After surveying 661 employees working in astronomy and geophysics, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has highlighted the “urgent” need to tackle bullying and harassment in the fields.
In short, 44% of respondents reported suffering in the workplace during the two years prior to the survey, and 65% of those respondents said their reported concerns were either “ignored” or their reports were handled unsatisfactorily. To be clear, the survey was conducted in 2020 and the data was soft-launched in 2021. However, a full-fledged analysis of the results with recommendations on how to move forward with the glaring issues, called Bullying and Harassment Report 2023, has just been published on May 17.
“The results presented in this report are dismal,” Emma Bunch, the RAS president between 2020 and 2022, wrote in the report. “They make a powerful case for change.”
Related: NASA launches anti-harassment campaign
For example, there’s a response that says, “One person who bullied me is on the committee responsible for enforcing the code of conduct” – and that’s just a taste of some of the anonymous quotes that pepper the report to illustrate the extent of illustrate the concerns identified. inside. Others indicate that those in positions of power and influence are seen as ‘invincible’ and are not punished. Yet another says relationships with regulators make reporting or whistleblowing difficult.
“The questions around reporting and the terrible cases where people are reporting are not being taken seriously,” Sheila Kanani, the Education, Outreach and Diversity officer at the RAS and one of the report’s authors, told Space.com about what she thinks that is the most worrying aspect of these results. “Then the perpetrator has an exceptional career and the victim is forced out of the field. I hate feeling so helpless.”
Not a new problem
The new impetus for this report undoubtedly comes at a weak point for the astronomy profession as a whole when it comes to allegations of harassment. For example, a lengthy article from late 2023 published in Ars Technica relied on lawsuits, European Space Agency (ESA) documents, and personal ESA employee accounts to reveal a troubling pattern of bullying at the agency to take. According to that article, ESA denied the allegations, but the physical and spoken sources cited by the author raise clear doubts.
A little earlier, in 2020, Lund University in Sweden conducted two independent investigations that found that two of the institute’s top astronomers, Sofia Feltzing and Melvyn Davies, had bullied colleagues. The duo also appeared to have victimized or discriminated against their peers, but despite numerous complaints, the university found that a solution was not found quickly enough. In 2021 alone, former SpaceX employees publicly shared allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace, as did a group of current (at the time) and former Blue Origin employees. And just this year, former SpaceX employee Michelle Dopak sued SpaceX for violations including sexual discrimination and retaliation.
“It is a male-dominated field, very competitive and with little job security,” Kanani suggested as to why the problem seems to be particularly prevalent in the astronomy professions. “That makes people angrier and more difficult to work with. Maybe because it is an old field, where things like a good working environment were not taken into account in the beginning.”
“Also,” she added, “universities as a whole suffer from bullying and intimidation, with difficult supervisor-student relationships and no training in things like how to be an effective manager.”
So it is not surprising that the RAS has decided to repeat this research into bullying, especially while making new recommendations for further steps.
To give a quick summary, some of these recommendations include encouraging people to join a union, planning social lunches, and keeping up with regular training, as well as updating those training sessions as needed. However, updates are likely to be critical, as one anonymous respondent had stated: “They are trying to follow all the recommended training and reporting systems. It still fails.”
“The current problem with training is that senior management doesn’t think they should go to the training sessions, we should focus on them!” Kanani said. “We should also use mandatory training as a way to gain acceptance into membership organizations like the RAS.”
However, other recommendations would likely yield more active results, such as making reporting procedures more transparent and implementing a hard timeline during which a report must be addressed.
A ‘damn’ report
For context, the 2020 RAS survey included questions such as: “In the past twelve months, how often have you personally been exposed to any form of bullying and harassment in your workplace” and “whether you have not been bullied or witnessed bullying, harassment or other undesirable behavior, would you feel confident reporting it if you ever did?”
It was distributed by the RAS via email to “members, university contact points, space organizations and industry,” according to the report, which helps paint a picture of the types of professions represented. According to Kanani, some respondents also specifically said they worked for NASA or ESA.
“We also promoted the survey through the RAS website and social media accounts,” RAS officials said.
To the first of the above questions, 56% of subjects responded that they had ‘never’ personally been exposed to any form of bullying and harassment in the workplace in the past year. However, 41% responded that they had been victims of some form of bullying or harassment during this period, 29% said they had experienced this less often than once a month, 6% at least once every two weeks, 5% at least once per week and 1% said they were bullied or harassed at work every day.
One percent may not sound like much, but in a sample size of 661 people, it means that about six people were bullied or harassed in their workplace every day. It is for these reasons that RAS openly calls the report a “damning” report.
“The evidence in this report is a wake-up call for everyone in the world of astronomy and geophysics,” RAS President Mike Lockwood said in an association news release. “The first step to solving any problem is to admit there is a problem and gather evidence about its scope and nature. Now that we have done that, it is clear that the problem is both insidious and systemic.”
Perhaps the worst aspect of the report has to do with the demographics of those who are bullied.
Women and non-binary people in the field were 50% more likely than men to be harassed or bullied; 12% of bisexual astronomers reported being bullied at least once a week; 5% of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer astronomers and geophysicists had been bullied in the 24 months prior to the survey; and younger people at relatively ‘precarious’ stages of their careers reported being bullied and harassed more often. This last group was determined by whether a respondent was a student, had a temporary contract or a permanent contract.
Disabled, black astronomers and geophysicists from ethnic minorities were also found to be 40% more likely to be bullied than their non-disabled and white counterparts.
With this in mind, it is also worth considering that 87% of respondents were white, 10% were black, Asian and minority categories (including multiple ethnic and black Caribbean), and 3% did not disclose their ethnicity. 80% described their sexual orientation as heterosexual/straight, 7% as bisexual and 3% as gay/lesbian. Broadly speaking, this not only exacerbates the findings to some extent, but it also demonstrates a serious lack of diversity in the professions surveyed, which is likely to be extrapolated to a serious lack of diversity in the general field.
This is also not surprising. For example, a stark 2019 report from the American Institute of Physics found that African Americans are incredibly underrepresented in the field of astronomy due to systemic problems. The 2021 Decadal Survey, released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, highlighted that racial diversity in the astrophysical sciences is “terrible.” In 2020, astronomy students at Yale University spoke out against institutional racism, and a survey of more than 400 people showed how women of color in astronomy experience disproportionate discrimination.
Furthermore, the dynamics of the sample size is why the report includes a disclaimer that a total of 661 respondents is a sufficiently strong group for robust statistical analysis, but “we cannot be certain that it is representative of our community and therefore of our findings.” are only indicative of broader problems.”
“This response rate,” the report says, “also means that we cannot look at intersectional issues while maintaining anonymity.”
However, as the report also notes, the data is largely comparable to the results of the 2013 University College Union report, which surveyed a whopping 14,667 participants working in higher education. In that report, 48% of respondents reported being bullied at work.
“Ultimately, I don’t think it’s just a ‘space sector’ problem,” Kanani said. “I think if we look, we’ll find it everywhere.”
Considering the study was originally distributed in 2020, you might also wonder if anything has improved for astronomy workplaces in recent years – especially considering how striking the results were.
“Anecdotally, I think things have already changed for the better,” Kanani said, noting that she believes bullying and harassment are now being discussed more on the ground, that bystander and ally training appears to be entering the conversation and that reports may is more likely to occur. Still, she emphasizes, “We haven’t done a re-examination yet, so I don’t know for sure.”
“That said,” she added, “there has been a lot more work done online since 2020, so perhaps the focus has shifted to online trolls and the like. The world is also more unstable, especially for students and people with a temporary residence permit. contracts, and they are among the people who have made a larger number of things public anyway.”
A full version of the report and all associated statistics can be viewed here.
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