Sexual Harassment – Changing the System II

[This post is Part II of an expanded version of my World View column in NATURE, Change the System to Halt Harassment from 08 February 2016. Universities and their senior staff must do more to deter, detect and punish all forms of inappropriate behavior – JTS]

This series discusses what can be done by people with power to change the system and begin to eliminate sexual harassment from our community. Part I discussed the role of senior academics and department chairs. Here, I focus on university administrators and leaders of our professional organizations, but I also want to make sure that anyone facing sexual harassment knows that help is out there. Please talk to someone you trust and rest assured that you are not alone. 

University Administrators

Every university needs an office where students/postodcs/faculy/staff can talk anonymously about harassment. For lack of a better name, I am going to refer to it as the Office of Good Advice. This office must be fundamentally separate from the Affirmative Action office, University Counsel, or University Police, all of which are responsible for reporting under Title IX. Office of Good Advice should be well known to everyone on campus, it should be staffed with trained professionals, and it should be the first thing that comes up on a web search for “sexual harassment.” Anyone on campus who needs to talk about harassment issues should know which university employees are obligated to report incidents and which can keep reports confidential. 

Every university needs an Office of Good Advice not only because students fear that they might be pressed to make a formal, legally viable report, but also because the staff in the legally responsible offices are often, with no malicious intent, unable to listen objectively and sensitively. Students might later report that they were asked intimidating and inappropriate questions that appeared to undermine the validity of their complaint like, “Were you drinking?” or “Are you unhappy with your grade in his course?” No matter how well-meaning, staff members in offices responsible for upholding the law cannot help but be influenced by that responsibility and by knowing the requirements of an investigation.  

Sexual Harassment – Changing the System I

[This post is Part 1 of an expanded version of my World View column in NATURE, Change the System to Halt Harassment from 08 February 2016. Universities and their senior staff must do more to deter, detect and punish all forms of inappropriate behavior – JTS]

With the issue of sexual harassment in the news, one hopes that student groups, academic departments, and university administrators are discussing what can be done to eliminate this vile plague from our community. There are fundamental flaws in the current system where Title IX offices are set up to protect the university, where all the pressure for righting these wrongs is placed on the shoulders of young women who are often in the most vulnerable stages of their careers, and where such harassing behavior can remain an “open secret” for years if not decades. In short, we have to find a way to change the system – to train those with privilege, especially senior men, to become not only allies who can support individuals but advocates who will add their voices and prestige to fight for right, to create a “safe space” where anyone facing sexual harassment can get help and advice, and to shine a light on the harassers who still operate in the shadows, destroying careers with their unprofessional conduct.

The Women In Astronomy Blog has already published advice for anyone facing sexual harassment, but here I focus on what can be done by people with power to begin to change the system. The target audience for this post includes senior academics and department chairs, but please don’t stop reading if you are not one of these! Sometimes senior people might want to help but don’t know how, or don’t consider this is a priority, or don’t think they have time. It might be your job to show them how to help, or convince them that this is important, or persuade them that they need to make time for this. Also, if you are not a senior person now, you will be some day. When you are chair of your department, will you know what to do? 

Becoming Allies and Advocates

Many senior members of our community admitted to knowing the “open secret” mentioned above. How can it be that so many did so little for so long while so much damage was being done? Think of all those young women, undergrads at a nationally renowned university, who left the field because their professor made a creepy advance. Think of all the discoveries they could have made but never will because they left astronomy before their careers had even begun. 

Blinded by my privilege

A large, visible knapsack.
htleather.com

This is a repost of an essay from my personal blog, Mahalo.ne.Trash. where it has received 4400+ page views. Clearly it resonated. The topic of privilege has come up here quite a bit in the last year. A good definition from the AMSA (.docx) is as follows: "Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels and gives advantages, favors, and benefits to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of target groups." See also this link. Keys to privilege include a power differential between an ingroup and an outgroup. In astronomy, this typically means white, straight, male holding privilege over white women, women and men of color and thos in the LGBT* communities. Another key is that privilege is often hidden from those who have it, and extremely obvious to those who lack it. Imagine a billionaire talking about how money and possessions don't matter to him and his family. 

I was recently talking with a female astronomer about diversity in astronomy. At one point, she said, "You don't know what it's like to be marginalized in your dept., to not have people listen to you and talk over you. To not give you the benefit of the doubt." Now, keep in mind that my conversation partner is white. I was a bit taken aback by her comment, and I blurted out, "You think I don't understand?! I am a Black man in America. At Harvard. In astronomy. There are of order 10 other Black people at my station in life. Until only recently I was rarely given the benefit of the doubt! I understand marginalization."

I could tell that she was, in turn, taken aback. I think that in her view I was just another man enjoying all of the associated privileges of being male in astronomy. To be sure, I do enjoy many membership benefits. I can look around the room in faculty meetings and see other men. Lot's of 'em. But it was obvious to me that she overlooked a major detail: even though I'm a man, I am far more of a minority in any astronomy gathering than she is. Not that it's a competition. I'd honestly rather lose the who's-more-of-a-minority contest. 

However, before I was able to feel too self-satisfied, I recalled a time when I did forget about my membership benefits. Indeed, I was totally ignorant of my privilege, to the detriment of people I was trying to help. 

Female Privilege?

Women in Science
via the Smithsonian

Author's Note: There are some important reactions, corrections, and commentary in the comments section of this post. 

This blog focuses on a lot of the challenges of being a woman in astronomy (and STEM in general). We talk about sexism (of both the explicit and benevolent variety), unconscious and implicit biases, the wage gap, the gender gap, the two-body problem, the leaky pipeline, the impostor complex, work-life-family balance issues, sexual harassment... the list goes on and on. But are there any advantages to being a woman in STEM? Is there female privilege?

In April, Thought Catalog published two pieces about Female Privilege one from a "male perspective" and one from a "female perspective" (I use quotes because I doubt all males reading this blog will agree with the male perspective or vice versa).

In general, talking about female privilege is problematic as this post very eloquently describes. Much of the general "advantages" to being a woman are actually in fact benevolent sexism or other byproducts of the disadvantages that we have in society in general.

Ain't I a woman? At the intersection of gender, race and sexuality

Today's guest post is by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a Martin Luther King, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Department of Physics. She specializes in theoretical cosmology and has an interest in formal issues in field theory and relativity. She also serves as an informal academic advisor for most of the very few underrepresented minority women physics majors at M.I.T.

In 1851, former slave Sojourner Truth asked white feminists, "Ain't I a woman?" when they refused to let her speak at a women's conference because she was Black. One might hope that in 158 years, that speech wouldn't seem so essential and relevant. But at the 2009 Women in Astronomy conference, my first foray into non-race oriented equal opportunity efforts, we were told the news was good: women had made significant gains and equality was on its way. There was no substantive mention of race beyond Peggy McIntosh's talk. But I knew the truth. I have been looking at the NSF and AIP statistics myself for years, and I knew that the news was not good for Black, Latina, and Native American women. Those numbers hadn't changed too significantly in three decades. How could they possibly be telling us that the news was good?

As a queer Black (cis)woman, I live at the intersection of multiple minority statuses. More of my time than I would like has been sucked up in trying to fend off the marginalization that society's structures foist upon anyone who has even one of these identities. More of my time than I would like has been spent thinking about a way out of those structures and trying to convince others to help.

And here's one thing I want out of: the phrase "women and minorities," a phrase I used to use a lot myself. As part of the effort to push for equal opportunities in STEM, I  used it repeatedly for over a decade, thinking that I was advocating not just for strangers but also for myself. At some point however, hearing other people use it began to grate on me. A lot.

Guest Post: Time to talk about Privilege

We have another guest post today from Caitlin Casey, a McCue Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine who studies galaxy formation and evolution, including discovering and characterizing diverse types of starburst galaxies and how they relate to more "normal" spiral galaxies in the early Universe.  Caitlin recently cowrote, along with Kartik Sheth, a NatureJobs article entitled The Ethical Gray Zone, based on an extensive community poll on ethics and diversity.  She is also involved in STEM outreach and mentoring within her department and throughout astronomy.

After reading this pretty excellent article on Slate about how to 'look the part' of computer genius (long story short, being an Asian male is pretty helpful), I thought a lot about how the notion of privilege affects STEM research.  Privilege itself is a term that carries a lot of stigma and even vile hatred for some, as if there's an implied prejudice or blame that comes with it. Many folks aren't comfortable with the idea that they have special rights or advantages (or even immunities) based on their physical appearance or life choices, and that these advantages pervade all aspects of life: even, *gasp* their research and work environment.

Do you know what benefits this card carries?

Whenever I point friends or vague internet acquaintances to Peggy McIntosh's white privilege essay or similar compilations for other group privileges (e.g.  for male privilege, female privilege, class privilege, physical ability privilege, religious privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc.)  someone usually pipes up and shouts "prejudice!" or sometimes "stereotype!"  They then argue that discussing privileges provides re-enforcement and makes stereotypes even more harmful.