Giving Compass' Take:
- A new training is emerging to make scientific field work safer for women and LGBTQ scientists experiencing sexual harassment in the field.
- Reports have indicated that scientific fieldwork and research can be unsafe and uncomfortable for some researchers and more work needs to be done to move toward inclusion.
- Read about female scientists fighting to address the climate crisis.
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In August of last year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a damning report about the pervasive culture of sexual harassment and assault on research stations located in one of the world’s most remote and isolating places for field work, Antarctica.
The fieldwork conducted by the approximately 700 scientists there helps researchers understand earth’s past climates, informing what our future climate might look like as global warming leads to rising sea levels and melting of ice sheets.
But for decades women, who, like their male counterparts saw the opportunity to do field work there as a way to further their academic scholarship, were subjected to a constant barrage of threatening and demeaning behavior. As one respondent said in the report: “Every woman I knew down there had an assault or harassment experience that had occurred on ice.”
Read the full article about science fieldwork harassment by Jessica Kutz at The19th.