A Major Scientific Society Says Harassment Derails Women’s Careers. Critics Say the Group Hasn’t Done Enough.

Sexual harassment is derailing the careers of far too many women in science, engineering, and medicine. That’s the central message of a searing new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the prevalence of sexual misconduct in those fields.

The report estimates that half of women in science experience some form of harassment. “What is especially discouraging about this situation is that at the same time that so much energy and money is being invested in efforts to attract and retain women in science, engineering, and medical fields, it appears women are often bullied or harassed out of career pathways in these fields,” the report says.

The document, the result of a two-year study, aims to send a clear signal that the three honorary societies are taking harassment seriously amid a growing conversation about how to combat such behavior in academe.

But it comes as the academies themselves are being roiled by a debate about whether or how to kick out members who harass. Academy members are chosen by their peers, and membership is for life.

In recent weeks, the National Academy of Sciences, in particular, has come under scrutiny for lacking policies and processes to expel people like Inder Verma, a cancer biologist who left his position at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies on Monday after facing harassment accusations, and Geoff Marcy, an astronomer who resigned under pressure in 2015 from the University of California at Berkeley after being found responsible for unwanted kissing and groping of female students. (Verma has denied the allegations; Marcy has acknowledged most of the behavior but said he stopped years ago.)

And the person taking much of the criticism for the academy’s inaction is Marcia McNutt, its first female president.

McNutt, who was out of the country and responded to questions by email, told The Chronicle that no one who had been found responsible for harassment by a college or institution “holds a position of prestige” in the academy. “Expelling members is another matter, however,” she said. “There is legitimate concern that it could be subverted for political or personal gain against perceived rivals.”

Another issue is that it would take years for the academy to formally change its bylaws. That’s why, in the interim, the National Academy of Sciences is looking at “an array of options” besides revoking membership, said Bruce B. Darling, the academy’s executive officer, during a Tuesday release event for the new report.

Many scientists aren’t satisfied with McNutt’s handling of the issue. “She just goes around giving PowerPoint presentations saying ‘harassment is bad,’” said BethAnn McLaughlin, an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University’s medical center. “That is not leadership.”

McLaughlin started a petition in May calling on the academy to remove harassers. So far more than 3,600 people have signed it. Last week she also created a website to highlight female scientists’ stories of being harassed, including her own.

The ‘Symbolic Compliance’ Obsession

The academies’ new report incorporates a sweeping review of the existing research on sexual harassment and in-depth interviews with 40 female faculty members in science, engineering, and medicine who said they’d been harassed. Researchers assessed the status quo in the three fields, examined the effect harassment has on women’s careers, and proposed solutions.

The report rehashes some familiar reasons harassment persists in the sciences. Hierarchical power structures in academe is one. Another is that men are more often deans, department chairs, and principal investigators, while women are more often early-career professors, graduate students, and postdocs.

But the report also faults what it calls the obsession of colleges and other academic institutions with “symbolic compliance” with federal civil-rights statutes like Title IX, the gender-equity law.

Many campuses first developed anti-harassment policies about three decades ago, and the focus on shoring up policies has intensified in an era of more-aggressive federal enforcement of Title IX and more lawsuits against colleges.

So while most institutions have elaborate procedures in place and require faculty and staff members to go through training on those procedures, such an approach has promoted a culture focused on protecting colleges from liability, the report states, and hasn’t helped prevent sexual harassment.

Most campus policies, it says, “are based on the inaccurate assumption that a target will promptly report the harassment without worrying about retaliation.” Having effective systems for reporting misconduct is critical, it continues, but that’s not enough — because administrators wait on victims to make formal complaints before taking action.

Institutional policies should clarify the precise consequences for committing harassment, the report says, and ensure that they’re meaningful enough to discourage the behavior. Campus leaders also need to become more informed on harassment issues, speak out more forcefully, and demonstrate that people are held accountable when they commit sexual misconduct. Such steps will help fight the perception in academe that harassment is tolerated.

The report also discusses anti-harassment training, noting that, in many cases, the training has backfired. After completing the programs, some men mock the behaviors they’ve been told to avoid.

One of the report’s recommendations suggests reframing the trainings by combining them with “civility-promotion programs,” where the emphasis is on building a safe and respectful workplace, not just complying with the law. The goal should be to change people’s behavior, not necessarily their beliefs, the report says.

Kate Clancy, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was part of the committee that wrote the report. She said she hopes it will help people understand that much of the harassment that women in science experience doesn’t look like the kind of behavior that, for instance, dozens of women have said Harvey Weinstein perpetrated. They accused him of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse; he has denied the allegations.

The form of misconduct more common to the academic realm is often gender harassment — behavior toward women that conveys hostility, objectification, or exclusion — that over time creates a toxic work environment for female scientists, Clancy said.

Defusing the dependent relationships that often exist in scientific fields is key, the report says. It suggests that colleges change their mentoring and funding structures for graduate students and postdocs. That means creating mentoring networks as well as committees to advise young academics on their work, instead of granting such authority to a single scientist.

Some See Mixed Messages

Some scientists who spoke with The Chronicle commended the national academies and the many scholars involved in conducting the study for putting so much time and effort into crafting the report and its recommendations.

But the academies are sending “mixed messages” by not taking on harassment within their own ranks, said Jacquelyn Gill, an assistant professor of paleoecology and plant ecology at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute.

In recent weeks, many scientists on Twitter have lobbed criticism at McNutt, the National Academy of Sciences president.

This tweet gets more to the point. Getting it right for the NAS is not just about kicking out the already disgraced but putting in safeguards to not honor them in the first place. That is harder to do right. https://t.co/ktM1gaZTKb

— Marcia McNutt (@Marcia4Science) May 22, 2018

Absolutely hear and relate to them. I will have one chance to get this done right or risk jeopardizing any reform for years. This is why I am lining everything up. https://t.co/v1PTbf1sYC

— Marcia McNutt (@Marcia4Science) May 23, 2018

“While I respect a lot of the work that Marcia McNutt has done, I’ve been disappointed in what often comes across, at least on Twitter, as a lot of defensiveness and dismissiveness,” Gill said.

For McLaughlin, the Vanderbilt professor who started the petition, the fight feels personal. In her recent Title IX case, the man she accused of harassment “got to control the narrative,” she said. “I was told to be quiet. He got to stay on campus. Nobody comes and tries to help me get my career back on track.”

It’s “insulting and degrading,” McLaughlin said, that men who have been found responsible for harassment can continue to hold membership in a professional society, serve as anonymous peer reviewers, and get paid to speak at national meetings, among other things.

She is calling for the academy to require that member scientists submit a letter from their institution saying that they have not committed any Title IX violations over the last 15 years. That kind of mandate would not only ensure that members of such prestigious groups maintain honorable behavior, she said. It would also help deal with the fact that harassers in academe often hop from college to college.

McNutt doesn’t support such a requirement. In an email she pointed out that the report questions whether the current Title IX processes for resolving harassment complaints are effective.

Phoebe Cohen, an associate professor of geosciences at Williams College, is also frustrated by how the academy has responded to the recent calls to expel harassers. Cohen reached out to some of her mentors who are academy members and asked them to sign McLaughlin’s petition. Many of them did, but she said male allies need to do more than put their names on an online petition.

One scientist Cohen contacted copied McNutt on his email reply that explained why he felt it was important for the academy to remove members who commit sexual misconduct. That’s the kind of step men should take to make their voices heard, she said.

But Cohen said she has some sympathy for McNutt. “She is in a position where she is cleaning up messes made by men,” the professor said. “And that’s a difficult position for her to be in.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.