 Hello. We're going to get started. We'll probably have some more people coming in, but let's go on to get this going. My name is Seth Manukin. I'm the director of the communications forum. One thing before we begin, I'm going to send around a clipboard with a pen. If you could let us know how you found out about this event today, we're trying to figure out the best way to reach people so it would be useful for us to know, and then also tell us how everyone you know did not find out. That would be great. I'm going to introduce today's panel, and then we'll get out of the way. One last announcement. We will have about an hour of discussion among the panelists followed by a Q&A. For the Q&A, please use one of the two microphones, because we get a significant portion of our audience who watch it online afterwards or listen to it, listen to the podcast, and if you do not speak into the microphones, they will not be able to hear what you're saying. As an added bonus, we would love it if you would identify yourself, but that is definitely not required. Let's see. One more announcement. If you would like to see more events like this, please sign up for our mailing list, which is right at the end of this table. Before you go, we will not spam you. We will only send you announcements about communications forums, which means you will get a total of six emails a year, possibly 12 if we send you two about each event. We have some cool things coming up. On April 13th, we had the comedian, Aparna Nancharla, speaking, and I know you don't want to miss that. Yeah. So we generally, this is generally an hour of moderate discussion followed by an hour of questions, and let me introduce our speakers. First, the moderator tonight is Christina Couch, who is a science journalist who usually writes about the intersection of psychology and technology. She's a former graduate of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, which we are very excited about. She's written for Mental Floss, Nova Next, Science Friday, Discover, and is also the administrator of the communications forum. To her left stage, right, is Azine Gaurashi, right? Okay, the name like Manukin, you would think that I would not butcher other people's names. She's a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and the recipient of the AAAS Cavalry Science Journalism Award and the Everett Clark-Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists. She is, over the last couple of years, broken a series of really incredible stories, including an investigative story in 2015, detailing astronomer Jeffrey Marcy's long history of sexual harassments, and then later that same year broke stories on astrophysicist Christian Ott and a 2016 piece on microbiologist Michael Katz. And these were pieces that, I think, made clear to the public at large and to the rest of the world what in many cases had been an open secret in different areas of science. To her left, right, yes, is Sarah Ballard, who's an astronomer and a tourist fellow for exoplanetary research at the MIT Cavalry Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. And she was part of the Title IX investigation against Jeffrey Marcy and went public with her story in 2015 and since then she's been a very passionate public advocate for gender equity in science, which is an issue that we still have an enormous way to go on. And then at the end of the table is Evelyn Hammons, a professor of the history of science and of African and African-American studies at Harvard University, and the former dean of Harvard College. And she was the first African-American and the first woman to hold that position, which is both impressive and incredible. So without further ado, I'll leave it over to them. We're coming. I'm very excited to have you and thank you three, especially for being here. So I wanna start off the panel a little bit by talking about the experience of sexual harassment and specifically the experience of talking about it publicly. Sarah, would you mind talking a little bit about how, why you chose to participate in the Title IX investigation to begin with and then later why you chose to go public? Yeah, so just as you say, it's useful to divide that into two answers. So first, why I chose to participate in the investigation. I had very mixed feelings about it and one particular thing that really helped me to navigate that complicated time and determine how I wanted to behave was thinking about who I would have needed at that time. So thinking about 20-year-old Sarah and how vulnerable she was, the series of things that were happening to 20-year-old Sarah, who did I most long to see, who did I most long for to intervene and prevent that from happening and I thought I'm just gonna become that person for whoever this other person is. So whatever my very complex set of feelings were about my own experience, including guilt and so on, that really helped me, that really helped crystallize my decision about whether to be a part of the investigation and then there was whether or not to use my real name. So I was not a named complainant in that investigation and that documentation is since published, but I'm a complainant number two in that. So then why I chose to use my real name was two-fold. First, I had tried to educate myself making use of the wisdom of other social movements, including the LGBT movement for equality and one major feature of that movement in recent decades has been urging individuals to come out. And the reason for that is because if you know someone personally, perhaps who's encountered the type of thing, the oppression or the type of violence done upon their person, then you feel differently about it than if it's an anonymous person. So that's sort of a political gesture and also I wanted for, if there were other young women reading the Buzzfeed piece or other pieces, I would want them to think, well, she's not afraid. If you use your real name, it shows that you're not afraid because I wanted them to think, well, then I don't need to be afraid. And can you talk a little bit about your experiences after this has been public and the trajectory from the story going public to where you are now? Sure. So it's been very recent for one thing. I was a Torres fellow at the period of time when he's been published that piece and I'm a Torres fellow still. It's been particularly tricky, I would say, because I've been on the job market. So trying to go up one more rung on the academic ladder to the lowest rung of professor, really trying to make that leap. So that has influenced that process in ways that have been deeply uncomfortable sometimes. Other times it has been a real outpouring of admiration from my community and gratitude from my community. So I would say the experience has been mixed and I had resolved myself to that experience being mixed before I did it. And so in that sense I feel at peace with it. I still think it was a good decision. And Azeen, can you tell me a little bit about how you got connected with this specific story and more largely you've covered several sexual harassment cases. How did you become connected with that subject? Yeah, so I think before I started at BuzzFeed as the first science reporter in the beginning of 2015 and the desk was launched completely brand new. It's led by Virginia Hughes. Their MO as a desk was to look at science through the lens of money and power and who does science, who doesn't do science? What, how does that shape what is created and what the public knows as science? And at the time there had been a lot of coverage of the leaky pipeline, sort of under representation of women in different fields. The SAFE study had come out I think in 2014 that Kate Clancy and Katie Hindi had put together. But you meant telling them what the SAFE study is in case they don't know? Yeah, sure. So that was sort of the first quantification of the problem of harassment in the sciences. And it showed that an overwhelming percentage, I can't remember right now off the top of my head, but an overwhelming percentage of junior researchers, specifically women had encountered some sort of harassment in field work. And so that sort of, I think blew a lot of people away, but again, it was sort of the, there was the level of the abstract problem of sort of why is there this under representation, the quantification that they had presented, but there wasn't really any concrete personal examples of how this was working. And we sort of made it a priority to report on sexism and science, but we didn't quite know what that meant. So we reported on things as they happened. There was the Tim Hunt stuff that happened. And there was the issues with science, the general science, several issues had come up with sort of questionable decision making in their editorial process. And then I think just sticking to that beat and making it clear that that was a priority for us to cover. I mean, I can't stress enough how these stories would not happen without just the people who decide to come forward. That was not in our hands at all. And it was really the person, there were several people involved with leading, sort of organizing the people who eventually came forward in the Marcy case. And one of them came forward to us and told us that there's this investigation. Berkeley went through the entire investigation. They concluded that there was, in fact, sexual harassment occurring from 2000 to 2009, but then they have sent us this message that they are not going to do anything about it. So that's why they decide to come to us. And so when you're in a case where a university either isn't doing anything about it or is doing very little about it, can you talk a little bit about the sensitivities in terms of reporting out a story and dealing not only with people who have been through these sometimes traumatic things but also an institution that frankly doesn't want to talk about it. I mean, so I guess that's two parts. I think for me in these stories, it's always how I deal with the women who are coming forward and then how I deal with the institution and figure out what they determined and where they potentially fell short. So in the Marcy story, I had never really worked with victims before and that's something that working at BuzzFeed was really helpful because we're a science desk embedded in a newsroom that has made it a priority to report on sexual assault on college campuses. They have a lot of higher ed reporters. We have an amazing investigative reporter, Ariel Kamner who came from the New York Times who wrote about horseman back in the 90s. So we had a lot of, that's not something a science desk is traditionally equipped to cover is a story like this. So we had a lot of advice from other people who had covered stories like this in terms of how to work with people who've gone through stuff like this. So I had a lot of help with that. And then in terms of the institution, what we discovered and what has informed every story going forward is that institutions are obligated to investigate stories like this when they come forward. And so we were lucky in the case of Berkeley that it was a public university. We were able to get our hands on all the investigation documents. So we knew what they had found in their own words. We also had the voices of the victims and then we were able to determine sort of what they had decided to do about it. And so when you and I talked on the phone, you mentioned that one of the questions that you are asked repeatedly is, is this a problem that is specific to science? I'm interested in from a historical and sort of cultural perspective. Evelyn, can you sort of place that in its historical context? I mean, when we talk about sexual harassment cases within science, is that a thing that are we in a unique place? Oh, of course not. No, no, no, no. Sexual harassment is not unique to science at all. And I would also argue that we've understood that there is a problem with sexual harassment in scientific and technical institutions and classrooms and labs and all of those things since at least the early 80s. And I think that some institutions have tried to in a forthright way begin to keep data, to provide training to various groups and constituencies that need it and really accept the fact that it is a real issue. So it's not new. I think there are some elements of it right now that are new. But I think overall it's not. And I don't think that one could argue at all that science has some special, there's some kind of science exceptionalism happening here. There are many institutions, the law. I mean, you can go back to the kind of issues that were raised about sexual harassment in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas by Anita Hill at the EEOC. I was in an unfortunate place for something like that to happen, but it happened there. And so there are many institutions that have had to grapple with this over many, many years. I think what seems new to people is that people don't expect it to happen in science. And I think there hasn't been a sense that in those kinds of scientific and technical places that one would see a problem with sexual harassment. But then you also have to consider one last thing about it. The number of women in these fields has only increased pretty slowly over the last decade, 20 years maybe. So we don't know much, we know some things that were happening earlier on, but the number of women was so small that that actually made it difficult to really get at some of the structural things that were going on. So no, there's no science exceptionalism. I think that, and I think one last thing I wanted to say about it at this point is that for people writing about the experiences of women and I mean all women, so that includes women of color as well, in American science and engineering and technology, I think people have wanted not to have the sexual harassment issue come to the fore. Because of the intense efforts that everybody's been putting into trying to get more women to come into the fields, those fields. So if you're gonna do that, you don't wanna say there's gonna be some hostility in those fields, there's going to be sexual harassment in those fields, you wanna say we need girls and we want girls to do this and we want women to do this. And so I think that kind of boosterism has sort of, has overshadowed a little bit of the real lived experience of women in these fields. Azine is that a consideration for you when you're reporting these stories? I mean is that a thing that you think about? Would the boosterism or? The, I mean the push to get girls involved in STEM and sort of what an accumulation of these sexual harassment cases kind of does. Yeah, I mean I think that is the larger goal, right? Is to, I think the larger goal of what Sarah's doing and then my job as a reporter and not as an advocate is to shed light on what the lived experience of people like Sarah is. And I think with time one would hope that there would be the type of culture change that wouldn't need to require that boosterism for girls to come in, you know. But I was curious actually on your point Evelyn, people always ask me in terms of the way that science is actually structured, the hierarchy and the level of reliance upon a PI and the access to data and collaborations and that there really is like a lot more room to fear retaliation and stuff like that. That comes up all the time when I talk to people about this, about maybe some of the systemic structural things that maybe facilitate this being silenced in science versus other fields. Okay, I mean I think first, I mean when we say science, I think we should try to get as much specificity as we can get into this. So we're talking about certain lab cultures with small labs. The PI of course is in charge of the whole point. But some PI's, principal investigators, try to have a collegial kind of culture, a collaborative kind of culture in their lab, not have it so high stress, not have it so competitive. So there are lots of different ways people run their labs. But of course, the undergraduates, the graduate students and the postdocs are absolutely dependent upon the PI, right? And so that is absolutely built in. And so how people handle that, some people handle it as I said well, and some people don't handle it well. And so how pervasive are the, let's just call them for lack of a better word, the people who are not very good at running their labs in anything other than a sort of strictly hierarchical, competitive kind of way, how good are they at actually addressing the kind of problems that arise when you put your lab in that kind of, when you make your lab that kind of environment. It doesn't have to be, and it's not required to do good science, but a lot of people feel it is. And the one thing about, that I think does make science a little bit a little bit different than some other kinds of organizations and institutions, is that if you're a student, when you're located in one lab, it's very hard to change. It's very hard to change. And it's very hard to change if what you want, if the reason you want to change is because of a hostile environment that you're experiencing in the lab. It's very hard for a young person to talk about that. And then for colleagues to say, oh, you want to come and work in my lab because what happened in my colleague's lab? Oh, you know, people want to back away from that. And that's not right, but that sometimes happens. But I guess the last one, I'm sorry to interrupt you, is world-class scientists, being a world-class scientist or engineer doesn't actually mean you know how to manage people. So that's the other part of the story. I mean, the two are, let's not assume that some natural alignment of good managerial skills and being a Nobel Prize winner. There's not. In so many of these cases that we read about, I mean, time and time and time again, these cases are open secrets for years. And you have, I mean, every time I read one of these stories, there are women who say, yeah, we all knew to avoid this lab or this person. In your opinion, and this is a question for all three of you, what are the forces that keep these types of stories under wraps for so long? I can speak to the journalist side. I mean, when the Marcy story came out, I got a couple of messages from prominent reporters who do astronomy exoplanet stuff, who said, you know, we had heard things all along. Like I'd sort of seen stuff, but like we just sort of passed it off as him being sort of flirtatious or a little bit whatever. I think you can make excuses like that. And despite knowing maybe, I think it's hard to write or to, Marcy was very celebrated for good reason. And there were many profiles written of him that were incredibly glowing for good reason. And it's sort of hard to square that with something that really isn't talked about in the sciences, you know. Yeah, I have a couple thoughts. My first is why something like that would remain kind of availed in silence on different levels of the hierarchy. So for students, for example, often the experience of harassment is deeply lonely. You have no idea that it's part of a problem. For that reason, you create a narrative in which what happens probably only happened to you, in which case why would you sink your own attempt to become a scientist? Which is what you see around you, the likeliest outcome of what will happen. So first of all, you don't know perhaps how widespread it is. Now if you are on a higher level, like if you're the chair of the department and you've heard many of these things, well why then wouldn't you act? And I've thought about that a lot. I think in order to comprehend fully how common harassment is, how commonly it's experienced by women in science and that safe study was one example of how deeply common it is, it really makes you question the meritocracy of the entire scientific process. Now that's a huge realization. And that's a huge thing as a leader within a scientific department to grapple with. How long has this been happening? How many, you would think as a person who's thought more about harassment than the average scientist or whatnot that I wouldn't feel just overwhelmed by the sheer number, the sheer volume of people that you see alone. But it's sort of difficult to fully comprehend. And then if I try then to imagine how much science has been lost by these individuals leaving the field or the amount of harm that's been done, it's difficult to look directly at it to tell you the truth. And I think that's another reason why people who long to have a scientific career based on this belief that it is the best ideas are the ones that thrive. People who work really hard, those are the people who benefit within science, you long to subscribe to those ideas. And to forfeit them is a major psychological undertaking. I think that's a piece of it. And I think the journalists, especially science journalists subscribe to that as well. And you have to think about who is doing this reporting, what the climate of reporting was as well. I think five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, there was far less reporting on the voices of women who have, especially on college campuses, with sexual assault and rape. So I think that whole movement coming sort of trickled into science journalism finally. And with the help of people who came forward. Well, I also think it's really a shame. And I speak as someone who started out in science and engineering and became a historian of science. How many scientists altogether, scientists and engineers, I put them together, don't know anything about the history of their professions, number one. And then there's also, I would argue, and I have in many cases, there is no self-critical tradition. I'm not least a very strong one often. And thirdly, as we've been engaged in this project of diversifying the scientific workforce, scientific and technical workforce, we've not considered the fact that the new people, the people coming in who are the new ones, the women who are now maybe used to be, when I was a graduate student here, only one, I think there was one woman on my floor in building 13 who was an administrative staff. What it would mean for someone like me to be the only African-American female in the lab on the entire floor. No one was thinking about that, that experience was going to be different. No one was thinking about the fact that gender, race and ethnicity would make a difference in how scientific communities would function. And nobody thought about the isolation. I certainly felt isolated. And certainly people weren't thinking about the isolation of other female students. And so not thinking about those things, not naming those things, actually produced a culture that has all this silence. So the first time when I was a professor here at MIT and I taught introduction of women's studies and we did women in science, people actually said to me, you can't do a course on the history of women in science because you'll discourage them from coming. You'll discourage the women from coming into science if we tell them what it's really like by telling them the stories, the history of women scientists coming into full participation in the scientific workforce all the time. So how are you supposed to know? How could you, the only choice you have is to think, this is just me. It can't possibly have happened to anybody else. We can't possibly have blatant discrimination in the scientific world. Well Marie Curie has two Nobel Prizes and people still say, and women shouldn't do science. I mean really, how many men have two Nobel Prizes? I don't know, but not many. So not knowing that history, not producing a space to talk about what scientific communities are like, they're not all the same as I said in the beginning, but that opening the door, so to speak, and just expecting all the women and minorities to just be white guys is a problem. And I think, so I think it's really important, these kinds of classes on the history of women in science, on gender in science or race in gender in science are really important for the simple reason of just opening up that box and says, yes, meritocracy is important, but meritocracy is not always practiced. Aside from changes in education, aside from bolstering those classes, do you, I mean, what other things do you feel like need to change in order to really broaden, to bring those issues of race and gender? I mean, you just have to shine the light on them. Institutions must shine the light on them. Institutions must put in place guidelines for addressing these issues, and they have to make every constituency and institution aware of those guidelines. It should be talked about to undergraduates, should be talked about to graduate students, post-docs, and it should be talked about to P.I.s. Now I know, as we would say at Harvard, Harvard professors don't get trained, and they don't, but they can get educated a little bit on what these issues really are about and consider that actually the institution has an absolute legal and moral responsibility to address them. So I think those are the things that have to happen, and people have to have, and institutional leaders have to be vigilant about making sure that people understand there has got to be zero tolerance about this. And I think some people do, and there are pockets in different places where people do understand that, where guidelines are clear, where websites are well documented, where there are offices where people can go and people know about them, and there are other places where nobody knows anything. Could I speak to that a little bit? Yeah, I think that not only is the burden upon us to change the things which are actively harming scientists today, that sort of presupposes that we have a scientific culture which sort of functions more or less okay the way it is, and I don't think that's true. I think in order to fully incorporate individuals who have been marginalized and not allowed to participate fully in science, that requires really rethinking how departments work on a really basic level. So how funding is allocated, a major step forward there, I thought was Congresswoman Jackie Spearsville to tie funding at the national level to whether or not an individual has a documented history of sexual harassment. So that's like another major piece which is sort of necessitating that universities take responsibility, but also when you look at, I often am asked this question, well what should we be doing differently to incorporate white women and people of color into astronomy? And I'll say like, I'm a scientist, here are the peer reviewed things. We should be having parental leave. We should have paid parental leave. Like this is a major feature of the so-called leaky pipeline. We should not have departments that don't talk about structural barriers. Instead we should talk about them. We shouldn't just be like a non-racist department. We should be an anti-racist department. So these are the kinds of conversations we should be having. When it comes to admissions, like the way that we think about merit, the way that we think about whether an individual student has promise and will succeed in the graduate program, even using the graduate record examination, the GRE score, that should be tossed out. That's been a biased metric this entire time. And so it really requires thinking about basically every pillar of how a department operates. It's not only kind of like preventing harassers from having access to students. It requires kind of a bigger picture, which is another reason why I think folks bulk at it. Because in order to fully address it and meaningfully get more people to move through the pipeline, it's not only harassment. There's a number of other stumbling blocks. But this one has been receiving a lot of press and I think for good reason. It's a lot less glamorous to say, well, we need 12 weeks of paid parental leave. That's what'll make the big difference. Even though I think to a large extent that is also true. I mean, every time a sexual harassment case comes out or even a gender bias case, it does not have to be a harassment case. There is at least some pushback inevitably that it's, this is one bad egg. This is one bad person. It's not an institutional problem. In terms of taking steps to really shed light on this as a systemic and institutional problem, first of all, what needs to happen in terms of really highlighting this as a larger issue? So as I said before, one of the things that institutions really have to do, I served as Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard, the very first one. And one of the things we did was a climate survey. We found out a lot of things that people kind of knew but weren't really talking about. You have to really, when I say shine a light, that means you need to capture the data. You need to make data public. You need to say that deans have a certain set of responsibilities, department chairs have a certain set of responsibilities, and people have to be held to that. And there have to be consequences if they aren't held to it. That goes back to the issues with the federal funding and tying that to some of these issues. So for example, if someone has received a National Science Foundation funding for a decade and never produced a women's student, why should they keep getting NSF funding? Why should they get NSF funding? They've never produced a student of color. That's government money, it's for, so those are the kinds of things that bring attention to the issue and get people who don't think it's important or would like to push it on the side and say it's not meaningful or only an individual issue or some thing that happens every now and then. It would make it clear that it's not, that it's structuralist systemic and these are some of the structuralist systemic reasons why we're going to change how we do business with people. So I think once PIs are, see that their success is tied to an anti-racist set of practices, anti-sexist set of practices, all those kinds of things. If they see that that's tied to whether or not they're gonna do successful as fundraisers and to be able to do their work. People open their eyes, it makes them stand up but it does take leadership at every level, from the department level, to the dean level, to the higher administration and people have to do it consistently and sustain it over time. If you just have one shot because some big explosive thing happened it's not gonna change anything. It has to be every year all the time people have to deal with the data. Are we doing okay? Do we need to change? Do we have some cases that are, have shown us some other areas that we need to work on? People have to take a seriously, like you would take anything else seriously. I agree and I think on that point, I mean each of the cases that I've written about have been very different in terms of their circumstances but in every single one there were several complaints lodged to the university before anything happened and in each case, I mean Marcy ended up resigning but in the other cases everyone is still employed by their university and in the case there had been like seven harassment claims filed prior to the investigation going through. I think what the larger picture here is really about accountability and sort of from the department level of chairs that had been notified over and over and over again who had made excuses or whatever to the level of the university which was still accepting grant money and still keeping a faculty member on board and then what Sarah said with the NSF or federal grants potentially being that lever being pulled. I think what's been made clear in all this for me at least is sort of the many chains of accountability that have failed and the many ways in which things have to change. In terms of, as a journalist looking at that chain of accountability, I mean, can you talk a little bit about the sensitivities in reporting on that chain of accountability? I mean, the sensitivities in terms of the institutions? Yeah, I mean, how easy or difficult is it for a journalist to actually delve in there and figure out who's accountable? I mean, it sort of varied with each case and at Berkeley we had, I was very lucky to have people who had worked on this for such a long time that there were many cases, they each had their components of the investigation. They also had people who I talked to who as far back as over a decade ago had gone to chairs and tried to talk about this. In the case of Caltech, I still have not seen the investigation in the Caltech case and the girls involved have still, as far as I know, not seen the investigations. They were not allowed to possess the investigations of their own cases despite having testified many dozens of hours. There's different things that play in private universities and public universities and Berkeley has gotten a whole lot of attention for how it's handled these issues, mostly because they have to fork over the documents to show what's going on. And I think, I mean, my colleague, Katie Baker, recently reported on a philosophy professor at Yale. Again, so many more layers of not being able to know exactly what's going on at the institutional level because they control that information. So it is really difficult working with private institutions and the public ones as far as accessing this information, but you sort of go with the sort of personal testimony you can get and then whatever sort of information you can glean otherwise. In terms of the role of academics, advocates, the media in this situation, do you feel that the responsibility of each of those players or of any of those players is really changing or should be changing? Well, I think they are changing. I mean, I think, again, when I was a student quite a long time ago now, you really couldn't, we couldn't have a panel like this, we couldn't talk about this. And I think, so I do think things have changed. Have we gotten to the point where there's enough transparency, there's enough accountability or any of that? No, I don't think so. There's a lot, lot more to do. And I think there's still, and I go back to now just wearing my hat as a historian, I just think until young women and young men who are students in the sciences really are asked to critically engage with not just the content of the work, but how the work gets done. That to me would be a fundamental way to help people see, you know, we don't have to do it that way. We could do it a different way. And I think that's a big piece that hasn't really gotten addressed. You know, people still will, there's still few women in certain kinds of classes in those classes. The males in those classes often dominate. The women don't realize that they have some options. They feel like they have to go along or else they're gonna lose credibility or lose the opportunity to do the work. I know of, this is still happening even at the high school level in AP classes. So there are a few young women in AP classes in some certain fields, particularly computer science. And if you talk to those young women, they tell you why they aren't in those classes. The guys take over everything. We feel left out. We don't get to say how we feel about it. And I don't like that kind of environment. So I don't wanna do it. Do you like computer science? I love computer science, but I'm not gonna work in it. I don't wanna be in an atmosphere like that. So the young women are actually not choosing not to do this work. They're being driven out of it because young men are being allowed to be bullies and dominating and acting ways that I think they're not even in many cases aware of. And I think that leads along the way to sedimenting some of these other kinds of behaviors that we think are extremely problematic as people go along. Because there's never been a place where we say, this is not how we expect you to behave. Now some PIs, of course, do that. I have people set expectations for their labs and their participants in their labs. And other people don't. They just sort of let people sort of soak up in the air somehow, how they're supposed to behave. And then they soak up the bad things, right? And that's not how it should be. So I think it really, for me, it speaks to a real need to redesign undergraduate education in the sciences. And I think we need more public discussion of what's really happening in science education. Then we need more stories of just sort of the great successes. We have a lot of those stories. I like them, but I'm kind of tired of them. I mean, there has been a move in the last several years. I mean, this issue has certainly gained much more media attention in the last few years than it has historically. Certain institutions, and especially professional societies, have taken a role in bringing out these issues and talking about them and making them more public. And also to institute some better measures in terms of accountability. In your opinion, I mean, are those measures successful? Or what do you see as succeeding in this space and what do you see as failing? I'd like to speak to that in part, and in addition, the question that you asked immediately before, which is about what are kind of the roles of advocates and scientists versus the media? Because that is in part how I visualize what success would look like. And even to a certain extent, when we talk about the myth of kind of a few bad eggs, when I imagine what a sea change would look like, that would produce the kind of scientific culture which would be more equitable, a place in which everyone could thrive. It would no longer be a myth about a few bad people or good people. Instead, there's humanity, which along certain axes, people possess more power. Then there are axes along which people possess less power. So even though I'm a survivor of harassment as a woman, I'm also complicit in this scientific culture, which excludes and marginalizes women of color who, in fact, experience harassment at higher rates than white women. And yet, I am the person who ended up coming forward in this particular case, and I was treated very, very differently, I'll say, than individuals in my exact field in astronomy who've drawn attention to racism within our field. So in that sense, it's beholden upon me to not only think about how I've been wronged, but also to think about what I can do to avoid wronging others. In this sense, every individual scientist should adopt some of those advocacy ideas, which is that there are ways that we can behave which really remove us from this dichotomy that we have of there's bad people and good people, which I think is really why a lot of people resist the existence of harassment. Because, well, so-and-so is a good guy, it's not possible. Well, I'm sure he's good in some ways, but he's also harassed people. Likewise, I've experienced harassment and probably also been very careless and flawless with other people around me and not treated them the way they ought to have been treated. I would want to be told. So to that extent, when I imagine how a scientific culture would look different, it would be one in which we really get away from this idea that science is distinct from advocacy. Rather, the way that science is performed is necessarily sociological, it's necessarily political, and it would be a different kind of identity to be a scientist, ultimately. I mean, that's what I imagine long-term. What would success look like? And for me, what success would look like is to see many more women who are doing science and thriving. And not so many people. I think there's a sort of self-selection effect that happens for me when people know, when I talk about these things, that people want to tell me their horror stories. But I would like to go a year without hearing any horror stories. I would like not to know about them. I would like to hear a lot more people talk to me about how excited they are about their work and how wonderful exoplanet studies are and why it makes you feel the way. I mean, I want to hear that creativity, that innovation, that spirit. But what I hear a lot are horror stories. And I know I'm hearing the canaries at the bottom of the mind and people who are really suffering, which says something about the scientific communities themselves. That means we have not yet addressed. So that's what success would look like for me, that people would feel. The people I run into on a regular basis would feel excited, affirmed, would feel like this is a world that they own and that they are able to reach their highest expectations. That end with reporting too, I feel like I get asked all the time I think about this all the time and talk about this all the time with my editor is, I have had many, many people come forward to me and after the Marcy story and to what end do we publish a big investigation on what happened with one person and one institution? And we don't really have a good answer for that yet. I think we're still working through sort of what we thought for a while was if a story sheds light on a new facet of some sort of way that students could be wronged by university in a case like this, then we should pursue that story. But I do think there is a time, I worry sometimes that it can veer on voyeuristic fetishizing the horror story or something. And of course, those things are happening, but do we really need to prove that over and over again? I think that there needs to be like they've been saying, like moving on from that narrative and what other ways are these power structures leading to abuses? And yeah, I mean, this is very different, but I see it in a benign but very complicated and emotional way in just how people are talking about the march for science. They can't agree on there is still so much wrestling to be done in terms of how to talk about inclusivity. And it's not a whatever quote unquote sexy story, but it's very real like figuring out how to make that culture change happen. Are there places where you, are there things that are working in this space, either in terms of balancing gender bias or in terms of making science more intersectional to begin with? So I think one kind of thing that doesn't get covered much is the kinds of efforts that institutions are engaging in, whether you consider them to be completely successful or not. So I would like to see a great story on the National Science Foundation's advanced program. Advanced gives big institutional grants to universities to do just some of the kinds of things we're talking about, to do training of department heads for searches, to get people to deal with the under representation of native or minorities in their fields, to get them to think about parent and family friendly policies that can be put in place. We put in place one at Harvard called Research Enabling Grants. And if someone needs to spend a young, untunned person, needs to spend some extra time with a family member, typically a small child, they can actually apply for a grant that will allow them to get either two more hands in that lab that can do some of that work and free up some of this person's time. And it's gender blind. So it could be a male or female who could apply for it. Or they could get another piece of equipment that could automate some part of what they need to do. And so those grants were highly sought after. And basically, you had to say to your dean that you weren't going to use the time to write another paper. You were actually going to use the time if you, and this was directed primarily at men, that they weren't going to just grab the kid, throw it in daycare, and go and write another paper. No, you were actually going to spend time with the kid, because that's what you were getting the time for, OK, to be with your family. And so those kinds of new kind of rubrics, you know, childcare subsidies for graduate students, so that you can actually not have to be in this long period of time where you have to think about whether or not you can have a child and have a life as a productive scientist. So the advanced program, I think, has been extraordinarily successful as putting those kinds of practices and policies in place. And many universities who've gotten the top of those grants are doing some amazing things with that money. Like I said, I'd love to see people write more about that. OK, this seems like a good time to open it up to audience questions. If you have a question, first of all, we'd love to hear it. If you wouldn't mind going to one of the two microphones, if you wouldn't mind stating your name, that would be great. But of course, you don't have to. I'm Joanne Kamens. I'm the founder of our local AWIS chapter. And I would just like to say, I cannot believe this room is in out the door. This is an amazing panel. So I'm sad. I'm so happy to be here hearing you, but I'm super sad that there aren't 500 people in this room hearing this story. So that's my struggle. How do I get people to listen? So I speak to hundreds of postdocs a month. I do a lot of career seminars. I speak a lot about diversity and implicit bias. I do implicit bias training. People come talk to me. I have to say, the advanced grants are lovely, failing miserably. They're often administered by incompetent people. Unfortunately, we can talk about it later. The best ones, not all of them. Yeah, the best ones. We can talk about it later. Failing miserably from a diversity perspective, helping a little bit on a career perspective. I speak, again, I have a broad knowledge of many universities, so I'm sad about that as well. So what do we do? Because my problem is, the woman that comes up to me and says, I interviewed two postdoc labs, and I interviewed the people who were in the labs before like you told me, because that's what I tell them to do, get somebody who's left the lab over beer and get the real skinny on what it's like to be there, what that PI, are they a manager? And one of the people told me that the PI made a man on a paper, first author instead of a woman, because he needed it more, which, of course, is completely unethical, even though the woman should have been the first author, she chose that lab anyway and then had a miserable experience, because the PI was a misogynist and unethical, essentially. So how do we get the message out in such a way that the young scientists, I mean, again, we have to start at the bottom of the pipeline with the eight-year-olds and the four-year-olds, but how do we get to the postdocs and grad students and students and get them in this room, get them understanding that they can demand better behavior, better performance, better management? To me, that's a gap that we're having. They're totally at the mercy of this power structure. How do we get them voting with their feet, pick good PIs? Anyone? It seems like, I mean, I'm probably not the one to speak to this, but to me, that seems like an expectations issue, right? There's, seems like there is an expectation that that is something that they might encounter in any lab, right? That sort of par for the course in some way. Well, I think that's right, but I also think, I understand how easy it is to be pessimistic, and I can understand how easy it is to be pessimistic about something like the advanced program. But before we had that, we couldn't have any conversations. We couldn't have, no institution was going to put the kind of money that advanced has put in to deal with these specific kinds of issues. Whether they've been managed properly or not, but in the cases that I know of where it's good, it's good. And of course, there are places where it falls off the cliff and it's not good. But in the same, I'm gonna stand by this and say, we really can't, institutions are not gonna put up their own money. The promontory of NSF for these things was an important, a very important step. For the fact that we don't have an overflow room of postdocs and other folks in here, I think just speaks directly to the problem. Are you supposed to take time between five and seven on what day of the week is this? Is it Thursday? And be in here talking about this kind of stuff, really? Yeah. So I mean, my advisor, who I loved dearly, would have said, now physics is a very demanding mistress. I don't know if you have time to do that. But you sneak, you know, I was the kind of person who would sneak around and try to find the places where these conversations were happening. The fact that people still don't feel comfortable here at MIT is a very serious issue, because some of the things I've been talking about without naming MIT specifically have been going on here. There've been conversations about sexual harassment issues. There have been reports to the faculty on a regular basis about sexual harassment because when I was secretary of the faculty here, every year we talked about, at the springtime, we talked about what had happened in the year. So people were trying to put these things on the table, to shed light on them, but I have to say, again, we're talking about some deeply ingrained attitudes about what it means, and I think we've been, to bring in, not bring in, to open up science and technology to a broader range of people than had been in the past. And until we can really have that conversation about what exactly is happening, I think we're all gonna be sort of fighting, throwing, I feel like I'm throwing arrows at a big dinosaur. Sometimes it hits the right place, and they say, ouch, and something changes for a little while until they feel better. One of the ways I like to think about a response to your question, which kind of touched on, how do you engage different people at different stages? I say to myself, different medicine for different people. That's something I'll often repeat to myself. So I'll engage very differently with a graduate student who's approaching me, who's encountering harassment in real time, than I will with a department chair who I get the chance to engage, than I will with other postdocs. One thing that I uniformly think about is that there exist as many experiences in science as there do people, and there's also a huge mental health crisis within academia. So that means every individual's challenge who you're talking with is informed by their own history, their own trauma, and also their goals and aspirations are distinct. So one thing I'm almost always recommending to people is to make use of therapy. We kind of laugh about it. It's a huge problem in academia. It's sort of laughably huge, depression and anxiety and so on. Because when it comes to individually guiding people, that means getting into, to really guide even a single person, means getting into the real nitty gritty of that person's hopes and fears. That's something frankly, I'm not trained to do. To that end, I often find myself urging that person to identify a set of tools which will work for them, and that toolbox isn't the same for different people. So anyway, so that's one thing I basically always recommend. And then as far as whether people come to things, I just meet people where they're at. It's great people came to this. It's great MIT help. Yeah to you guys. Thanks. Go for it. So you were saying how you were the only female person of color on your floor and your lab. And I was, and how isolating that was. And so I'm just wondering if you could elaborate on that experience. You know, why was it isolating? What was that like? And what would the presence of another person of color, female or male, another person like you, you know, how would that have benefited you? How would that have helped? Well it would have helped because most people would have thought that not so many people I'd like to think would assume that I was a graduate student instead of assuming I was the secretary or the janitor. Because there were so few women of color around that most people didn't think I was a student. I didn't wanna wear my MIT t-shirt every single day for God's sake. You know, so I mean I think that the isolation is just built in when there were 50 students in a class, 50 doctoral students, and there are three African-Americans, two men. And no, there were four of us in our first year because there's two men and two women. And the second woman, she dropped out after, in January of our first year because she said, I am not gonna do this. This is too hard, I'm not gonna do it. So I'm like, please don't leave me. And so, I mean it's just the fact that nobody would ordinarily assume that I was a student. And that I was someone because of my race and gender was trying to do science. So that would have made a significant difference if I had been in an institution where people were actually affirming my choices and affirming my presence. And so I'm not saying, I really don't want to leave the impression that it was an actively hostile place for me. I'm just talking about having to come to terms with that experience. That I wasn't going to, that I could almost guarantee that at least once a week somebody thought I was the gender. And at some point you just say, okay. And sometimes I'd say, no, I guess I forgot that garbage can today. What can I tell you? You just play it off. I mean, you can't spend your life dealing with that. I mean, because I was here to do something else. So that's something you have to learn. How you want, days you want to fight, days you don't want to fight, let it go. And certainly part of what I had to do was educate my colleagues and my teachers and my mentors. And I'm just thinking about Millie Dresselhouse recently passing away. She for a while had an office on the floor that I was, that I was on in building 13. And you know, Millie really was a very actively, openly encouraging all students to come to the lunchtime meetings that they used to have. And so that was a place that was open and everybody felt really welcomed. I mean, there's a lot more I could say about my experience, but that's just one, I mean, her doing that just made me feel less isolated. Just by opening up her lunchtime session for us, so. My question is about how to deal with situations where even a really low bar of expectation isn't fulfilled by people in power. My specific example is from MIT, which I believe is correct, but I'm sure it's worse than other places, which is the harassment training you do online, which is this tiny, laughably small questionnaire, training thing you have to do online in the privacy of your own office. And I don't think MIT has been successful in getting the established staff members to just do this 10 minute thing. And I've talked to some of the people at Title IX and they said incoming staff, they do it as part of their registration, but they can't convince the established staff and professors, the ones that are most likely to be in a position of power and commit harassment, they can't get them to do it. And so, other than just waiting until they retire, disappear somehow, which will take a long time. I was wondering if you have a fast approach that isn't shaming, although I'm open to that. I vote for shaming, I vote for organizing. I vote for organizing. I really do think it matters that if a lot of things that people have tried to do around here for a long time are now sort of being done in perfunctory and in ways that are not actually helpful, then I think it's just time to start talking about it. I am a firm believer in talking about it, organizing people. I mean, there's some safety in numbers. There's some safety in getting other people together and making a case and making that case, loudly and visibly, I truly support that because I think your silence won't protect you. It just won't. I think in the wake of the Marcy case, there was a huge shakeup in the Berkeley Astor Department. At some point, they stopped answering my phone calls, but they definitely, there was an overhaul, I think, at a university level or a UC-wide level of what harassment training is required. I'm not sure sort of what exactly changed about it, but I think there is a space for shaming in that it led the UC to be, to take a good hard look at itself, and I would hope that sort of ripples outwards. I think, like you mentioned, the professional groups stepping forward and having that as a central part of conferences, you know, just sort of loud and clear saying things that before were sort of assumed, but I think that problem of it still being sort of viewed as an inconvenience is speaks to what's going on here. I've definitely heard of other places, so not any place I've ever been, but places that I've visited or any place I've ever worked or been a student. But I have heard of places where there's just like an equity officer who visits every department. So that has to happen. That equity officer is at the highest levels of the university. They have to meet with the chair or they have to meet with the faculty and then there's a description of like anti-bias training. So people have to be physically present in the room or else you're not gonna, that person's not gonna sign off on it. Now that's at places where they seem to take equity more seriously. But it's an example that I thought of in my mind for at least that's something where you would be required to be physically present in a room. At the end of the day, you can't make somebody listen and you can't make them internalize an idea just because you'd like them to and it's the right thing to do. But you can make people be physically present or you can make people take an online questionnaire. I thought we had to do that just to get use of our email address or something. I forget. I will say that Berkeley had, I forget the exact name of the title, but the former chair of the Berkeley Astronomy Department later became the head of the Office for Diversity and Inclusion at Berkeley. Vice Chancellor of Diversity and Inclusion, Gabor Basri. And that was before all of this came out. He was one of the people who sort of shielded him and viewed him as a friend and colleague. I forget the exact quote of when the allegations first came out, but it was something to the extent of let us all feel sorry for him at this time. Personal biases can exist even when those positions exist within. That's where you need the shaming. Sure, yeah. I mean, one of the things about bias, sort of the water torture, I guess you said it's not over. You deal with it every day, but it's the little things. It's the water torture of implicit bias and harassment and comments and language. And so one of the things that have been shown just scientifically is what we're scientists, is that if you don't do it all the time, people forget. So when you're recruiting, you have a recruiting committee that's like, they take implicit bias training and then they recruit, that year they do better. And then next year, when there's some turnover in the committee, they slide back into their old ways. So I think the five minute training that you take is not enough. I think, well, I do believe in celebrating the positive stories as well. And I really appreciate that's what AWS is about, that giving visibility for women. That's what yesterday was about. Twitter was so fun yesterday, right? But I think we do have to have required mandatory in the room reminders more than once a year. More than just a constant sort of required awareness, heightening to make, you can't change people like you say, but if we don't do something constantly and regularly that's required and there's meat behind it, you don't get your email address. You don't get any money. You don't get your paycheck. Cause if there's no meat behind it, nothing will happen, right? So I think it's that constant steady level of reminder that we have to get to. One thing I can say about the sexual harassment training in literally every job where I've had to do some sort of sexual harassment training in order to onboard is that these programs, especially when they're in online formats, when they're very short, really lack any sort of nuance. So there's a lot of like, don't touch that, but not a lot of like anything that's a shade of gray or I mean so much in terms of gender bias is just places where you don't know if the motivations, why somebody is saying something or doing something. And so I have never been through any sort of sexual harassment training that even remotely comes close to the level of nuance that is actually present in any of these situations. And so it would be really great, MIT as well as everywhere else on the planet. Yeah, could address what sexual harassment and what gender bias actually feels like. I feel like none of these programs ever talk about what it actually feels like. That's why it's such a low bar and that's why it's even worse that they wouldn't do this fun thing. Yeah, yeah, true. This actually dovetails pretty nicely. By the way, I never had to do a sexual harassment training even though I'm staffed at MIT, so confused about that, but. They're gonna teach you, don't touch that. Yeah. Yeah, be ready for it. I'll finally know when not to touch, but so Sarah, you mentioned guilt at some point and I'm not sure if this is exactly what you meant and I'm curious to hear that, but one of the things I really would have liked to know in my twenties is that if someone is in a professional relationship with me and has professional power over me that it's not my fault if I'm sexually harassed even if I was wearing something sexy or if I went along with certain things because I didn't know how to say no to them. And so I'm curious what your thoughts are on the value of teaching students or women in science to recognize when something inappropriate happens because that needs to happen before they can even make use of any institutional structures to report it. But I'm also curious what you make of it because one part of me feels like this might be an additional form of victim blaming like it's again putting the onus on women to identify these things rather than teaching the men not to sexually harass. Yeah, your question is a complicated one. To first speak to the part about guilt, I've advised other young women who've either chosen to report or not report just to kind of help them sort through their set of complicated feelings. There's often a few things that I actually recommend. One is that I think guilt is present in every single story. So it is an illusion that there exists some level of cruelty where and the thing that happened is so heinous that that person will be like it clearly wasn't my fault. I think there exists no such thing which is why I've said to many people the guilt that you feel is part of this process it's inextricable from it is that you wonder whether you're complicit. That's a moving goalpost that there ever could be anything bad enough that you wouldn't feel guilt. For that reason, it's a illusory to say, well, you know, if it had been this bad maybe then I should report. There is no such thing as this bad then you would feel okay about it. The other thing that I say is I often use this tool myself. I'll think to myself, what happened to Sarah? It's not Sarah in this story. It's another young woman that I know and I really admire. Well, does she deserve justice? Because I'll often think to myself, maybe I did this or that. Perhaps I didn't set clear boundaries like I should have as a 20 year old as an undergraduate interacting with some professor. It seems very silly to say that out loud but I really would have that feeling. But when it was someone else who I knew and admired well I would say to myself, of course she deserves justice. She wouldn't be treated like that. It was so clear. The scales really fell from my eyes. That's something else that I use. And then I often like to when I'm advising people about whether, when they're thinking like was this harassment or whatever. There's a tremendous amount of, it's not my role to forgive but I do say like there's no right way to behave in that situation. There was no right way to behave and there was no wrong way to behave. You froze because you were overwhelmed and you didn't know how to behave. And so that's an okay response. Like part of the, specifically when I mentioned guilt around the Marcy thing was because he also materially helped me in my career. So it wasn't a clear cut story of uniform harm. He helped me too. So I grappled with that feeling. Well, shouldn't a person forgive? Because there is that kind of, especially in universities, well it wasn't that bad. We'll just look the other way, whatever. And I thought to myself, well firstly, even if a person apologizes or something that doesn't mean the wrongdoing never occurred. It did occur, regardless of how I behaved, that's inarguable, that person shouldn't have behaved that way. And furthermore, there's no indication that that behavior will stop. And so I use that too. I often use them. I try to view other women with a clarity. I find very hard to view myself and whether they're deserving of justice and good behavior. I'll think to myself, what, who was it that I needed in that situation? I'm gonna be that person. So I guess I'm sharing sort of a complicated set of feelings like in response to your question because I feel like it's a really complicated situation. But I do feel like budging that guilt for me often requires like thinking about it in specific ways. Like otherwise I will feel a real overwhelm which I think is common. Sorry, I have a question. I have a question. Me or yeah. Sarah, what do you think you would have needed most as you know, when you were Sarah 20? I received it. I mean, that's why I'm here today because so the pattern of harassment that I was experiencing was escalating to the point of like physical contact. So I remember talking with a friend in the department and in our, you know, a very junior way we were trying to figure out how I should approach him and make the situation stop. And we needed letters from him, letters of recommendation in order to have any chance of achieving our ultimate dream of becoming astronomers. So I remember saying to her, even if I approach him and it goes really badly, you should still ask for that letter. There was like this calculus that we had of like, even if I don't make it, maybe you'll go incrementally forward. But I never had to have that hard conversation with him. His behavior miraculously stopped. It seemed like magic to me at the time. Now I know it was because he was confronted independently by a graduate student for harassment of another undergraduate altogether. So he was confronted by a more senior person. And so he wrote me letters. He ought to have written me great letters. I was a great student and I went on to achieve success. I don't know what would have happened if that individual who was in the Buzzfeed piece, you know, if Ruth hadn't helped me in that situation. I received that, you know. I didn't, it didn't mean that I didn't experience any harassment but I did get a chance to go forward and that was because an older person intervened. Yeah. Trapped in again with Complainant 4, right? I'm curious sort of in the wake of becoming one of the few like faces of this for in science in particular. And you've taken on so much in terms of speaking about this, being at panels like this. I saw you on CNN, I feel like one. That did happen. How, and then I'm sure privately, I'm sure you, your inbox, and my inbox after writing these stories is full. I'm sure your inbox is in a much more real way. Like, you know, do you have women coming, you must have women coming to you asking for help all the time. Like how do you deal with that and also be doing your post-doc and. Yeah. Oh. Sorry. I don't know what to do with that. Sorry, I reminded you about your inbox. No, no. A major way that I've dealt with this entire situation is with therapy myself, you know. So that is a place where I have the opportunity to engage with a person who is trained in how people process trauma, you know, and to help me process it myself and also to help me develop this set of skills. Like I thought very carefully about whether I even wanted to become a complainant and then whether I wanted to use my real name and so on. I thought very carefully about those things ahead of time. And so I made those choices mindfully based on the emotional resources I had available at that time. And one piece of my toolbox as a scientist is that I adapt my responses to things based on the availability of those resources. You know, so on a given day, sometimes I will respond to people. You know, like that young woman who was like, I feel like I have imposter syndrome but about like harassment. I feel like it wasn't bad enough or whatever. But then I'll think like, okay, I have the resources today to respond. Other days I'll say you should go to Jackie Spears office, you know, like because that particular congresswoman now is like I'm collecting all of these stories, I can help you, I have resources. Other days I'll just say right to this person. You know, other days I won't respond. And so I try to adapt my response based on what I have available. And I try to find a balance. Now that's a work in progress. But I'm hopeful about it. I think it's sustainable. Which was a major piece of what I ultimately hoped to achieve is that I would stay in science. So as a partially as a response to all these surfacing harassment cases in particular and gender inequity studies and science in general, there's been a formation of a number of student advocacy groups geared towards women. And I was wondering what you guys view as like the best role of those groups kind of in helping with these things. Well, I think I said earlier, I think the role of those groups are to keep the issue front and center for people to deal with. And not just accept that if people say, well, we have this implicit bias training, if the training's not doing anything, then say it's not doing anything. If people aren't really finding the atmosphere and environment to be improving, say it's not improving. And continue to push for the kind of change that needs to happen. I think that's kind of part of your job for these groups and to have the institutions be accountable to you. I think there exist as many possible roles within groups as there are people in that group. So I've borne witness to groups of women in scientific spaces that are there just like simply out of a sense of play. They're there to spend time with one another. I've been parts of other groups in which it's much more explicit the expectations of different group members. Okay, what are we gonna do this week? Well, it's been delegated that so and so we'll pick whatever resistance task we're gonna do this week. And then it's sort of more sustainable that way. It's like activism, work is more sustainable that way because you don't feel so isolated and you don't feel overwhelmed by a feeling that you have to do everything at once. Rather, it's been diffused to a group who are doing it together. I've also seen groups that operate frankly as like group therapy. There's some books written about that actually by women scientists who join in groups and then part of the function of that group is to just have a space where you can give voice to the things that are troubling you the most. And then there are groups where it's like you are in a group and one of the things you do is mentor younger women. I think that there can exist so many helpful models and it ought to vary, dependent on what the different members of the group have to give and also what it is that they are struggling with most. And surely that varies from campus to campus. The Women in Astronomy blog was really crucial to bring this forward. Both privately, on the blog itself, people sort of anonymously discussing the problem for a while and then eventually gathering all the forces together in order to come forward publicly and then there were so many people who were sort of shepherding that process and I think that to me was really a shining example of how a group like that can decide to act on something. Yeah. All right, Bertrand from MIT. And I want to say first of all that I know Sarah for her scientific contributions and they are so impressive. Thank you. Yay. Thank you. Thank you very much. And secondly, the kind of advocacy that's being given here is exactly what all scientists should aspire to. So I'm glad that this is being recorded because I'm hoping we can use it to replace one of those five minutes. Check the box surveys. I wanted to ask though about the prospects for interventions by scientific societies. So I think of, for example, the American Astronomical Society was really quite vocal and active through this in its leadership in getting a code of conduct for its meetings and now that code of conduct concept has spread to most scientific societies but there are many more steps that could be taken. There are things like the Vanderbilt and earlier the Baltimore Charter in astronomy. So what do the panelists think the role of professional societies could be in trying to short-circuit some of the issues that the universities are not so successfully dealing with? So I think, I mean, the AAAS meeting was just happened a few weeks ago and so I think that, again, the sort of open secret of these kinds of issues I think just simply has to be addressed and the leadership are the people who can do it. So having panels at AAAS, having people actually talk about it, having people maybe talk about what happens at some of those parties at AAAS and when conferences happen, that's another place of venue where some code of conduct conversation needs to happen. But I think that, to me, it's about exercising leadership really and truly and I think it's been tremendous, for example, with the American Physical Society that people actually publishing the data every year about not just conduct specifically, but also on issues of diversity. I mean, it used to be, you could call and beg and plead and nobody would ever tell you anything about the numbers. Now you can actually go and they give you a PDF and they're happy for you to have it. I mean, that's a big deal, that's a big difference but I think the code of conduct conversations are just starting and we just have, and it's not gonna be easy and I think that's something else that I think Sarah is really showing us here. I look at this from a vantage point of 20 years between here and Harvard and I know the kinds of things from Nancy Hopkins and Lottie Bailin and all those folks who worked on Women in Science Report and MIT and the Gender in Science Report and all kinds of minority reports and how long we've been sort of pushing this ball along and some days it feels like, and then, you know, talented young women are still here in 2017 telling stories that I just find amazing. So I just think that we are making just, we've only been doing incremental changes. It's time for a lot bigger push and I want the science journalist to help us make that push. No, I think really important, there's men in this room. So a lot of the things I do through AWS are just women and that's great and that's great for the therapy aspect every other Thursday. All in Daniel, Lottie Bailin was our first cameos speaker ever with this chapter, Millie was the second. So I mean, and that was all women, you know. So that's really, really important for solidarity and the therapy part and the advocacy part but when it comes to real advocacy and making change you've got to have men in the room. And so I think professional societies are the place where there are a lot of men and where that's where the conversation can start because not that many men come to our AWS meetings. I think one thing that came up for me after the first two stories came after Mercy and Ott was people were like, what's wrong with astronomy? Like, there must be astronomers like really messed up and I was like, no, there's just a group of people within astronomy who are like really deciding to like think about this stuff and talk about it really openly and are willing to like inconvenience their elders, and I had written a story about the Mauna Kea putting the telescope on this mountain in Hawaii. It was a similar group of people who were willing to question whether the people in Hawaii wanted this new giant telescope to be built on a mountain. They considered sacred and what role science had in engaging with indigenous communities and it's, I think that was, I think a committee, a subcommittee of, do you remember? I remember there was like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's committees within astronomy for like on the status of minorities and the status of women. It could be some group within that. Yeah. So I mean, I think that role of sort of having groups like that within bigger societies trying to shed light on stuff works. One major suggestion or concrete suggestion that I have for a professional society or for some scientific group is about the question of like early reporting. So like a major problem, I think, is oftentimes harassment of an individual or perhaps it's like a pattern is allowed to escalate to the point where truly so many people have been harmed including that individual, him or herself, to a point where perhaps they can't even work around students anymore, right? Like it's long past the point of like incremental change. So the question is, well, then how do you encourage early reporting? So there exists software to do this like Callisto is one example. So that is a type of software in which you would make an anonymous report about something that occurs and that is sealed. Now there's an escrow on those. So if a particular individual is harassing many people, let's say at a double S meeting and that probably would be the case if it's happening one time, it's probably happened more than once. Then at that point, the people who were operating that software would become aware of the problem and then have a hint about how to proceed. So that's something which is very tricky to do because it would have to be implemented at every university, for example. And then how would you end up reporting if it does happen at a conference which is a major place where harassment occurs? So that's one example because there's a lot of talk of like, well, who would host such a thing? Literally, what would the server look like? Well, who would pay for it and things like that? So that's one role I think that professional societies could do is like setting an example of here's how we're going to demonstrate that we want to get on the ball. Like we want to find out where harassment is occurring within our meetings and whether we can kind of prevent escalation of it before we lose the younger minds and before we lose our leaders in the field who are behaving very badly. So anyway, so that's a hope I have, a fond hope. And I think that also requires institutional transparency which we haven't had up to this point. I mean, the Office of Civil Rights has numbers on every university's sexual assault reports now. We don't have that level of transparency for faculty and it's very hard to get that information about faculty. Berkeley to this day has never fired a tenured faculty member and there are lots of issues in that that I think haven't yet been grappled with. First, thank you all again. This has been a very powerful panel and a lot of people do watch them online. So this hopefully will reach more people. I have two questions. One is sort of touching off what you just said, the fact that Berkeley like a lot of institutions has never fired a tenured faculty. And the question is the extent to which the tenure system as it exists today is part of this problem and contributes to the problem and specifically the lack of accountability in the tenure system. And my second question is we've been talking primarily about the harassment of women by heterosexual men. And I just noticed that we have not brought up the harassment of men of any sexuality. And to the extent that an issue with every type of harassment for the harasser is shame and guilt, is there any, do you have any information or any sense of how that might be an issue among men who are harassed? On the tenure issue, this came up really explicitly in the Kate's case at the University of Washington because the way I found out about the case was he had been investigated. And as part of being investigated for sexual harassment, he had been put on home assignment. He was not allowed to come into his very large microbiology lab at the University of Washington. And so he actually sued the university in court, which made his legal case, I mean, it was public. I pulled up his case on Pacer. And he sued on the basis that him not being able to access his lab violated his tenure. And that, I felt, was making very explicit the claim of tenure should protect despite behavioral issues like this, that it isn't, from my understanding, it isn't factored in strongly enough. Marcy was made by an automatic feature of the University of California system. Marcy was made an emeritus after he resigned due to this sexual harassment issue. So he's an emeritus professor at Berkeley now. He can't teach, but entitled he is. And I think there needs to be, I think, at a higher institutional level a rethinking of some of these things. It didn't come out that Berkeley had never fired a tenured professor until we pushed on the emeritus issue. And they said that they actually couldn't find anything. One professor had been fired during the McCarthy era. He had then been rehired. And there's a building named after him. So yeah. But obviously, tenure is also incredibly important. So those are really sticky issues. Yeah, I think tenure is really, really complex. And I think it's, and I think because of certainly for private universities that this is just an area that's kept incredibly close. But I will say this. People, for people who have done some egregious things, including sexual harassment, it's not that people don't get punished. People do get punished. But I think what might be needed more is an awareness across the faculty that you can get punished. Tenured does not protect you from everything that can happen to you in your life as a faculty member. And so as I said before, I was a vice provost at Harvard. I know more about bad behavior than I wish I did know about it. But it's very, very difficult. It's very complicated. I think the AAUP is the one place that takes up these issues in a serious way that's both about protecting individuals, but also forcing institutions to be more accountable. I'm not sure I would say more transparency about those punishments is actually what's needed. And that's because you just can't talk about some of the things. You just can't talk about them, what's happening. But I can truly say, people do get punished. People do get punished. Perhaps not enough, I can't say, but they do get punished. I mean, another issue that's been raised is if someone leaves an institution, should that follow them as they try to get a job elsewhere? And is that raises questions of, is rehabilitation possible? How much should they be punished? And that came up in the Jason Lee case, went to Princeton, and it was questionable what was known, but some stuff was known. And I think I know that obviously transparency raises a lot of issues around privacy. But I do think there needs to be greater transparency in terms of a handoff and in terms of thinking about how to, I think that rehabilitation question is very valid, but you're not going to be able to have that conversation unless you know what baggage the person is bringing along with them. Yeah. Oh. I was down to 80 yet. So the discrimination and the bullying is now just starting. So there are about a decade behind the women's movement as far as diversity, because it's just been such an easy-core statement of being a woman if you could believe it. So yeah, it's just hard to believe since we're talking about all these horrible things. But the data are starting to be clear. Yep, they are, I think I know the society. They are. So I guess we can't say the extent of the problem we have, but hopefully soon. And there are a lot of now very public organizations or the groups that we're talking about and organizing in many of the professional societies and universities that are starting to be able to talk about it more openly. So I think, say, soon, in the next probably a few years, you'll be able to see data. But there aren't any data, but look, there's not. Yeah, I mean, people are becoming more aware. And I would say that. I don't mean to be polyandish about any of this. It's incredibly complicated. But there are people working very hard on that and people coming forward, which is a good thing. And even if people pay lip service by just, you know, rambling off the alphabet, at least they rattle off the alphabet a little bit more and know that that needs to get folded in. So I'm hopeful about that. I think there's an increasing exposure. How does that affect the center, there's an organizing group and that's not the only group that they're helping to collaborate on the groups. And I'm starting to see about the Sunday side about that. Because that's been a big problem. See, so I think, you know, one last thing I want to say about institutional, and it speaks also to Ed's questions about professional organizations. You know, I think it really needs to speak up about all of this a lot more forcefully. It's the academies. The academies need to talk about this. The academies have published endless reports on underrepresentation of native born minorities. They've published the last, what was the last one on women beyond bias and barriers. You know, nobody reads that stuff. But they do, isn't it a good report? I bought 10 copies for my colleagues and I think they're door stops. But when the academies speak, people do actually listen. And it's something that provosts and academic officers and departments, it has that big a force that people do know they need to pay attention to it. I think that if the academies were to be very, very forceful about the things we've been talking about this evening would make a, would be a huge deal. I think Donna Shilano for beyond bias and barriers really tried but we pushed a lot of her. And you need to be, you really need to do this on CNN. You need to do this. This needs to be not something that's just gonna be put aside in the pile of national academy reports. It needs to be understood as a critical issue, urgent critical issue for the scientific community in the U.S. to deal with. And I think it's true for everything we've talked about. It would be great if they talked about it. One question I have is, I mean a part of gender equity in science is also having female scientists represented to the same degree that men are. I know, I actually read this morning that Ed Young is a very prominent science journalist, measures how many female sources he interviews as opposed to men. From a news perspective, do you see any of that changing? I mean I've been a freelance journalist for almost a decade. I've never had a single editor ever ask me anything along those lines. For somebody that's on staff, I mean do you see, are there changes in terms of having better representation? I mean I think, yeah Ed started doing that. I think after realizing how much stuff had been skewed in his pieces, and that's awesome. He brought it up to I think 50%, maybe even more. My editor, I'm very lucky to work for Virginia Hughes who kind of questions things at every turn and always urges me to not go to the one person who's always quoted, the one biologist who's always quoted, and I think Twitter is very useful for that. It's not entirely an answer because there are obviously some people like it and some people don't, but in terms of sort of younger, different voices coming forward and we're very aware of that and try to do the best we can in stories too. How about internally in terms of promoting science than female scientists? Are there changes from within institutions in order to put female scientists more into the spotlight? I think so, I mean it's uneven, it's complicated, but I mean it started when people were being challenged about if you have a monthly colloquia, how many times do you have women scientists lead those colloquia? Speak of those colloquia, I mean really pushing people to say we want to see the top women in the field at these kinds of gatherings that are so much a part of the culture that expresses the values of the culture. I mean we used to say around here we couldn't wait till we saw a woman give the physics colloquium wearing a T-shirt and jeans because that had never happened. The women all seemed to have to dress up and be something different and then the first time somebody gave a talking T-shirt and jeans, you'd think the world had just slipped over or something. But yeah, I think sort of making more visible prizes when women win those prizes. Those kinds of things, those are the kinds of symbolic things that help or letting a woman be a spokesperson on a major issue is also a big thing. Listen, there are, this is coming at the time when Hidden Figures has just been this great movie nominated for Academy Award. I mean, up until this movie, probably one of the most prominent African American women scientists was Uhuru. I mean, playing a scientist on Star Trek that more people knew about than they know about real living women scientists. So, I mean this is completely transformative to have these highly skilled and incredible actresses portray black women scientists. My God. So, that means that this kind of, that kind of active gestures to tell the stories of women and women to tell their own stories actually has force and meaning and can make the world seem different. All right, if nobody else has any questions then hey, thank you guys for coming. Thank you.