Female Scientists Report a Horrifying Culture of Sexual Assault
Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they’re in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.” That’s what British biochemist and Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt told an audience at the World Conference of Science Journalists just two years ago.
Following intense social media backlash, Hunt claimed his remark “was intended as a light-hearted ironic comment.” His defenders said the line was taken out of context, pointing to his praise of female scientists in the same speech (“science needs more women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles”). Bad joke or not, it costHunt his faculty position at University College London—and pointed to an insidious problem in the world of scientific research that had persisted far too long already.
From her office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kate Clancy, Ph.D., watched the reaction to Hunt’s comments unfold on Twitter, thinking, Same shit, another day. The 38-year-old associate professor was recalling a string of recent high-profile incidents that have made her and other women in science feel excluded, unwelcome, and like the very nature of being a woman in science “is in some way problematic,” as she puts it. There was the peer reviewer for a scientific journal who suggested that two female researchers find “one or two male biologists” to co-author and strengthen their paper. And the column published on Science magazine’s websitein which a biology professor told a postdoc who asked how to handle her adviser, who frequently tried to look down her shirt, to “put up with it, with good humor if you can.”
In October 2015, Buzzfeed reported that University of California, Berkeley’s Geoff Marcy, a noted astronomy professor, got away with sexually harassing students for at least a decade—despite complaints being filed against him at two different universities. (Marcy denied the allegations generally, but he apologized and has since resigned.) In January 2016, Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier aired on the House floor a 2004 investigation into renowned astronomy professor Timothy Slater by his former employer, the University of Arizona, in which Slater was revealed to have gifted a student a vibrator, told a female employee she’d “teach better if she did not wear underwear,” hosted meetings at strip clubs, and asked graduate students for sex. (Slater denies all allegations and is suing Arizona for releasing the confidential report.) A month later, Science magazine reported that paleoanthropologist Brian Richmond, curator of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, was under investigation for sexually assaulting a research assistant. (Richmond said that the encounter in question was “consensual and reciprocal”; following multiple investigations by the museum, Richmond resigned last year.) Similar cases of harassment by science professors have also been reported at the California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and Boston University.
Each time one of these incidents comes to light, and each time women in science take to social media to express empathy and anger, commenters swarm to tell them to get over it or learn how to take a joke—as if putting up with sexism, harassment, and assault is the expected price of being a female scientist. But Clancy knows it’s never just a joke, or a few bad apples, or one misguided university—and she has the data to prove it.
In July 2014, Clancy and her co-authors Robin Nelson, Ph.D., Julienne Rutherford, Ph.D., and Katie Hinde, Ph.D., published the results of a survey that gauged the climate for women and men on field sites, where students and faculty at all levels across many scientific disciplines perform research. Of the 666 scientists from 32 different disciplines who completed the survey, 64 percent said they had personally experienced sexual harassment in the field and 20 percent reported having been sexually assaulted. Women were 3.5 times more likely to have experienced harassment or abuse than men, and were primarily harassed and assaulted by superiors (whereas male students were more likely to be victimized by peers). The report sent shockwaves through the scientific community. “There was a lot of outrage,” says Heather Metcalf, director of research and analysis at the Association for Women in Science. “A lot of, How is this still happening? After all this time and all of these efforts to change the culture, how can this still be so prevalent?” And worse: How many would-be female scientists are we losing as a result?
But Clancy and her coauthors knew that if they were truly going to impact the culture of their industry, quantitative research alone wouldn’t be enough. The four are back this month with a follow-up study in the American Anthropologist journal detailing just how and why such widespread abuse has persisted. They conducted in-depth interviews with 26 of the original survey respondents and identified patterns and themes: On field sites with clear codes of conduct and supervisors who enforced the rules, women thrived, but on the sites where rules did not exist or were ambiguous and there were no consequences for wrongdoers, they found instances of unwanted flirtation or physical contact and intimidation, verbal sexual advances, sexist jokes and comments about physical appearance, forced kissing, attempted rape, and rape. One respondent said field site leaders insisted on conducting conversations while naked. Another said the head of her field site “would systematically prey on women” to the point that some women in her group chose to sleep on the floor in the same room rather than their own beds: “I had to serve as a kind of bodyguard.”
Confronting offenders did not deter the perpetrators’ behavior. Quite the opposite: Women were only rewarded (i.e. given the best research assignments) if they consented to harassment or sexual advances. “It became clear that I was going to have to play along a little bit,” another respondent said of her harasser. “I had a professional connection with this person, but he expected me to become his next mistress.” Many female scientists said the behavior continued even after they left the field sites and that the psychological trauma compromised their ability to revisit, analyze, and publish their data. Several of the women were able to pinpoint exactly how their abuse led to their career stalling. Five of the women said they had to leave the sciences altogether.
hen she was a Ph.D. student studying paleoanthropology, Jennifer (not her real name) got the opportunity of a lifetime: She was invited to spend a month at a field site in Eurasia where she’d have the chance to study fossils crucial to the understanding of human evolution. One night, she and the other scientists shook off a long day of excavation at a house on-site—drinking, dancing, singing, listening to music. Jennifer was sitting next to the male principal investigator (or P.I., as they’re commonly called) who ran the site.
At some point, the lights went off. Almost as if on cue, the P.I. grabbed her and shoved his tongue in her mouth. “I don’t want to say he French kissed me because that’s something two people do together,” Jennifer says. “I felt filled up.” She pushed him away, but was sure everyone in the room had witnessed the encounter. Embarrassed, she feigned tiredness and scurried to bed.
For the next few weeks, the P.I. regularly grabbed her hand under the lunch table before she could swat him away. “I would just kind of politely laugh it off,” she says. “I was out of my country, I didn’t speak the language, and he was the head of my project. I hardly knew him at all—I only knew him as the person in charge of all my hopes and dreams.”
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