There have been a series of high-profile bullying scandals in astronomy in recent years. These include :
- the resignation of the pioneering discoverer of extra-solar planets Prof Geoffrey Marcy from his Professorship at the University of Berkeley in 2015 after violations of the University’s sexual harassment policy;
- the closure of the Institute for Astronomy in the ETH, Zurich in 2017 after mistreatment of students and postdocs, followed by the subsequent (contested) dismissal of Prof Marcella Carollo;
- the resignation of Prof Christian Ott from CalTech after being found guilty of harassment of female graduate students;
- the dismissal of Prof Tim de Zeeuw, the former Director-General of ESO, from the Chair of Theoretical Astronomy at Leiden University in 2022 after an investigation that concluded “over several years he repeatedly belittled and insulted women in public and abused his position of power as a Professor by threatening to damage their scientific careers” ;
- the closure of the Observatory at Lund University in 2023 after accusations of aggressive and bullying behaviour by Profs Sofia Feltzing and Melvyn Davies
These scandals have affected European & American universities. What about the UK?
The Royal Astronomical Society has just carried out a survey of bullying and harassment. There were 661 respondents, working in the fields of astronomy and geophysics, primarily in universities in the UK. The report was released on 17 May 2024 and is available here. The results make painful, though not unsurprising, reading.
Overall, 44% of respondents suffered bullying in workplace within last year. Groups with a high incidence of being bullied are postdocs and students.
- 48% of those on fixed term contracts reported bullying in the workplace in the last 12 months, 13% recording it once per fortnight or more
- 50% of students reported bullying in the last 12 months, with 15% at least once per fortnight or more
The serious power imbalance between senior and fixed-term astronomers puts those vulnerable to bullying, harassment and discrimination at serious risk. This suggests a disheartening picture of abusive supervision in UK astronomy.
The most shocking disparities relate to gender. 53% of women reported suffering bullying and harassment in the last 12 months, compared to only 33% of men. These figures are similar to those in UK computer science and engineering (49% of women compared to 34% of men) found by EPSRC (Graham, Raeside & Maclean 2018). Together this suggests that in STEM subjects in UK universities, over half the women are being bullying each year. Given this high incidence, every woman working in STEM in a UK University is experiencing repeated acts of bullying and harassment over an academic lifetime.
(Figure from RAS Report on Bullying and Harassment authored by Sheila Kanani, Áine O’Brien, Robert Massey, Natasha Stephen and Emma Bunce)
If all this is not depressing enough, them the statistics on dealing with bullying and harassment are dire. Only 40% of bullying and harassment episodes are ever reported. And of those that are reported, 25 % are ignored and 40 % are handled in an unsatisfactory manner, leaving the respondents dissatisfied. This suggests a pattern of Universities turning a blind eye to bullying, repeatedly failing to take matters seriously or investigate properly. If you are bullied in astronomy, your chances of successful redress are tiny, only 14 %. The bullies almost always get away with it.
The Royal Astronomical Society deserves enormous credit for carrying out and publishing this survey. Bullying and harassment are not pleasant subjects and it is all too easy for professional bodies to ignore uncomfortable matters. Where, for example, are the equivalent surveys for UK physics or chemistry or medicine or engineering? Astronomy and geophysics are not unusual. Patterns of unacceptably high levels of bullying are the case throughout STEM subjects in the UK.
At the beginning, we asked why have there been no reported bullying scandals in UK astronomy, despite a series of high profile incidents & dismissals in Europe and the US. This is all the more glaring now we know that the prevalence of bullying is so high in UK astronomy. We will return to this contradiction in our next blog post.
2 Comments
Anonymous · 19 May 2024 at 19:36
“The Royal Astronomical Society deserves enormous credit for carrying out and publishing this survey. Bullying and harassment are not pleasant subjects and it is all too easy for professional bodies to ignore uncomfortable matters. Where, for example, are the equivalent surveys for UK physics or chemistry or medicine or engineering? Astronomy and geophysics are not unusual. Patterns of unacceptably high levels of bullying are the case throughout STEM subjects in the UK.”
I’m really impressed and I think the Astronomical Society deserves a lot of credit for carrying out and publishing this survey. They are evidently light years ahead of many other scientific societies in the UK that clearly would prefer to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that all is well.
As you mentioned, no equivalent surveys exist for other STEM subjects, which undoubtedly experience similarly high and unacceptable levels of bullying and mobbing as astronomy. I also agree that this may be partly due to professional bodies finding it more convenient to turn a blind eye to these concerns and pretend these problems do not exist (a stance of incredible stupidity and one that almost always backfires in the end).
Another factor that may explain the lack of surveys in other STEM fields is that perpetrators often occupy and wield top positions of influence within these societies, leading to a reluctance to address these issues. Word travels, and people usually already know who these individuals are, but fear of retaliation and “rocking the boat” keeps them from doing anything about it, as well as a tired resignation to what is essentially an ecology of top-down bullying as “the way things are done and always have been done.”
It’s also worth mentioning that perpetrators are often politically savvy and careful not to display this behavior within these organizations where they carefully curate their image, instead keeping their bullying and mobbing to the universities where they work, where the chances of them getting away with it and not facing any scrutiny or consequences are far higher.
For example, I know this to be the case for the British Ecological Society and the Zoological Society of London, despite their apparent lip service to combating these issues through their equality and diversity policies, codes of conduct, and dignity at work policies.
I really do hope that other societies and STEM fields within UK higher education eventually follow the example of astronomy and launch surveys of their own, as it is well overdue. That said, one concern I’ve had for a long time is that the very same perpetrators, enablers, and bystanders may begin to position themselves within these campaigns and in studies and papers on these subjects as a way of managing their reputations and covering things up, as often happens with EDI initiatives.
21percent.org · 19 May 2024 at 19:57
Agreed.
We hope professional bodies like the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Mathematics and the Royal Academy of Engineering (amongst others) all follow suit.
It will be interesting to understand the pattern of bullying & harassment across STEM subjects in UK Universities.