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It is 2018, and the director of the National Science Foundation, France Córdova, is tired of learning that male scientists whose research she supports with public funds have sexually harassed their female students, staff and colleagues.
At 71, she still remembers an unwanted sexual remark from a graduate-school professor she had sought out for advice on her astrophysics research. And over the last few years, she has listened to stories — so many stories — shared by younger scientists at conferences for geologists and astronomers.
So last month, Córdova enacted the kind of structural change experts say is a prerequisite to increasing the ranks of women scientists, who hold only about 30 per cent of senior faculty positions in colleges in the United States.
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Institutions that accept an NSF grant must now notify the agency of any finding related to harassment by the leading scientists working on it — and face the possibility of losing the coveted funds. Individuals may also report harassment directly to the agency, which may then conduct its own investigation. That, too, may result in the suspension of funding.
The move may seem like a no-brainer, but it may be the most consequential action any of the nation’s science agencies have yet taken to hold academic institutions explicitly accountable for sexual harassment. Other agencies require notification if a scientist can no longer work on a grant, but do not track the reason.
For the NSF, which distributed grants to some 40,000 scientists at 2,000 institutions in 2017, the goal is also a shift in a scientific culture that has long sought to evaluate scientists without consideration for their personal conduct.
t the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Nasa as its chief scientist. “‘You’re harassing me? I’m going to ignore you. I’m going to go do my research somewhere else.’”
“Well, enough is enough.”
That the NSF’s new sexual harassment policy was put in place by a woman who controls a $5-billion research budget captures the bittersweet nature of the #MeToo moment for many scientists.
Even as a small corps of women have assumed some of science’s most influential positions in recent years, their experience — along with actual research — has shown that harassment and other forms of sex discrimination remain widespread.
As they grapple with the field’s big challenges, ridding it of the gender inequities that many believed would by now be a thing of the past ranks high on the list.
“I think when my generation came along, we thought, if we put our heads down and did a good job, things would get better,” said Cori Bargmann, a neurobiologist who heads the $3-billion science arm of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organisation.
“I even feel personally responsible, like I let these younger women down. I thought I would fix it by doing OK. And clearly that’s not enough, so we’ve got to do more.”
At a recent meeting, Bargmann recalled, a male scientist told her she held a particular opinion on gene-editing embryos because she was a woman, and “women are more conservative”. “I looked at him and thought, ‘And that’s your opinion because you’re a dinosaur’”.
To boost the lagging representation of women in physics, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, one of many women whose scientific contributions have not received the same credit as those of male mentors or competitors, has said she will use her $3-million Breakthrough Prize to create scholarships for women and other under-represented groups. She believes her own insights grew from her outsider status in the Cambridge lab of her thesis supervisor, who received the Nobel Prize for their work in 1974.
“I was one of very few women, and I wasn’t from the southeast of England, the affluent part of the country,’’ she told Space.com. “So, I think increasing diversity of the workforce actually allows all sorts of things to develop.”
© 2018 The New York Times
