Whoa, those numbers are high... very disappointing to see. But I think this is certainly a societal problem in general.
Let's keep in mind, however that this is a verifiably unscientific survey of scientists. I'm actually surprised PLoS One would publish it. IT'S DATA FROM A VOLUNTARY ONLINE SURVEY, aka, the worst type of survey for accuracy purposes. When Fox News has its surveys about how afraid the American Public is of illegal aliens, does anyone pay attention? No. Not that I'm suggesting that we shouldn't care about sexual assault, but I would have to imagine that victims are far more likely to answer the survey than non-victims. Also, it would seem more likely than not that field research in remote areas is more likely to spark this behavior that other types of science. Read: Of all the fields I've ever been a part of, science is so by far the most egalitarian that irresponsible reporting like this kinda pisses me off. We can do better as a society in every area vis sexual harassment and violence, but a headline like this is so wrong it's hard to put into words.
How do you objectively quantify something like sexual assault and harassment statistics? I see this sentiment a lot and it's so baffling to me. Everything's got to be a hard data point to be legitimate, they say, but I think we should be more willing to accept what people say about their experiences instead of going on and on about how everything is conjecture until we get the facts. These are the facts. You're not gonna get any better data about this than people telling you it happens.
I think you misunderstand me. I don't doubt the experience of any of the respondents, and my heart goes out to them. What I doubt is that this survey represents a good picture of the state of sexual violence in the field. To get that picture a much more scientific survey would be needed. My guess is that this survey overestimates the number of women who are victimized, because of reporting bias, not inaccurate accounts on an individual basis.
I guess I am unsure what else you would need to tell you how bad it is. The other side certainly isn't going to condemn themselves by saying anything about what they do. If you ask them, nothing happens at all! This being the case, how do you get more in-depth analyses than surveying the only participating parties, both of which may be "inaccurate"?
What you would want is a survey where the sample is randomly drawn from a cross section of professionals in the field. This was an online self-reporting survey where anyone was invited to respond. In that case, it is my conjecture that women who have been harassed or assaulted will be more likely to reply, because they will want to get their experience known to the world, whereas someone who has never had an issue may think taking a survey is a waste of time. I'm not a statistician, so I can't really say how to design a survey with a low margin of error, but I know enough to say that this isn't a way to do it. Anyway, I'm glad when issues of abuse are addressed, but when we overestimate the problem, I think it's easy to start to characterize a problem as an epidemic, and then to demonize scientists in the field, when really we don't know what the numbers are.
If you had spent more than a second writing this reply or more likely if you weren't an iredeemable rape apologist, you wouldn't perpetuate victim-blaming myths. The study itself says: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0102172The survey used operationalized definitions of phenomena generally characterized as “harassment” by the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [17], and “assault” by WomensLaw.org [20] without specifically using the terms “harassment” or “assault” to avoid making respondents name their experiences (see Materials S1 for the full survey).
Any thoughts on how this can be combated to any degree? In one of the organizations I've been involved with we've had multiple instances of either asking or forcing people to leave the organization due to sexually harassing females in the organization and making it an uncomfortable environment for everybody. However, that is more a treatment of the symptoms than addressing whatever underlying issues are causing that treatment to come out in the first place. This is all in college so I feel like it has to, in part, come from environmental issues and lack of education in K-12.But I think this is certainly a societal problem in general.
I'm not an expert on this problem, so I don't even feel comfortable addressing what the solution is. I appreciated the #YesAllWomen hashtag, I think it generated a necessary conversation, hopefully among all people. I agree with you about lack of education. Our society probably doesn't talk about sex openly enough and I would support having age appropriate sex education earlier in the curriculum. But overall, I just think our society still has a lot of growing up to do in regards to the nature of patriarchy, the objectification of women, and generally getting all males to realize that women are equally persons. The sad fact is that there are a lot of guys out there who just can't get that through their heads and simply see women as some type of toy or commodity. As a male, it is incredibly embarrassing to see.
My original point was going to be to ask how to combat this within science fields and if you've ever witnessed anything of the sort, but then I got side-tracked towards the root basis so my question got warped. It's definitely a problem in engineering too, especially when I worked as an Environmental Engineer for a few months. One interesting part of that article to me was that perpetrators are more likely to be superiors which could speak more towards a lust for power or desire to assert superiority and reaffirm their position. Has anyone here had a boss that was openly sexist, misogynistic, or otherwise mistreated the opposite gender? (Male to Female or vice versa). If so, how did you handle the situation?
I've actually kind of experience this with an old supervisor. The situation it puts you in is almost impossible. On the one hand you have almost no connections (and connections are everything), so you don't want to burn any bridges. But on the other hand it is impossible to feel comfortable and actually continue performing/operating on the same level when you feel like you're being harassed or feel like that is a possibility. No one should have to be put in that position. It's pretty de-humanizing.Has anyone here had a boss that was openly sexist, misogynistic, or otherwise mistreated the opposite gender? (Male to Female or vice versa). If so, how did you handle the situation?