 So if you could kindly take a seat you can change seats if you like Okay well we'd like to begin first plenary which is followed by breakout sessions is on creating a safe workplace in your RU title 9 and sexual harassment and Rebecca Hacker my colleague and Lisa Rome you know from NSF have kindly agreed to provide us some guidance and information on this difficult topic thank you so I just want to introduce this topic and then Rebecca is going to take over NSF and all of all of us have been wrestling with these issues lately and they're particularly important for the geo sciences NSF does expect your institutions to comply with title 9 and we we want to make sure that our RU's are really safe places and safe and inclusive we would like to prevent any problems from happening so that is our goal and we also you know there is a is something that happens we want to be very clear what steps need to be taken so when you find your RU these students are coming in from all over the place they don't know anyone there they have no support network when they arrive so you need to create that for them you need to be very clear about setting policies you need to provide training for them and for their mentors doesn't have to be extensive but they need to know who to go to if there's a problem they need to know that you set high expectations and that you would very much like this not to happen anything anything bad not to happen no no harassment of any sort you need to appoint a person who can help them who will be there all the time not on vacation when they need them and you need to post signs around with policies that are very clear and say you know if you have a problem this is and we expect this kind of behavior and you need to follow up quickly if there are complaints so those are the things that NSF expects for you to be doing and your RU's and I want to give you an example because I was just on a site visit in Alaska to Tulik Lake and I thought they did a super job I don't know if this is the best example but it seemed to be a very good example so I'm going to talk about it before you go to Tulik Lake they have people coming from all over the world to Tulik you have to get on their website and you go to their harassment training and you go through the training and you sign that you finished and then you have to take a little quiz and not only do you have to take the quiz you have to get a hundred percent on the quiz or you don't get to go so you can't set foot on their field site before you go through this and so it just makes it really clear that they're serious and you get there and their signs everywhere and you know they introduce you they have a little orientation session they introduce you to the person to talk to if you've got a problem and they also had one unique feature that I hadn't seen anywhere else and it was the one ask rule you can ask someone for a date once and if they don't agree you can't ask them anymore so I thought that was pretty pretty clever so I you know it's just an example perhaps a way you might want to think about approaching it it was very it was just very clear that they want to prevent this kind of thing so and now I'm going to turn it over to Rebecca well thank you I think we started talking about this topic in the realm of how are we preparing our mentors and students and internships about two years ago when a couple of studies that I'll point to in a minute came out and they were pretty alarming and I opening and actually Lisa I think called me and said what are you doing about this okay let me organize this and so we had conversations in our office and sadly enough we all had examples out of our own careers that we had encountered sexual harassment or gender biased treatment through our careers and two different levels to different degrees but it was I think a good conversation to have and to open up about these things and to say this is not uncommon and it's really easy to point to other disciplines or to say oh they have a real problem but it's important I think for all of us to own this and so I want to talk about a couple of things that I've learned over the last couple of months things that are going on in the geosciences overall and I will also hopefully be able to point you to a couple resources because I don't want to make this too depressing right after lunch telling you all the horrible things that are happening I kind of want to end with and here's some resources and here's something we can all do so if you've been on Facebook or read the news at all over the last year or two you've probably noticed that we had an increased attention to this topic in STEM overall and a couple really public scandals and issues that happen so here a couple news clips we had articles like many women scientists actually harass during field work things got spotlighted even in Congress we had a Caltech professor suspended for harassment and many other issues and I know that the poor astronomy community kind of got a bad rap the last year but I think it was more a testimony towards people starting to talk about it and being vocal about it versus oh it's only happening in astronomy I think that's the wrong conclusion to take out of this data set I think we need to see it as this is happening all over STEM the good news part of the story is that the geosciences is now very active on this topic so in many ways driven by the earth women science network if you're familiar with it and then many societies and professional societies have come together to actually talk about this and try to address it so just last week the week before I was in DC at a workshop put together by the AGU funded by the NSF many different societies there to take a stance and to start getting organized around this and what was really interesting was in addition to an overall call and saying this is not okay and we need to change this as a community there were clear calls for including sexual misconduct and harassment as part of scientific misconduct factors which then would mean that an institution could get suspended for federal funding if this happened on your campus or in your institution and there was a call for that everybody in the room said funding agencies might need to take that step and be pretty clear about this and when I shared this when I came back home and I shared it with a couple administrators that that's when they all perked up before it's always a oh yeah this is really bad we need to deal with this but suddenly when it's about money people start listening so I think the calls are pretty clear and I think all of us as a community need to watch this so why is this important for us Lisa already mentioned this we all have to comply with title nine and we need to make sure that our students are safe and I'm not going to read you all the legalese you will have these slides available later to you so what can we do how can we actually move towards positive change in our community and Lisa mentioned that already but I think the key piece here is prevention I don't want to give you a lot of lectures of what to do I mean we'll talk about this but ideally we don't want to talk about what to do when your student or one of your mentors or staffers has been harassed or assaulted or discriminated against ideally we talk about prevention so I am asking that we all include this in our mentor training I'm not sure what type of mentor training you currently do are you bringing them all together as a group before this summer do you have individual conversations but I do believe that this needs to be addressed and you can make your mentors your allies in taking care of your students you're not accusing your mentors oh don't mistreat my students you say I know you care that's why you signed up as a mentor please make this one of the things you watch out for I think we need to be very explicit up front what we consider professional conduct what is our code of conduct and explain that in the first week when we start our programs when the students arrive and share it with them as well we also want to be very clear what are our lines of communication what do you do if you're uncomfortable who should you talk to and I like Lisa's idea a lot I stole this and added it here to have one ombuds person on campus if this is you you have to decide if as the PI you are the best person they should come to or maybe it's someone less scary I know you don't consider yourself scary but you are in a position of authority and so you might want to have one more person that a student can come to and talk to and I think and this is really important any of you who have kids or dogs for that matter know this if there is a misconduct and you don't address it it will happen again so you need to nip it and you need it early and I want to give you an example not necessarily about sexual harassment that happened in my program but I went hiking the first weekend with a couple of students and we were all goofing around we were just getting to know each other and it was really loud and up in the mountains here and somebody shouted out oh my god that's so gay and I took a deep breath and I told around and I said not okay not in my RU we're keeping the language respectful clean this was not okay what you said this is exactly a type of stuff we don't want to slip into and all the students looked at me like oh my god did I do something wrong and so we had a conversation about how we even need to keep our language non aggressive to prevent even anything else does that make sense so you can start this really early nipping little issues before they become bigger and bigger and I think this is kind of what I really wanted to point to instead of just working and doing the minimum required by law so you check off your title nine requirements try to create a good environment for everybody that everybody feels safe that everybody is comfortable and the good news is that we have a breakout session that Carolyn Brinkworth here from NCAR will lead later today I think after this if you're curious about how to create this environment so the issues don't even come up please go to that session as someone who's worked in the field a lot this is something dear to my heart and I think it applies to many of our RU's in some shape or form field work is a whole different beast than being in the lab and we need to be especially aware of this I think power structures whatever they are in science between PIs and who's the leader of a camp and what's going on that's kind of even kind of exacerbated in the field you have a lot of peer culture and pressures going on in a field site and we all are aware of the alcohol in field work long hours people are stressed out and if we're honest none of us make really good decisions when we're tired or drunk so I think this applies to field work we have found and research kind of proves that that off-campus behavior that includes field work conferences travel is often worse than your normal behavior back in your office where you are maybe more you think you're more watched more than in field work we also have a lack of communication in the field of your student might be isolated really far out there you might not even be with your student in the field in my field we go storm chasing but storm chasing that we do a lot of research following storms and so I might not be all the time with my students I need to trust that they can call me and if something happened and that often isn't difficult it's difficult but we also need to see that these field experience field camp is so exciting for a student they don't want to be sent home if they report something going on that should not be the response and it should be made clear up front that that is not the consequence that will happen to them correct but if you never explicitly say that at the beginning of the summer what the consequence would be if they came to you and reported something then the student might just prefer to or choose not to say anything because they really want to stay in camp and I just wanted to point you to one study if you don't believe me you can read the reports so in 2014 we had a very good paper come out by an anthropologist named Clancy and she surveyed people doing field work and the data was so shocking where it came out that 64% of people working in the field over a certain period of time had experienced sexual harassment noticed unwise comments jokes that type of behavior but 20% had personally experienced sexual assault and more than and this is really where I think it's relevant to our use more than 90% of women and 70% of men who had been assaulted or harassed where student postdocs or employees of lower rank why because harassment is often like most things not about sex it's about power and so of course the people with the least power in a department or in a field camp are the most vulnerable so I think our responsibility as PIs is to make sure that we protect our students from that and so what do we need to do we had a lot of discussions at the last workshop about this and so a couple of the proposals where that harassment needs to be part of a safe environment certificate I know some of you maybe who work on a shipboard or out in campaigns know this that you have to certify that people know that they need to wear a harness when they climb up a tower right but this potentially harassment prevention could become part of that safe and working environment that's a hard one to propose but you might want to consider a no alcohol policy some grad schools now bringing this in for their social events they're saying no we're not going to happy hour anymore we're trying to find to do something else I know most federally funded shipboard activities technically should be dry um are we doing that all the time are we for example in my r u or in my internship you will not find alcohol at all and you will never find me drinking even a glass of wine in the presence of students it's just something I don't do I think we need to stress over and over the role of the PI and mentors in prevention and really putting the responsibility what clancy found in her study is that the field experiences that were the safest where where the PI took upon themselves to set the tone and the code of conduct when the PI or the leader said this is not acceptable this is what's happening actually everybody else kind of fell in line when you silently assume everything will be fine then people kind of make their own decisions how far they can go and again we need very clear instructions not just in your main r u site but if you go out in the field and say what to do if something happened and I want to conclude kind of with some resources the AGU put together a phenomenal website it's harassment.agu.org that I encourage you to check out a lot of the news the press releases resources studies it's all linked from this website and this is a collective effort so if you have other resources you would love to share please let the AGU know and I encourage you to check this out in addition and that's smaller but maybe helpful you maybe saw this handout on your tables we will provide if you find this useful we are providing this to you in electronic form this is something that the UK lawyers helped us put together a couple years ago for our internships and we are handing this out to both mentors and students not just dry we're not just handing them a paper there's a whole one hour training around any type of harassment prevention not so sexual or gender based but racial etc and then we talk about these legalese a little bit and we try to make it accessible we're not trying to make it sound too lawyer talk but we talk through this and so everybody who's involved in our internship gets this so if you don't have something like this already from your own university and institution see if you want to use something like that and again we'll make it available electronically to you so you can easily adapt it and maybe check with your institution's policies and kind of update it or adapt it in a way that it fits your needs that's gonna work i want to stop and i think we have about five minutes if somebody would like to share something here and then again pointing out to the breakout session for like a deeper discussion after this hi thank you very much i am an astronomer and in fact i am on the council of the american astronomical society all three of those headlines in the middle there and four out of the five headlines that rebecca showed earlier are all in the field of astronomy we are very very much aware of this and in a sense i want to call this out for a couple reasons first of all all of you please continue to hold our field and every other field in as much scrutiny as possible because we are just starting in astronomy at least to bring these things out to light for things that have been happening that are going on for a very very long time and i'm really glad that this is happening we as american astronomical society have been changing our ethics rules now to allow a certain reporting policy that may wind up costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for legal fees and so forth for membership behavior at our conferences but we don't mind because that's really important it's something we need to do we are trying to bring as much of this information out to light as possible and larger organizations such as agu the more you all do this the easier it is for us in the smaller fields like astronomy to really keep moving this stuff forward i think it's very very important and keep us posted we welcome the opportunity to talk to you all and this is big great i think we have members of our society who attended the agu workshop just a few weeks ago so yeah this is a really really big thing and then another point ironically at the museum of natural history american museum of natural history where we have our reu site the head anthropologist was recently fired for having sexually harassed a co-worker to the level of approaching sexual assault so this is a problem that's very significant we really thank you for bringing this forward and keep bringing it forward i don't have a question about this right now but it just wanted to make that point please have everybody be aware how important this is our reu students this summer for the first time all took a sexual harassment course brought in to the museum by the museum in order to make that work so we'll go from there thanks i have a question and a call for feedback um so we do a lot in our reu about sexual harassment we have um a very formal government eeo trainer come in and talk to our mentors and our students about smithsonian institutions official policies on sexual harassment official reporting channels just like you have here like the real strict deal um we do that the very first day day one of the program uh but then i've been doing something else the last many years and in my work my reu's in the it's a second implementation and i'm trying to make this something that i potentially export to other reus and so i i'm interested if anyone wants to come up and talk to me later to get feedback i run a professional development workshop called race power gender what graduate school is really like and it's towards the end of the program when we feel comfortable as a group and we've bonded as a group and um uh it's very discussion based and the students talk about their own experiences but i try to go into um my own we've all collected stories right we all know a lot of stories real stories of what actually happened to us or actually happened to our friends or our colleagues and every year i hear new stories uh and i share those stories i remove the names but i share those stories of real situations um that graduate students are put into and i don't i don't judge i don't say you know you're a bad person if you you are having sex with your phd advisor uh but i ask them to think about what the consequences of that might be and to be to be ready for the worst and uh i'm working on ways to evaluate the efficacy of this workshop but the students have a very positive response i get a lot of emails and meetings after this where students come forward and say you know thank you and hey i this this did happen to me as an undergraduate and thanks for like providing all those resources so this is something i'm trying to develop and maybe do an article in kerr or or somewhere to talk about this strategy this workshop strategy uh i don't feel as empowered to change the overall culture of my field as i do to prepare these students for what they might face and so that they're better able to act in their own self-interests um and so i just mentioned this if anyone is doing something similar or um wants to know more i just ask for your feedback or for your feedback on um something as uh touchy feely as that thank you if no one else is at the mic i will do one interesting follow-up i realize i do have a question after all if that's okay okay um there is resistance in the field and and i'll just talk about astronomy because i know it again as council we have lots of conversation we have many members and in our diversity committees challenging the council to do more and to make statements and things like that and we do a lot but there are also members of the society who come back to us and say you know you're this we are not an advocacy group we are a group of scientists uh how dare you suggest that i am sexist or a harasser when i do the same thing i've done for 30 40 years blah blah blah and and when we did our ethics change our ethics policy change about the same number of people didn't want the changes as advocated the changes as thought that we weren't going far enough so um here's the question i guess i would have particularly for our program officers but for other people who are leaders in the field can we go back to those who resist and say look uh nsf the funding agencies the entire community needs us to act we cannot resist anymore if you resist i'm afraid we're just going to have to roll you over uh can we do that is is that something that you all would would be comfortable with us saying does uh rest with the institution um but nsf uh we if if you've got a problem you can bring it to us and we take it up the chain so um we are just implementing um title nine compliance uh checks i guess where they go the ig's office goes in and at an institution level um so uh if you if you really find that you're in a problem and you you don't know how to address it you definitely should contact us um the institution is responsible ultimately but um we can try to help thanks you know we're actually um out of time um of course yes thank you all thank you to our speakers and commenters okay next uh we have a breakout session and um you'll see that in the south auditorium next door is creating a working group creating an inclusive r u and a welcoming workplace climate which is sort of a follow-on a little bit of a follow-on to this as well as designing an access accessible r u that supports the abilities of all students in room 21 26 uh additional rooms are available for spontaneous breakout groups uh we have somebody said cohort building i think was one another talked about essays on applications uh potentially and then in this room we have uh finding preparing and supporting mentors and overseeing progress in r u projects uh which is being run by melissa burt and rachel sites so go for it are there people interested in the cohort one i'm happy to lead it but let me know if i should go to 2503 or not