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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.
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.
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.