Widespread harassment reported in astronomer survey

Widespread harassment reported in astronomer survey

Astronomers and planetary scientists experience frequent gender- and race-based harassment in the workplace.

http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.20170721a/full/

Christina Richey is not a crier. But she went home and sobbed when she saw the results of an online survey she had co-organized on workplace harassment. For the astrophysicist and past chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, the data put numbers on the stories she’d been hearing for years. And the numbers revealed that harassment in her field was even more prevalent than she had realized.

“I’d heard about issues, mostly gender based, and also race based,” says Richey. But, she adds, the members and leaders of the astronomy and planetary science community would often brush off the stories as anecdotal. That led her and colleagues to run an online survey in early 2015—months before the Geoffrey Marcy harassment scandal broke. Their results appear in the July issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

In their survey, the researchers posed 39 questions about verbal and physical harassment, including sexual harassment and comments about ability, masculinity, femininity, race, and religion. Volunteers reported their observations and experiences from the preceding five years. A total of 474 people took part in the survey. The researchers analyzed the responses by gender, race, and career stage.

Women were intentionally oversampled—they made up about two-thirds of the respondents—because of their small numbers in the field. And the representation of minorities in astronomy and planetary science is so small that, although many minority groups were present in the data, they were grouped together to achieve reliable statistical analysis. The data could not be used to determine what percentage of all astronomers have suffered harassment, but they offered rare perspective on the general pervasiveness of such experiences.

A whopping 88% of respondents reported hearing negative language from peers, and about 52% had heard such language from their supervisors. Some 39% reported experiencing verbal harassment, and 9% said they had been physically harassed. “It doesn’t have to be directed at you,” Richey says. “Just hearing comments can be isolating.”

Women of color were harassed more than members of other groups, and men of color reported more harassment than did white men. The survey did not find any statistically significant differences in harassment by career rank.

White women and women of color experienced verbal harassment related to gender nearly equally (43% and 44%, respectively). In addition, 35% of women of color experienced verbal harassment related to their race. The report says women of color are at “double jeopardy” for harassment.

Both white women and women of color reported higher frequencies (about 13% and 18%, respectively) than did men of skipping classes, meetings, fieldwork, or other professional events because of feeling unsafe. Men of color (6%) skipped such events for that reason more often than did white men (1%).

“We found that peers are mean to each other,” says coauthor Katharine Lee, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s hard on people emotionally and physically to be subjected to a hostile work climate and to be told you are not worthy. It doesn’t help science. Some of this mistreatment is weeding people out of science. That is the damage: the people who should be in science but aren’t.”

The authors compiled recommendations for improving workplace climate, including imposing codes of conduct for all trainees and employees; requiring training in diversity and cultural awareness; encouraging leaders to model appropriate behavior and define an inclusive culture for their workplaces, disciplines, and professional societies; and pushing authorities to mete out sanctions for harassment swiftly, justly, and consistently. Particularly since the Marcy case, some institutions have been bolstering their ethics codes and antiharassment policies (see Physics Today, June 2016, page 30).

The authors plan to publish more details about harassment, particularly of minority groups, based on further data analysis and follow-up interviews, says Richey. “I want people to see these results and have a gut-check moment,” she says. Members of the astronomy community “are problem solvers, and this study highlights a serious problem that needs solving. If I thought it was so toxic we couldn’t fix it, I wouldn’t stay in the field. This community can step up to this challenge and create a workplace that is safe for all.”