The other, even darker, cloud above the sciences and academia is sexual
harassment. The global phenomenon of #MeToo has brought survivors
of sexual assault to our attention and abuse and bullying to the fore. And
there is reason to believe that these experiences are more widespread than
is yet clear. Data to back up women’s anecdotal experiences is growing.
When Kathryn Clancy at the University of Illinois and colleagues surveyed
more than 660 scientists about their academic fieldwork experiences, 84
percent of female junior scientists reported harassment and 86 percent
reported assault. That survey was among the first to lay bare just how
deep the problem may be.
Physicist Emma Chapman, a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow
based at Imperial College London, was so affected by her experience of
harassment at the hands of a senior colleague when she was at University
College London that she became an outspoken champion for women in
the same position.
“I found myself dropped into a very uncomfortable culture,” she says,
one in which informality crossed the line into unwanted hugs and intru-
sions into personal life.
An investigation resulted in a two-year restraining order against the
man. Chapman was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, while her
harasser remained in his job. “Dismissal is vanishingly rare,” she tells me.
Yet she considers herself lucky, because in almost all such cases she has
seen, women’s careers end when they dare to speak out.
Chapman estimates that roughly a hundred women have approached
her since she became involved with the 1752 Group, a small U.K. organiza-
tion working to end sexual misconduct in academia, named after the £1,752
from university event funds that launched the group in 2015. Her greatest
battle is persuading universities to stand behind victims rather than cover
up for perpetrators. “We talk about a leaky pipeline all the time,” she says.
“It’s absolutely not. Women are being shoved out the back door quietly.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Australian microbiologist Melanie Thomson,
herself a past victim of sexual harassment. In 2016 Thomson says she
witnessed astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, then based at Arizona State
University, grope a woman at a conference. “She elbowed him in the guts,”
she recalled. Thomson filed an official complaint, and in 2018 Krauss’s
university confirmed that he had violated their sexual harassment policy.
The problem is not limited to a few such men, Thomson says. “It’s huge.
In science it’s particularly insidious.”
SCIENCE JOURNALIST Michael Balter, who covers sexual harassment
cases and has adopted an advocacy role, says the behaviors persist in
part because “science is very hierarchical. You’ve got the head of the lab
or the head of the institute and they really have an enormous amount of
power,” he says. “A democratization of science and a lessening of the power
differentials would go a long way to solving a lot of evils.”
Balter says investigating harassment allegations is legally fraught, mak-
ing many cases of misconduct hard to document. BuzzFeed News reporter
Azeen Ghorayshi experienced that in 2015, when she published a report
84%
of female junior
scientists reported
harassment during
academic field-
work experiences—
and 86 percent
reported assault—
in a survey of more
than 660 people
in 32 disciplines of
the life, physical,
and social sciences.
SOURCES: RESEARCH BY
KATHRYN CLANCY ET
AL., PUBLISHED IN PLOS
ONE, JULY 2014
116 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC