04/03/2018

#MeToo and Your Members

As industry leaders, how associations respond to sexual harassment matters

Two years before the #MeToo movement, the American Astronomical Society faced a sexual harassment firestorm. A prominent astronomer—a college professor who had once been honored with a prestigious AAS award—was found to have harassed multiple women and ultimately resigned from his post at the University of California-Berkeley. Then-AAS President C. Megan Urry, writing in Scientific American, called it a “wake-up call to reform our field.”

“As a professional astronomer, I have seen this behavior push women out of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM),” Urry wrote. “I am angry that so many bright, ambitious, eager young scientists have had their dreams crushed, and I am sad that the world will not benefit from the discoveries and innovations those women (and it is most often women who are targeted) would have given us.”

AAS set out to explore the scope of harassment in the field, and the findings were stark. In a survey of more than 400 astronomers and planetary scientists, “a quarter of the respondents said they felt unsafe in their workplace in the last five years as a result of their gender,” says Christina Richey, former chair of the society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and coauthor of the study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last July.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.