To address harassment in science, rooting out harassers might be less effective than creating better social arrangements.
So far 2016 has seen no shortage of allegations about sexual harassment in science, including sexual harassment of trainees by the scientists who were supposed to be training them. In addition to high-profile cases in astronomy, new cases have emerged in molecular biology and anthropology.
The more cases emerge, the more reason there is to doubt the hypothesis that harassment is an isolated problem, the result of a few bad apples within the scientific community.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there is also coverage in which accused harassers assert that they have been misunderstood (or worse), that they touched female students, but in a way intended to be supportive, not sexual.
This is where we always seem to end up, in an argument about intentions and oversensitivity, about whether a good scientist is a bad person, about whether trainees who object to certain behaviors are really cut out to be scientists. It’s not an especially useful place to be, since intentions are not susceptible to public inspection — and, moreover, since intentions are beside the point when they are not strongly coupled to actual effects. The harms of harassment do not depend of the intentional efforts of a mustache-twirling villain. It is possible for someone to sincerely intend his interactions with trainees to be helpful and nurturing and for those interactions to have created hostile conditions for many of those trainees.
For an individual to have good intentions, or to try harder as an individual, probably isn’t enough. This state of affairs is not unusual. At the very center of the scientific enterprise, individual scientists try really hard to be objective, but they recognize that it’s not sufficient for the task of building reliable knowledge. Your best individual efforts are not as effective at counteracting your subjective biases as the knowledge-building systems that coordinate the efforts of many, many scientists.
Maybe it’s time to stop approaching harassment and discrimination as fundamentally an individual problem. Maybe it’s time to consider whether adjustments to the social systems in science — and in particular to the social arrangements in scientific training — could reduce trainees’ experience of harassment and discrimination. To that end, in this series of posts I’ll propose some ways to reconfigure scientific training programs (including PhD programs) that might make a difference.
Do I know that the modifications I’m proposing will result in less harassment and discrimination? I do not. It’s an empirical question, which means we won’t know the answer unless we try it out.
However, it’s worth finding out — unless we’re prepared to say that harassment and discrimination are acceptable parts of scientific training. If you’re willing to say harassment and discrimination are acceptable parts of scientific training, first, you should own that — take your stand loudly and proudly. Second, after you’ve taken that stand, turn your attention to the question of how you’re going to fund scientific training.
At least in the U.S., the reality is that scientific training in PhD programs depends on government funding, and the government’s money comes with strings attached. Those strings include following federal education and employment law, including where it applies to discrimination and sexual harassment. If you think following these laws gets in the way of doing good science and training skilled scientists (and I’ve not seen anything like a plausible reasoned argument for this position), again, go ahead and build your better unfettered science. Just do it on your own dime, and probably in a jurisdiction where U.S. employment and education laws don’t apply.
Why am I recommending that we change social arrangements here, rather than keeping the focus on “fixing” individuals? Arguably, the social arrangements within science and scientific training are as artificial as any we might imagine, so these are surely more susceptible to change than whatever “human nature” there might be. (Did early human ancestors engage in peer review on the savannah? I think not.)
Moreover, approaching the problem at the level of social arrangements might help in an important way: it lets us consider harassment and discrimination as an engineering problem. If we’re trying to construct a system (say, a scientific training program) with less harassment and discrimination, what benchmarks should we look at to judge if we’re succeeding? Probably not the intentions of the people whose actions are causing harm to others in the system. What are the parts of the system we could move around to see if we can produce better effects? Again, probably not intentions (as these not just hard to measure but also hard to control).
Messing with what’s in people’s hearts and heads, even if we could do it reliably, feels inappropriately manipulative. Sorting out good people and evil people assumes an all-or-nothing model of morality that doesn’t make much sense of the actual people in our world — plus, it requires letting bad things happen in order for us to detect the evil-doers responsible for them.
On the other hand, changing the system’s ground rules, the patterns of interaction, the financial relationships within the system — these are things we can do without demanding that people be someone they are not.
In the posts that follow, I propose changes to the system by which science students are trained to be scientists, some modest, others more ambitious. I will set out reasons for thinking each of these changes could reduce the frequency or severity of harassment and discrimination against scientific trainees. Whether those who could make any of these adjustments to scientific training programs will judge it worthwhile to find out if they actually help is an open question.
But unless we view harassment and discrimination as not worth addressing — as not worth preventing — we need to find something that will help.
