees report harassment and assault.” The coverage includes a compelling backstory: female scientists’ anguished informal testimony about sexual harassment, and worse, when pursuing research with colleagues away from campus or laboratory.
Plenty of anguished testimony has appeared or been reported this month. The hashtag #astroSH is being used on Twitter. On 20 January Nature published the commentary “Sexual harassment must not be kept under wraps: A female scientist who was harassed by a senior male colleague feels let down by the system that is supposed to protect her.” For complex reasons, say Nature and the author, it was necessary for the author and the man she calls her harasser to remain unnamed. An excerpt gives the sense of the testimonial:
The harassment began when I was working at a university in a different country from my former supervisor, but continuing to collaborate with him. He was planning a work trip and asked if he could stay at my home to save money and so that we could work on publications together. The harassment during his visit was daily and persistent. He made suggestive and lewd comments, such as asking me one morning whether him masturbating in the next room had kept me awake. He would try to kiss me. Each time I would ask myself: “How do I say no without damaging my career?” On the final occasion, I told him repeatedly that I found the aggressive way that he was talking to me intimidating. He then questioned why I was being so prickly around him and why I was shaking. My response triggered more verbal abuse, so I locked myself in a room and contacted a friend for advice. The following morning, he packed his bags, went through my possessions and left without a word.
I was reluctant to make an official complaint in case it made things worse. I decided to restrict communication to e-mail, rather than using Skype, which was a change in working practice that I had to justify to colleagues whom we worked with in his department. A few weeks later, I learned from one of these collaborators that, without permission, the harasser was taking my data, PowerPoint presentations and conclusions and using them to write a grant proposal. The colleague suggested that my name be included on the grant.
When my boss questioned why, less than one working day away from grant submission, our university had not yet received the paperwork necessary to approve my involvement, I told him about the sexual harassment. The harasser subsequently informed me that it was simpler to submit the grant without me. At this point, my boss advised me not to attend an upcoming field expedition, because my harasser was the lead scientist. My boss told the organizers that I was withdrawing for personal reasons. A few months later, my harasser published my data sets in a journal article without my permission and without my name on the author list. My boss advised me to submit a formal complaint.
When I did—to his university—my harasser responded with dozens of pages of denials and counter-complaints, to which I was expected to respond. He belittled me, demanded access to my data sets, misrepresented evidence and argued for restrictions that would significantly detriment my career. Because of these issues and the confidential nature of the accusation, I found it nearly impossible to publish during the lengthy complaint process (which took much longer than laid out in the university’s own grievance procedures). I felt I had to excuse myself from international conferences, because I knew that he would be there. His career continued unaffected.
Now, however, not all comparable careers are continuing unaffected. Consider Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley. Two years ago, he was the subject of a high-visibility New York Times profile calling him a contender for the Nobel Prize as “the most prolific American discoverer of alien worlds, so-called exoplanets circling stars beyond the sun.” But in October 2015, a Times headline reported “Berkeley faculty call for firing of astronomer found guilty of harassment.” Marcy figures prominently in the January 2016 media surge on this topic.
In that surge, reporters and others have been focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on one field of physics. On 13 January, that Post news report carried the headline “Astronomy’s snowballing sexual harassment scandal picks up even more cases.” At the New York Times, it was “Stories spill out as spotlight is shined on sexism in astronomy.” At the Atlantic, it was “Astronomers are finally doing something about sexual harassment: Recent scandals have forced the field to confront a pervasive culture of gender discrimination and abuse.” At Nature, it was “Astronomy roiled again by sexual-harassment allegations: Caltech has suspended a faculty member for violating its policy against harassment.”
Scientific American published “Astronomers struggle to translate anger into action on sexual harassment,” a news report that, like the Atlantic piece, covered discussions of “the prevalence of harassment and discrimination” at the 227th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Kissimmee, Florida. Earlier, on 13 October, Scientific American had published a long piece under the headline “Leading astronomer violated sexual harassment policies, investigation finds: University of California, Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy has apologized for ‘unwelcomed’ interactions with female students.” On the next day, Scientific American published “How to end sexual harassment in astronomy: The case against Geoff Marcy must be a wake-up call to reform our field” by AAS president Meg Urry, director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. She published a similar commentary at the CNN website.
In a 20 January editorial, Nature’s editors declared that “sexual harassment is rife in science.” They urged universities to “stop trying to save face” and instead to “discipline perpetrators and support victims.” They ended with this:
Any principal investigator who thinks, “It cannot happen at my university,” is wrong. These are not one-off cases. They are examples of a systemic underlying rot that is driving many young researchers out of science for good.
Articles at Science, Ars Technica, and elsewhere report that Democratic Representative Jackie Speier of California hopes to strengthen a federal antidiscrimination law. Ars Technica observes:
The confidentiality of these cases has created an environment where sexual harassment can flourish. Anyone in need of a clear indication of what behaviors are not appropriate never gets to see the reports. Women will sign up to work with the offenders with no indications of the environment they may face; others may continue to believe they are the only ones preyed upon by these faculty and are less likely to come forward. Other faculty in the department remain unaware of the problem and don’t realize that they need to police their peers and protect their students.
In a 15 January letter to grantee institutions running NASA-funded programs, NASA administrator Charles Bolden summed up the apparently growing resolve for a zero-tolerance response. He wrote, “Let me be perfectly clear: NASA does not tolerate sexual harassment, and nor should any organization seriously committed to workplace equality, diversity and inclusion. Science is for everyone and any behavior that demeans or discourages people from fully participating is unacceptable.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
