After surveying 661 employees affiliated with the astronomy and geophysics professions, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) highlighted the “urgent” need to tackle bullying and harassment in all areas.
In short, 44% of respondents said they had suffered at work in the two years preceding the survey, and 65% of them said reported concerns were “ignored” or their reports were not addressed. been treated satisfactorily. To be clear, the survey was conducted in 2020 and a soft launch of the data was released in 2021. However, a full analysis of the results that includes recommendations on how to move forward from the glaring issues, dubbed Bullying and Harassment Report 2023, was just published on May 17.
“The results presented in this report are grim,” Emma Bunch, president of the RAS between 2020 and 2022, wrote in the report. “They make a powerful argument for change.”
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For example, there’s a response that says “a person who bullied me is on the committee responsible for enforcing the code of conduct” – and that’s just a taste of several anonymous quotes littering the report to illustrate the extent of the concerns found. In. Others express that those in positions of power and influence are seen as “invincible” and are not punished; yet another says relationships with superiors make it difficult to report or denounce.
“The questions around reporting and the horrible cases where people report are not taken seriously,” Sheila Kanani, head of education, outreach and diversity at RAS and the one of the authors of the report. the most worrying aspect of these results. “Then the attacker has an exceptional performance and the victim is forced to leave the field. I hate feeling so helpless.”
This is not a new problem
Arguably, the reinvigoration of this report comes at a time when the astronomy professions as a whole are experiencing a low point in terms of bullying allegations. A lengthy article published in late 2023 in Ars Technica, for example, called for court cases, European Space Agency (ESA) documents, and personal accounts of ESA employees to reveal a troubling pattern of bullying at within the agency. The ESA, according to this article, has denied these allegations, but the physical and oral sources cited by the author raise obvious doubts.
Earlier in 2020, Lund University in Sweden conducted two independent investigations that found that two of the institution’s top astronomers, Sofia Feltzing and Melvyn Davies, had bullied their colleagues. The duo appear to have also victimized or discriminated against their peers, but the university found that a solution was not found quickly enough despite numerous complaints. In 2021 alone, former SpaceX employees have publicly shared allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace, as have a group of current (at the time) and former Blue Origin employees. And just this year, former SpaceX employee Michelle Dopak sued SpaceX for violations including gender discrimination and retaliation.
“It’s a very male-dominated field, very competitive and with little job security,” Kanani explained of why the problem seems to be recurring in astronomy professions in particular. “It makes people angrier and harder to work with. Maybe because it’s an old field, where things like a good working environment weren’t considered in the beginning.”
“Furthermore,” she added, “universities as a whole suffer from bullying and harassment, with difficult supervisor-student relationships and no training on things like how to become an effective manager.”
It is therefore not surprising that the RAS has decided to repeat this investigation into harassment, including suggesting new recommendations on ways forward.
For a quick overview, some of these recommendations include encouraging people to join unions, plan social lunches, and attend regular trainings, as well as updating those trainings as necessary. However, updates are likely essential, as one anonymous respondent said: “They try by following all the recommended training and reporting systems. This always fails. »
“The current problem with training is that managers do not think they are obliged to attend training, when in reality, they are the ones who should be targeted!” Kanani said. “We should also use mandatory training as a way to be accepted into member organizations like the RAS.”
Other recommendations, however, would likely have more concrete results, such as making reporting procedures more transparent and imposing a strict timetable during which a report must be processed.
A “damning” report
For context, the 2020 RAS survey included questions such as: “How often, if at all, have you personally been subjected to any type of bullying and harassment in your workplace in the last 12 months” and “if you have not been bullied or witnessed bullying, harassment, or other unwanted behavior, would you be able to report it if you ever did?” »
It was distributed by the RAS via email to “members, contact points in academia, space agencies and industry”, according to the report, which helps build a picture of the types of professions represented. According to Kanani, some of those interviewed also specifically stated that they worked for NASA or ESA.
“We also promoted the investigation on the RAS website and social media,” RAS officials said.
To the first of these aforementioned questions, 56% of subjects responded that they had “never” personally been subjected to any type of workplace bullying or harassment in the past year. However, 41% responded that they had experienced some type of bullying or harassment during this period, 29% said they experienced it less than once a month, 6% at least once a fortnight, 5% at least once a week and 1% reported being bullied or harassed every day at work.
A single percentage may not seem like much, but out of a sample of 661 people, that means around six people experienced bullying or harassment in the workplace every day. It is for these reasons that the RAS openly describes this report as “damning”.
“The evidence in this report is a wake-up call to everyone in the world of astronomy and geophysics,” RAS President Mike Lockwood said in a press release issued by the society. “The first step to solving a problem is admitting it exists and gathering evidence about its scale and nature. Now that we have done so, it is clear that the problem is both insidious and systemic. “
Perhaps the worst aspect of the report concerns the demographics of those being bullied.
Women and non-binary people working in the field were 50% more likely than men to be harassed or intimidated; 12% of bisexual astronomers reported being bullied at least once a week; 5% of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer astronomers and geophysicists experienced bullying in the 24 months before the survey; and young people who are at relatively “precarious” stages of their careers were more likely to report experiencing bullying and harassment. This last group was dictated by whether the respondent was a student, under a temporary contract or under a permanent contract.
It was also found that disabled, as well as black and minority ethnic, astronomers and geophysicists were 40% more likely to be bullied than their non-disabled and white counterparts.
With this in mind, it is also worth considering that 87% of respondents were white, 10% were black, Asian and minority (including multiple ethnicities and black Caribbean) and 3% did not disclose their ethnicity. 80% described their sexual orientation as heterosexual/heterosexual, 7% as bisexual, and 3% as gay/lesbian. From a general perspective, not only does this exacerbate the results to some extent, but it also depicts a serious lack of diversity in the professions surveyed, which likely extrapolates to a serious lack of diversity in the general field.
It’s not surprising either. A grim 2019 report released by the American Institute of Physics, for example, found that African Americans are incredibly underrepresented in the field of astronomy due to systemic issues and the 2021 decadal survey released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has highlighted that racial diversity in the astrophysical sciences is “appalling.” In 2020, astronomy students at Yale University spoke out against institutional racism, and a study of more than 400 people showed how women of color in astronomy experience disproportionate levels of discrimination.
Additionally, sample size dynamics explain why the report includes a disclaimer that a total of 661 respondents constitutes a strong enough pool for robust statistical analysis, but “we cannot be certain that it is representative of our community and therefore of our conclusions. are only an indication of wider problems.
“This response rate,” the report says, “also means that we cannot examine intersectional issues while maintaining anonymity.”
However, as the report also notes, the data is largely comparable to the results of the University College Union’s 2013 report, which surveyed a staggering 14,667 participants working in higher education. In this report, 48% of respondents said they had been bullied at work.
“Ultimately, I don’t think this is just a space sector problem,” Kanani said. “I think if we look, we’ll find it everywhere.”
Given that the survey was initially dispersed in 2020, it’s also worth wondering if anything has improved for astronomy workplaces in recent years, especially considering how well the results were striking.
“Anecdotally, I think things have already changed in the positive,” Kanani said, noting that she thinks bullying and harassment are now discussed more on the ground, than training of bystanders and allies seems to enter the conversation and that intercourse is perhaps more likely to occur. Still, she stressed, “we haven’t done a new investigation yet, so I can’t be sure.”
“That said,” she added, “since 2020 there has been a lot more work conducted online, so perhaps the focus has shifted to online trolls etc. The world is also more unstable, especially for students and those on temporary contracts, and they are in any case among those who revealed a greater number of problems.
A full version of the report and all associated statistics can be viewed here.