It's Not Just Marcy, and the Grapevine Won't Save Us

The below post was written by a contributor who wishes to use the pseudonym ExUngueLeam. The author is a junior astronomer whose friends and colleagues may be able to identify her from her writing, but who is nevertheless afraid to post this under her real name.

Editor Note: The author of this guest post is not a member of the AAS CSWA, and has not shared any names with CSWA members. The CSWA is not using any information obtained from the author of this guest post to pursue or further Title IX cases against anyone in the astronomical community. The CSWA does not maintain an internal list of "serial harassers" of its own. 

ExUngueLeam states: "The purpose of this post is to explain the grapevine and passing along such lists are *not* the way to deal with the widespread problem of harassment in astronomy, and ultimately don't provide any real protection to the most vulnerable members of the astronomical community. While many members of the astronomical community may already have private lists of people to avoid, sharing these lists with colleagues poses real danger to one's career, and ultimately we need another way of addressing the problem of serial harassment."

Image credit is Jim. C. Hines

November was the month I discovered that the fractional abundance of "known" sexual harassers in the astronomy community is greater than that of oxygen in the universe.

Since the Geoff Marcy case broke I've had a number of overlapping conversations with friends and colleagues trying to discover if there are any "well-known serial harassers" at large in their area of specialization. I've had these conversations with astronomers at all levels of career advancement, from undergraduate students to tenured professors. While many of my senior colleagues were vaguely aware of the conversation about sexual harassment happening in the astronomy community, they never guessed that Marcy was on the list of alleged perpetrators. They were appalled and shocked when they found out.

"I knew about so-and-so, but not about Marcy," one friend confided. "How many more people exist like this in our community? How deep does this rot go?"

Another friend told me: "I keep hearing there are all these 'known' harassers, but I don't know who they are. Is there someone like Marcy in my subfield? I'm worried that in failing to warn my students about these individuals, I could be putting them in actual physical danger."

Fed Up with Sexual Harassment II: Information Escrows

Today’s guest blogger is Mordecai-Mark Mac Low. Mordecai is a curator in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, where he leads a research group studying the formation of planets and stars and the structure of the interstellar gas, and has curated the Space Shows "Journey to the Stars" (w/Rebecca Oppenheimer) and "Dark Universe."

After Eliot Rodger's rampage, the hashtags #notallmen and #yesallwomen swept Twitter, expressing the reality that although most men do not engage in sexual assaults or harassment, the ones that do tend to be serial offenders (e.g., sec 5.6 in this federal report from 1981, "Sexual Harassment in the Federal Workplace: Is It a Problem?", or Lucero et al. 2003, "An Empirical Investigation of Sexual Harassers: Toward a Perpetrator Typology" Hum. Rel., 56, 1461), ensuring that almost all women have had to deal with such problems at some level. (Although male victims may be slightly less common, and female perpetrators more so, both appear to suffer from even more overwhelming underreporting than the usual narrative.)