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.”
The report was just the latest reminder of a problem that has plagued fieldwork: In field sites across the country researchers for years have reported facing gender-based harassment and sexual assault, and what they say can be an unwelcoming and hostile environment.
Now, women in the geosciences have decided to do something about it. They’ve developed a new set of training and standards they hope will make the work safer and stem the bleeding of talent from the sciences.
Fieldwork can look like venturing into the Alaskan tundra to collect rock samples or to volcano observatories for monitoring work. Long hours in the field are crucial for scientists and researchers to collect novel data that they can analyze and draw conclusions to publish. Published academic papers lead to grants, career opportunities and tenured faculty positions.
But since their inception, research institutions have done a poor job of making fieldwork accessible to people who aren’t White men. Up until the 1960s and 1970s, many universities barred women from doing this type of research. Now that the geosciences are growing more diverse, women and LGBTQ+ people are finding the work environment to be rife with negative and uncomfortable experiences that can lead to harassment.
Read the full article about science fieldwork harassment by Jessica Kutz at The19th.