“If women are dissuaded or excluded from even a handful of opportunities, she continued, the loss to science is enormous.”
As an undergraduate student in biology, I spent several weeks in Costa Rica one summer with an older graduate student on a research project deep in the cloud forest. It was just the two of us, and upon arriving at our site, I discovered that he had arranged a single room for us, one bed.
Mortified but afraid of being labeled prudish or difficult, I made no fuss. I took the lodge owner aside the next day and requested my own bed. The problem ended there, and my graduate student boss never made any physical advances.
Reflecting back, I’m struck by how ill equipped I was to deal with this kind of situation, especially at 19. My university undoubtedly had a harassment policy, but such resources were thousands of miles away. I was alone in a foreign country and had never received any training on my rights and resources in the field.
I’d forgotten about this experience from two decades ago until I read areport published July 16 in the journal PLOS One. Kathryn Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and three colleagues used email and social media to invite scientists to fill out an online questionnaire about their experiences with harassment and assault at field sites; they received 666 responses, three quarters of them from women, from 32 disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, biology and geology.
Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors. Very few respondents said their field site had a code of conduct or sexual harassment policy, and of the 78 who had dared to report incidents, fewer than 20 percent were satisfied with the outcome.
The findings are depressingly similar to the data some colleagues and I collected this year from an online questionnaire sent to science writers.
The Latest on: Harassment in Science
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The Latest on: Harassment in Science
- The CSU mishandled sexual harassment complaints. Two bills are aimed at protecting studentson April 19, 2024 at 5:00 am
This bill is in response to a complaints of “sexual harassment and improper behavior across the gamut of campuses,” said Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, D-Burbank. Friedman said colleges, in the past, ...
- UCSB students accuse A.S. Senator of harassment, met with delays from Universityon April 18, 2024 at 5:51 pm
A UC Santa Barbara student filed multiple complaints to university administration against an Associated Students Off-Campus Senator and first president pro-tempore for threatening abuse of power and ...
- 'Cracking the Bro Code' in computing cultureson April 18, 2024 at 2:16 am
Science X is a network of high quality websites with most complete and comprehensive daily coverage of the full sweep of science, technology, and medicine news ...
- Machine Learning-based System for Analyzing Sexual Harassment in Middle Eastern Literatureon April 17, 2024 at 9:22 am
Scholars utilized machine learning techniques to analyze instances of sexual harassment in Middle Eastern literature, employing lexicon-based sentiment analysis and deep learning architectures. The ...
- Escalation in harassment of New Zealand's MPs threatens democracy, says studyon April 16, 2024 at 12:52 pm
From online abuse to threats of sexual violence, harassment of New Zealand's parliamentarians is on the rise, and becoming increasingly disturbing, University of Otago research shows.
- Shrouded in secrecy: how science is harmed by the bullying and harassment rumour millon April 15, 2024 at 5:00 pm
Because misconduct investigations are usually shrouded in secrecy, colleagues are often left to base their responses on rumours and hearsay, and unsure how to interact with an accused peer.
- Iowa Supreme Court overturns $790,000 sexual harassment award to government employeeon April 13, 2024 at 2:15 pm
The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled that inappropriate comments by employees at the state Department of Human Services did not justify a $790,000 jury award for sexual harassment.
- How sexual harassment is rife in Antarcticaon April 11, 2024 at 5:33 pm
Women have been 'gaslit' over reports of abuse at 'the emptiest, windiest, highest, driest, coldest place on Earth' ...
- How sexual harassment is rife in Antarcticaon April 11, 2024 at 5:00 pm
In 2018, five women alleged sexual harassment, sexual coercion and bullying on the inaugural Homeward Bound, an Australian leadership-development voyage to Antarctica for women in science and ...
- 39 lecturers indicted for sexual harassment in five years – Reporton April 10, 2024 at 1:24 am
No fewer than 39 lecturers in the nation’s tertiary institutions have been indicted and dismissed over sexual misconduct.
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