Slashdot Mirror
What Spotlighting Harassment In Astronomy Means
StartsWithABang writes: Geoff Marcy. Tim Slater. Christian Ott. And a great many more who are just waiting to be publicly exposed for what they've done (and in many cases, are still doing). Does it mean that astronomy has a harassment problem? Of course it does, but that's not the real story. The real story is that, for the first time, an entire academic field is recognizing a widespread problem, taking steps to change its policies, and is beginning to support the victims, rather than the senior, more famous, more prestigious perpetrators. Astronomy is the just start; hopefully physics, computer science, engineering, philosophy and economics are next.
Just so you know, the relentless barrage of articles about alleged rampant harassment in science and technology is harassment of your main audience. If you want Slashdot to be a feminist blog, just say so. I think the appropriate warning is: Careful what you wish for. I have cancelled decade-long subscriptions to magazines which thought it wise to "expand" their audience by sucking up to the feminist agenda.
This may be causing the demagogue flop: Trying to vaguely synthesize a "problem" may work in other circles, but hard science doesn't want to hear that there's "some kind of thing going on, maybe", it wants facts, places, numbers, reproducible events, documentation, data, something real, something tangible. Not posturing and implied semissertions.
I read somewhere that the sexual harassment investigation was instigated by a fellow facility member at Berkeley. The head of some women's group who actively sought out students to make a complaint against Marcy. Yet another case of political correctness gone insane.
.. asked Oldham whether the university was doing all it could to address allegations involving sexual harassment of students by a faculty member" ref
"The 15 April 2011 complaint, the first in the documents, involves a witness report from someone who described Marcy rubbing the bare shoulder of a female undergraduate student"
"On 18 March 2014, someone writing from outside Berkeley
“There is a concern that protecting the campus may be a higher priority than addressing the problems” ref
We once needed to hire another developer, but we were short on space. There was a woman that we really wanted to hire, but she would have had to share my cube with me. I told my boss no way no how. I would never harass a woman or do or say anything even close to harassment, but the chance of some sort of harassment complaint would go so high with us working in such close proximity (what if I accidentally backed my chair into hers? Obviously that was an unwanted advance) so I flat out refused. We hired a man instead. I felt bad for the woman, but the environment is so toxic for men working in close proximity to women that we couldn't chance it.