A New Twist in the Fight Against Sexism in Science

The past year has seen a steady drumbeat of stories illustrating, yet again, how science as a field and profession remains unwelcoming to women. A Rosetta space probe scientist appears on TV wearing a shirt covered in pictures of scantily clad women. A Nobel laureate says female scientists in labs are distracting. An advice columnist for a career site run by the prestigious journal Science tells a woman to "put up" with her adviser staring down her shirt. And now, a famous Berkeley astronomer has been allegedly sexually harassing students for years.

This kind of thing, unfortunately, isn't new. What’s remarkable is what happened after each of these events occurred, when the hashtags trended and the voices clamored: The people responsible were held accountable for their actions. The Rosetta scientist issued a teary apology. The Nobel laureate lost his honorary professorship. The editor of the Science column is no longer there. The Berkeley astronomer resigned in disgrace.

In isolation, any one of these events could seem like an outlier: just one person getting his due. But taken together, so many and in succession, they suggest something bigger. A conversation about sexism in science broke open this year. Sharp organizing and social media are sparking real change. What was once whispered privately in laboratories and offices is being discussed publicly, loudly, and clearly.

What’s happening in science mirrors larger changes. In a year that saw grassroots activism prompt a national discussion of racial profiling, sexual assault, and transgender rights, marginalized voices have challenged the status quo. And mainstream media cares.

When BuzzFeed broke the story of a Berkeley investigation that found famous exoplanet hunter Geoff Marcy sexually harassed his students, it hit a nerve. Marcy’s behavior had been an open secret among many astronomers—a field where over 70 percent of faculty are male.

A few astronomers began circulating a petition in support of his victims the night before the BuzzFeed story published, after Marcy posted an apology on his website. In the minutes after BuzzFeed’s story went live, dozens of names on the petition bloomed into hundreds. The petition now has 3,000 names.

“The article gave more weight to his voice than to the students he has traumatized, and it is that exact practice that allowed the abuse to occur for as long as it did,” Laura Lopez, the Ohio State University astronomer who wrote the letter, tells WIRED in an email. The Times' public editor agreed. Lopez had circulated the letter on her Facebook page and an astronomer Facebook group. “I expected to get some signatures, but I had no idea the letter would get such broad support across the astronomy and physics communities,” she says. She’s since also received hundreds of emails from people thanking her for the letter.

The media’s missteps in reporting on the sexual harassment story show that this kind of coverage is kind of new, especially in science journalism. “I don’t think we saw these kinds of news stories and saw this kind of reaction in the journalism community in earlier generations,” says Deborah Blum, a long-time science journalist and director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. “We’re all catching up in this kind of cultural awareness.”

The community of science writers, bloggers, and journalists had its own major reckoning with sexism in 2013, when several young women spoke out against sexual harassment by Scientific American's blog editor. Blum organized a panel called "The XX Question" at the National Association of Science Writers meeting that year—and that conversation continued at this year's meeting just a week ago.

But this isn't just journalist navel-gazing. The groundswell of interest comes from readers too, which has—to frame it cynically—also created a cottage industry of outrage mining. For every deeply reported story like BuzzFeed's on Marcy, dozens more blog posts exist seemingly to aggregate angry tweets. Take the deluge of content after Science Careers' controversial column advising a woman to "put up" with her leering advisor. Post after post ripped into the column, adding snark but not even attempting to wrestle with the difficult question at its heart and offer alternative advice.

These stories exist because an appetite for them exists—and that part, at least, is a good thing. It reflects the changing norms of what's tolerable in science. Here might be a good point to pause and reflect on WIRED’s coverage of sexism in science, which is, well, sporadic. We've been silent on many these stories because we've long hoped to cover the ways science can make the world better, not reflect the world's problems. But that's wrong, of course. Ignoring social inequality doesn't fix it. We cover science and the culture of science, and that has to include the ways that culture goes wrong. Point is, we're trying to figure it out, too.

Certainly the events of the past year have not eradicated sexism in science—not even close. Look no further than the trolls. Along with two other journalists, Blum broke the news about Nobel laureate Tim Hunt’s comments at a conference of science journalists in South Korea, where he joked to a room full of female scientists that having “girls” in labs caused romantic trouble. His comments were tweeted out, and his comment turned into a meme: #distractinglysexy went global, with women scientists posting distinctly un-magazine-cover-like pictures of themselves at work, in lab coats and hazmat suits, or covered in dirt from archaeological digs.

But Hunt’s defenders also joined the fray. “I started getting hammered—all kinds of misogynists and horrible names,” says Blum of her Twitter feed. “People came to me, almost entirely women scientists who had the same thing happen to them, said what I had to do to protect myself.” When I asked Karen James, a biologist at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory who frequently tweets about sexism in science, about backlash, she answered wearily, "Everyone gets pushback on social media." The defenders—and attackers—appear in every case, from the Rosetta shirtgate to Geoff Marcy. But in a way, the backlash only shows how serious the threat to the status quo is. Hashtag activism turned into real action, upsetting the existing balance of power.

These few highly publicized cases are only the tip of the iceberg though. “This is atypical. A hundred other cases are probably happening right now that are not being reported,” says James. Julienne Rutherford, a biological anthropologist who published a paper on sexual assault and harassment in scientific fieldwork, agrees. “There are still a lot of people who are afraid to speak up," she says.

On the plus side, Rutherford says, “the conversations are out in the light. That didn’t happen a few years ago.” That's why the advice in Science Careers to not raise a fuss about a leering advisor seems so out of touch. The author of the column is Alice Huang, an eminent virologist whose career dates back to the 1960s. Huang told me she still stands by her advice as practical—even if the advisor's behavior is clearly wrong. She herself is no stranger to sexual harassment.

“A lot of us through our careers have thought of suing and then you look around and see the few people who have sued on harassment or bias and they turn out to be the walking wounded among women. And you really don’t want to do that," says Huang. "But if you find people aren’t the walking wounded for life, then you get a little braver the next time.”

It'd be nice to say that Huang's word choice of the "walking wounded" is melodramatic and also outdated. Certainly the outpouring of support for the women who filed complaints against Marcy and spoke to the press is encouraging. But as one of those women, Sarah Ballard, who is an astronomer at MIT, puts it, the community of scientists still has lot of work to do—and a lot more voices to listen to. "It's worth noting that public faces of survivors so far have been white women (myself included)," she tweeted, "WoC [women of color] have it even harder."