A (female scientist) friend pointed me to “Science’s Sexual Assault Problem,” a New York Times article by a woman who was attacked in Turkey (by a criminal on the street, not by a fellow scientist). The author concludes that “Sexual assault is a pernicious and formidable barrier to women in science”, with the implication that a female scientist is more prone to being sexually assaulted than a woman who chooses some other career or chooses not to work at all.
The vast majority of scientists, male or female, that we know work in office buildings. None that we know has ever been assaulted while in an office building or lab. The scientist who goes out into the jungle or the mountains, Humboldt-style, is a statistically rarity among the modern scientific workforce. Check out the 2013 Nobel Prize winners, for example. The scientist winners were two physicists who scribbled equations at blackboards, three chemists who couldn’t have gotten very far from an air-conditioned supercomputer, and three biologists who were attached to microscopes in a lab looking at cells. The most recent female winner in science was Ada Yonath. In this interview she doesn’t say anything about having to leave the lab to do her crystallography work. Given that being inside an office building or lab is generally safer than being out and about (as is required in many non-science jobs, e.g., journalism, textbook or pharma sales, or appliance repair (imagine the risk of assault when arriving for service visit #8 on a Bosch dishwasher)), wouldn’t it be natural to draw the opposite conclusion? I.e., that science is a great career for anyone, male or female, who is concerned about being a victim of a violent crime.
there is the case of Annie Le, murdered in a Yale University lab, but a rarity nonetheless
Good point, Suzanne, though we did not know her personally (the original posting was about people we actually know; we know lots of scientists and lots of people who’ve been crime victims but no scientists who have ever been victims while in their labs or office buildings).
[Separately, according to Wikipedia Le’s murderer was caught nine days later, partly due to the fact that the security measures in her lab building narrowed down the number of suspects. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/clearances says that only about 65 percent of murders nationwide are “cleared by arrest” (and presumably not all of those arrests result in convictions). So if a criminal wants to commit a crime and get away with it, a science lab is a bad location in which to perpetrate.]
It’s hard to draw conclusions from a single anecdote. If I found one more incident (I don’t know of any but surely there must be one) where the scientist murderer was not caught, does that mean that the rate of clearance for scientist murder is now 50% (worse than average) and not 100%?
In any case, the rate of clearance is less important (to the person choosing a profession) than the overall murder rate. Suppose I told you that 1 in 100 scientists was murdered but 100% of scientist murderers were caught, while 1 in 100,000 lawyers was murdered but only half of lawyer murderers were caught – wouldn’t you rather be a lawyer in that case?
This is another commentary (or sharing of first-hand experience) on the subject of sexual harassment in Science, that follows that PLOS study. While this op-ed does focus on the field work part of it, I think the overarching story spans more than that.
You are right in concluding that labs are in fact safer in what regards violent crimes, but I believe the PLOS study comes as an investigation of one of the symptoms of a male-heavy set of institutions and practices, where gender discrimination and latent sexual harassment is a problem.
A previous article focused on other aspects of that problem, not necessarily regarding field work:
«A female student, “Hazed,” recounted life in her graduate program:
“My body and my sexuality were openly discussed by my professor and the male students,” the woman wrote. “Comments ensued about the large size of my breasts, and there was speculation about my sexual history.” Her professor, she said, “often joked that only pretty women were allowed to work for him, which led me to wonder if my intellect and skills had ever mattered.”».
(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/science/harassment-in-science-replicated.html)
Francisco: Thanks for the pointer. I think the issue of facing sexism or being harassed on the job are different subjects than what was in the NYT article referenced by the original posting. So one could look at the question of whether or not science was worse than other kinds of jobs in these respects. Hope Jahren’s article says (second paragraph from the bottom) that she listens to colleagues talk about why there aren’t more women in science and they “postulate what the barriers might be.” In other words, these supposedly scientifically-minded individuals are speculating wildly, without any data.
The Times article that you cite, about sexual harassment rather than sexual assault, says that “almost two-thirds of the respondents said that they had been sexually harassed in the field.” The journalist didn’t bother to ask the natural question of “How does this compare to other academic majors or occupations that a woman might choose?” Nor did the journalist try to quantify the self-selection bias of the survey (it was not a random sampling of female scientists who’d gone “into the field” (which, as noted in my original posting, is itself a small subset of female scientists)).
I did a quick Google search and came up with this Wikipedia article citing an American Association of University Women study that 83 percent of high school girls have been sexually harassed and 62 percent of female college students (and 61 percent of the male college students). There was no indication that a science major or career was substantially different in terms of harassment prevalence than any other academic major or career option. This page says that, depending on the study, 40-70 percent of women will be sexually harassed if they enter the U.S. workforce. The data suggest that the best way for an American to avoid harassment would be either (1) to emigrate to a country where sexual harassment is less common (this UN report shows, on page 15, that there may be a wide variation among countries (tough to say due to different methodologies used in surveys)), or (2) to drop out of high school, not attend college, and find a way to support him or herself that did not involve working for wages.
At the college level, you could attend an all female institution such as Radcliffe or Vassar. Oh, wait, you can’t.
let’s not forget Smith, Mt Holyoke & Wellesley (Hillary Clinton is an alumna of Wellesley where she majored in political science)
Jackie, Suzanne: Great ideas, of course, but http://www.annamaries.org/lesbian-battering and http://www.njcbw.org/PDF/publications_BatteredLesbianBrochure.pdf (did a quick Google search) indicate that even an all-female environment may not be perceived as safe by at least some.
Surely you are not implying that all (or even most) women attending a womens college (as Hillary did) are lesbian?
Jackie: I have never attended a women’s college so I wouldn’t have an opinion on the subject. My point was merely that even if women were to eliminate all contact with men there would still be claims of abuse.
It’s time to get rid of coed.