Crosspost: Groping, Derision, Bias, Threats: Women in Science Face It All

Written by Arianne Cohen for Bloomberg

Credit: Daphné Geisler for Bloomberg Businessweek

Two decades ago, Rachel Ivie attended a conference for women in astronomy in Pasadena, Calif. During a panel on gender demographics, she presented a series of charts depicting the dismal truth: Only 14% of astronomy faculty were female—a little more than half the rate for science and engineering overall. After the panel, several participants approached her to discuss why those numbers were so low when 60% of young astronomers at the time were women. “The question was, what’s going to happen to this big group?” says Ivie, a senior research fellow at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). “Why do women drop out?”

That question continued to nag Ivie, and a few years later she started a long-term study of gender roles in the field, sponsored by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and the AIP. She and her team have followed 1,300 graduate students since 2007, checking in again in 2013 and 2016, with further rounds possible. Some respondents now work outside academia, so the study sheds light on women’s experience beyond the confines of university astronomy or physics departments.

The initial idea was to investigate the myriad reasons women might ditch science careers. But when the data came back, Ivie and her collaborators were riveted by the responses to a question about sexual harassment and discrimination. “We felt that it was important to report on the nuance about where harassment happens, who’s doing it, and what power structure is being reinforced,” she says.

Learn more about Ivie's detailed breakdown of the types of harassment and inappropriate behavior women in physics and astronomy experience at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-19/why-aren-t-there-more-women-in-science-harassment-looms-large 

And read the full AIP Harassment report here: https://aas.org/press/aip-harassment-report 

Let's Talk about Street Harassment

Trigger warning: The below includes explicit descriptions of street harassment and sexual assault.

The issue of street harassment has gotten a bunch of attention in the media lately.  According to stopstreetharassment.org:

Gender-based street harassment is unwanted comments, gestures, and actions forced on a stranger in a public place without their consent and is directed at them because of their actual or perceived sex, gender, gender expression, or sexual orientation. 

Street harassment is a problem in general, but is especially prevalent on college campuses (where many astronomers work), is especially scary at night and in isolated places (when and where astronomical observing happens), can affect how safe someone feels traveling alone to unfamiliar places (like conferences and observatories) or how late they feel comfortable staying at work.  Street harassment is something, that while might seem like a non-astronomy issue, actually can have real impact on the professional life of an astronomer because it affects one's ability to travel freely through the world without fear of violence or abuse.

Part of the problem with gender-based street harassment is that it rarely happens to women (or more generally people who are not masculine-presenting-cis-males) when they are accompanied by men. Therefore this is a phenomenon that many men (who are not harassing people themselves) never witness.