Women demand halt to harassment in science fields

It is 2018, and the director of the National Science Foundation is tired of learning that male scientists whose research she supports with public funds have sexually harassed their female students, staff members and colleagues.

At 71, France Cordova still remembers an unwanted sexual remark from a graduate-school professor she had sought out for advice on her astrophysics research. And over the past few years, she has listened to stories — so many stories — shared by younger scientists at conferences for geologists and astronomers.

So last month, Cordova enacted the kind of structural change that experts say is a prerequisite to increasing the ranks of women scientists, who hold only about 30 percent of senior faculty positions in colleges in the United States.

Institutions that accept an NSF grant must now notify the agency of any finding related to harassment by the leading scientists working on it — and face the possibility of losing the coveted funds. Individuals also may report harassment directly to the agency, which can then conduct its own investigation. That, too, could result in the suspension of funding.

The move seems like a nobrainer, but it might be the most-consequential action that any of the nation’s science agencies have taken to hold academic institutions explicitly accountable for sexual harassment.

For the NSF, which distributed grants to 40,000 scientists at 2,000 institutions in 2017, the goal also is a shift in a scientific culture that has long sought to evaluate scientists without consideration for their personal conduct.

“We were raised with letting the water run off of our back,” said Cordova, whose resume includes stints at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA as its chief scientist. “’You’re harassing me? I’m going to ignore you. I’m going to go do my research somewhere else.’ “Well, enough is enough.” That the NSF’s new sexualharassment policy was put in place by a woman who controls a $5 billion research budget captures the bittersweet nature of the #MeToo Cori Bargmann, a neurobiologist, says she wishes she had said more about men who have sexually harassed women in the science fields. “I even feel personally responsible, like I let these younger women down,” she said. moment for many scientists.

Even as a small corps of women have assumed some of science’s most-influential positions in recent years, their own experience — along with actual research — has shown that harassment and other forms of sex discrimination remain widespread.

As they grapple with the field’s big challenges, ridding it of the gender inequities that many believed would by now be a thing of the past ranks high on the list.

“I think when my generation came along, we thought, if we put our heads down and did a good job, things would get better,” said Cori Bargmann, a neurobiologist who heads the $3 billion science arm of the ChanZuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization.

“I even feel personally responsible, like I let these younger women down. I thought I would fix it by doing OK. And clearly that’s not enough, so we’ve got to do more.”

Much has changed for women in science, of course, since the 1970s, when Cordova approached a senior male scientist for advice on her graduate thesis and was taken aback by a comment that she describes as “completely inappropriate.”

Now, women account for about 20 percent of senior faculty in math, computer science and physics. They have received around half of the doctorates in the life sciences for the past decade, and they constitute about half of assistant professor positions.

But the representation of women overall decreases among associate professors and declines to 33 percent among full professors. (And only 3 percent of the women employed as full professors are African-American.)

Erin O’Shea, appointed in 2016 as the first woman to head the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, an influential biomedical-research organization, has instituted a program to support women and underrepresented minorities as postdoctoral fellows and young faculty members, when they might be diverted to less-elite labs at lowerranking institutions.

“My interest is in capturing as much talent as possible for science,” said O’Shea. “If you want to capture the best talent, you don’t want groups de facto excluded.”

For her part, Cordova said the NSF is working on additional plans to combat gender harassment.

She said she had not previously shared publicly the story of her own incident of harassment. Nor had she told anyone what happened decades later, when she found herself sitting on the highlevel committee evaluating candidates for an award for which, it turned out, her harasser had been nominated.

“I explained to the group that I thought his conduct was not becoming of a scientist,” Cordova said. “So that was my little thing. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll do this for the rest of the gals.”’