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Sexual Harassment Is Common In Scientific Fieldwork
sciencehabit writes: Universities and other workplaces have codes of conduct guarding against sexual harassment. But what about the more casual venue of scientific fieldwork—which is also a workplace? A new survey finds that sexual harassment and assaults occur frequently in the field, with little consequence for the perpetrators or explicit prohibitions against such conduct. The study reveals that the primary targets were young women who were harassed, assaulted, and even raped by men who were usually senior to them in rank, although men also reported harassment.
Some jerks are in fact high ranking/importance jerks, and unfortunately not companies can appropriately deal with them.
If you have males and females working together, the males will harass the females. Period. Irregardless of the type of work, what color their skin is, what language they speak. It's how things work.
"jokes about physical beauty and cognitive sex differences"
It's so hard to take these reports seriously when they include the most trifling transgressions along with the truly egregious ones.
http://www.hackcanada.com/canadian/zines/spacemoose/polisci.gif
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
Newsflash: Sexual harassment is common everywhere there are men as their genetics don't change from one career to another.
Now please send your $50,000 worth of research grant funding to my bitcoin address: FJi2seXY2jf9eYEDoit4ScienCEFiJSfj82jfiffj
Thanks!
And I think you'll find that most, if not all, research institutions have codes of conduct in place.
I'll stop giving them blow jobs!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
product, bSD's
Nerds think how people act in Internet porn is how real human interaction happens.
the pizza boy of the 21st century.
>
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed.
Scientist A: Show me pictures of your boobies!
Scientist B: They're really big
My hobby: Making clean jokes.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
::Inappropriate Ghostbusters movie reference::
Let's say, for example, you're walking around with a $100,000 in a briefcase that says "MONEY".
You decide to carry this briefcase with you into some remote wilderness, far from civilization, the law, and witnesses. You travel alone, or with people you don't know.
When you do this, most people will not steal from you. Most people are decent.
However, there are bad people in the world. They will want to steal this money from you.
This should not happen, and it is horrible if it does. They are criminals, and all decent people believe they should be punished severely. But even if they are put to death, that doesn't change the fact that they took your money.
The world doesn't conform to our wishes. Sometimes we just have to recognize that certain things are true and either avoid them or accept that sometimes bad things happen. The obviously sad bit is that women - in this analogy - can't really set the briefcase down.
-Styopa
Back in the day, when I did a lot of field work, it was not at all uncommon for co-workers to hook up
There was no rape, no arm twisting, no roofies or alcohol
Just horny people in the field having a (discrete) good time
Those dirty filthy paleontologist types... I swear! They are giving us all a bad name!
but, but, she blinded me with science!
Table-ized A.I.
do not inspire confidence. if you dont think harassment is a problem in the work place, you either havent worked with very many women, or you are in denial.
water is wet.
If it's good enough for the President, it's good enough for the common man.
</sarcasm>
Seriously, if we're going to excuse it at the highest levels when because we like what the person does otherwise, what do you expect?
If my father didn't harass my mother I wouldn't even be here....
what she did was go after the guy full bore, no holds barred, and not one thing made not perfectly clear.. Reported it to the employer, letting him know that he (the employer)had a choice. Do something about it before the day was over, or face the legal consequences of both himself and the asswipe being served the next morning. She outlined exactly what she was going to do. Which included sexual assault charges, and charges against the employer for having such a person in their employ., with a whole lot of publicity.
Her harasser got to not only go through a long list of reparations and counseling, he ended up being her employee.
This was in the home construction industry which if no one has noticed, is a whole lot less amenable to sexual equality that a university environment.
Which is all to say that if there is harassment, if there is assault. Then fucking do something about it. Otherwise, it's just an anecdote. This crap of just saying men are pigs, look what they do - is grade A bullshit. Press charges, dammit!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
SKINNER: Six hours, nineteen minutes, right ascension, fourteen degrees, twenty-two minutes declination... no sighting.
BART: Mm-hm.
SKINNER: Six hours, nineteen minutes, right ascension, fourteen degrees, twenty-three minutes declination... no sighting.
BART: Mm-hm.
SKINNER: (excitedly) Six hours, nineteen minutes, right ascension, fourteen degrees, fifty-eight minutes declination! ...no sighting. Did you get that one Bart?
BART: Hell no.
I can't imagine why scientific fieldwork in particular could provide an environment that promotes inappropriate behavior.
I saw this happen in the late 80's, when the heavy handed sexual harassment efforts first started.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As a married man, not playing the game of flirt anymore, I feel harassed by the dress, cosmetics and perfume that some women in my office wear. Its no big deal. That is the way the world works, so I put up with it without many comments - but I'll admit to my eyes wondering towards a well exposed cleavage or camel toe protruding from a pair of tight pants. It is still sexual harassment though, even though many men enjoy that kind of harassment. Our culture encourages women to highlight their sexual features, and many do. Some of the off color jokes may just be men's way of keeping the yin and yang in balance. Enforcement, or even acknowledgement of the light hearted levels of harassment is asymmetrical.
I'm seriously laughing my ass off here. If your wife pulled that shit with the construction workers I know, both you and she wouldn't even exist. You'd be in a concrete foundationg to be found a century or two from now.
Any interaction between a woman and a man, depending on the woman's mood and circumstances
If she thinks the man is attractive then its "harmless flirting", if she thinks the man is unattractive then its "harassment", if she thinks she has something to gain by claiming harassment (like not being fired for incompetence) then its "harassment", if she thinks the man will do stuff for her then its "being friendly"
The whole "sexual harassment" bullshit is yet another in the long list of reasons why you should never hire a woman if you can possibly avoid it.
Nothing. You already told her twice.
Burning karma like fine cigars.... in a series of small fires.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
While I can certainly recognize the seriousness of the topic can I only gasp at a statement such as the following:
“How can we encourage little girls to study science if their future academic careers will be marked by not only the normal struggles of solving the mysteries of the universe, but also fending off professors who make unwelcome sexual advances?” (John Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts)
It might be a good idea for some scientists to learn about life and nature before anything else. Men, or rather the male gender in general, have made sexual advances onto the female gender throughout the entire history of evolution. One cannot go through life being a woman, and only dream of science and have all men arrested, because they made an advance. Maybe the man was not the right one, or maybe the woman send out the wrong signals, but there are plenty of women who do like it when men make an advance. And do not get me wrong. I am not trying to defend stalkers, perverts and rapists here. Only the struggle between men and women is a completely normal struggle, always has been a part of life, and came long before the "normal struggles of solving the mysteries of the universe". Mr. Johnson even manages to talk of "little girls" and "sexual advances" in a single sentence. Why does he bring little girls into the discussion? Does this not seem wrong on its own? ...
Whatever Mr. Johnson really was trying to say in his statement does it come across like the plot of a mad scientist, who in his ivory tower dreams of being a white knight and basically wants to live out his sociopathic tendencies by avoiding all human contact.
Just saying... One needs to be careful here and not generalize everything as sexual harassment.
Jesus F Christ - we will soon be extinct with all that "gay rights" and sexual harassment witch hunt for the remaining few "traditionals". Stop this nonsense already.
Most "sexual harassment" today results from a person saying that someone looks nice, not the other way around. This mentality has been pushed past the point of insanity.
When a guy walks up to a woman and says "Hello" and she claims to a Radio Host "A guy comes up and rapes me today." you begin to understand the depth of the problem. I can't find the quote, but this was on Talk 910AM in SF a few months ago. Perhaps you will have better luck looking for transcripts of the Gill Gross show than I did.
Yes, there are surely sexual harassment issues just like there are surely racist issues. Is everything being counted as "sexual harassment" really that? Hell no, just like much of the racist reports are not racism.
Comments like yours and what studies like this report exacerbate problems. It becomes impossible to find the real problems in the massive piles of false claims, so people stop taking any claim seriously.
As a guess, you realize this and simply wish to propagate the nonsense to ensure that nothing can be done to fix the real problems. That guess is based on your post as an AC instead of a real person wishing to hold any type of real dialogue.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Look, I hate to be the asshole who says this, but
Saying 'hello' to a woman is not harassment.
Touching a woman's hand once accidentally in the breakroom as you both reach for the same item simultaneously is not assault.
Women withdrawing consent hours or days after sexual activity is not rape.
Go calculate the numbers after you remove such incidents and then tell me what the actual occurence of male-on-female misbehavior is.
> On the other hand, I've seen very good evidence presented that the "trifling" transgressions tend to correlate strongly with environments in which people are a lot more comfortable pushing things a lot harder. which means that there is at least some reason to believe that they may contribute to an environment where people will think they can get away with rape. That, and "trifling" transgressions can have a significant cumulative effect over time.
Speaking as a man who has had another man fired for sexually harassing him, no, not really. Screwing around among friends and telling jokes is fine. Sticking your hands in someone's pants is not fine. Lumping everything together to score political points and those supporting it are trivializing real problems in a way that helps the people who abuse others and I really wish you would stop. You're being an idiot. Nobody sensible would lump assaults and jokes into the same column. The way you treat your data makes it impossible to support your conclusions. This is a terrible effect if you happen to be right.
Assaults are a real, serious problem. Jokes aren't in the same category.
Presumably having a continuous good time is against policy.
Fornication is a sin. Repent!
looks hot, I sure would like to bang her.
1) They asked if one had experienced or had been told about the behavior. First is legit, but second is hearsay.
2) The actions reported are very wide. "The experiences described by our respondents ranged from inadvertent alienating behavior, to unwanted verbal and physical sexual advances, to, most troublingly, sexual assault including rape." Being a dick or a rapist are a bit different things and using a single category to lump both together is misleading to say the least.
Dr. Rodney McKay harassed the shit out of Samantha Carter.
What constitutes sexual assault and sexual harassment in this study? Sorry to be cynical, but phrases like these are too often used as weasel words trying to get a shock out of people (or in this case, more grant money).
Exactly my point. Normally, company policies try to "fix" harassment by forbidding relationships with co-workers. That would be counterproductive. I rather would like to propose a way to improve the ability for harassed people to press charges and compulsory shrink visits for both including mediation, which should be also used for minor incidents (including misunderstandings) to solve issues instead of just hanging the man/woman for severe misconduct.
Isn't there a kind of general problem in urban academic settings where you have senior, often male, academics surrounded by young students, some of whom are in a dependent client relationship with the senior academics. Senior academic uses authority, persuasion and more than a little red wine to bed the younger students?
Now let's all go out in the field and camp. Maybe overseas. In a remote location. Where you can't leave or even make a phone call. Limited privacy, communal living. Long nights with alcohol and/or drugs.
I kind of hate to use the phrases "going tribal" or "Lord of the Flies" but it's not hard to see how this situations can turn kind of ugly pretty quickly.
And it's not also hard to see how it's not just driven by the gross, predatory senior academic. You might add in the attractive but less talented student who uses her sexuality to compete, or the smarter but less attractive students with less social sophistication who gets in over her head.
The sample was self selective survey of those commenting on a blog about the subject matter. To claim that makes it 'common' is anecdote and not scientific.
Frikin psychos are common everywhere. It's a bit of a lurking variable. Scientific people tend to see the scientific patterns more easily in their environment. A good portion of the CS majors I graduated were certifiable - people that u just don't want to be around, kind of like psychotic psych warfare bullies. And they don't change.
Although I don't want to detract from the problem being highlighted, I think this may be a symptom of a broader problem with academia: lack of accountability at the top.
FTA:
'About 22% of that group felt it would be unsafe to fight back or not give consent when they were sexually assaulted. Victims were overwhelmingly young: More than 90% of women and 70% of men who had been harassed or assaulted were students, postdocs, or employees of lower rank than their assailants. Women were 3.5 times more likely to report sexual harassment than men and significantly more likely to have experienced sexual assault. “This is about power dynamics in a permissive environment,” Clancy says.'
This sounds to me like the person in charge is getting away with behavior that is established as wrong, and the person in power is often inclined to sexual harassment. Better accountability at the top of the research group might make this a bit more difficult to get away with; you could imagine that this kind of person, in addition to sexual harassment, might make other problematic comments, perhaps ridiculing people for lifestyle choices(smoking, being overweight, etc.) or engaging in intolerant language (racist jokes, homophobic comments, etc.)
First - Don't piss in your own well. If you date someone you work with, when it ends, you should expect to look for a new job.
Second - what is the difference between witty repartee and sexual harassment? - about 20 pounds.
Just because she went down on the last 2 guys she did field work with, does not mean the fat guy gets some.
Just finding out about this? Wait till someone starts looking at what happens in non-field-work locations ... labs, classrooms, offices. You can have all the rules you want, some people are just not nice ... and some are just evil.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I have NEVER seen or heard of a company that had the policy of forbidding relationships between co-workers. That is not in any way normal.
...is often used as a bullying tactic. The bully acts as if the victim is so much like a woman or like a gay man (often just because of the victim's size or build) that the bully just "can't resist" making advances toward the victim. These "advances" are often made loudly and publicly, with great fanfair, thus to emasculate the victim.
"sometimes these dickheads disagree with me, that's sexist, I should be able to never be questioned on my method and conclusion when doing science, men are pigs."
There sure is a lot of sexism in this world but most of it comes from women/feminist.
That kind of rule used to be fairly rampant in some of the more stodgy firms back in the day, started becoming more rare in the '80s, was almost gone in the 90's, and most folks younger than 40 or so, have probably not seen one. Us older folk, though...
These days, it's been supplanted by a looser interpretation saying that you can't be "related to" someone you're supervising (or vice versa) and there are strong cultural norms to not be involved with someone within your chain of command.
That is all.
I have NEVER seen or heard of a company that had the policy of forbidding relationships between co-workers. That is not in any way normal.
Where do you live (or work)? Here in the USA it is not typically against company policy to have a "relationship" with a co-worker. On the other hand, it is typically against company policy for the boss to have a "relationship" with his (or her) subordinates. It still happens regardless, of course, but now the two of them know that legally speaking they are skating off onto thin ice. Of course, the company also is well aware that this kind of thing is occurring, but now they have their asses covered if the whole thing goes sour. Yeah, the policy is there to protect the company, not the employees. What? You thought the company actually gives a rat's ass about their employees? How naive!
The purpose of company policies about sexual harassment is to avoid legal problems. As long as they have satisfactory policies and enforce them, they're legally in the clear when it occurs. I've never been forbidden from having sexual relationships with cow-orkers. I have been flat-out told that, if I had some sort of relationship with somebody I had some sort of authority over, and that person accused me of sexual harassment, I would be considered guilty and treated as such by my employer. This was short of forbidding such relationships, but not by much. (This was the one time I had such authority, as a lecturing TA. My wife took the course I was teaching, and was shuffled to another session, which is the only time I've been in a position of having a sexual relationship that might involve my work.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes