Source: Science & Technology Australia
The survey was carried out over two weeks in late January and early February by the STA, which represents about 70,000 scientists. Nearly 60% of respondents worked in academia; the rest worked in the government (25%), the private sector (12%) or non-profit organizations (5%). The results form part of the STA’s submission to a national inquiry into sexual harassment in workplaces, run by the Australian Human Rights Commission.
This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril
BethAnn McLaughlin has no time for James Watson, especially not when the 90-year-old geneticist is peering out from a photo on the wall of her guest room at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Banbury Center.
“I don’t need him staring at me when I’m trying to go to sleep,” McLaughlin told a December 2018 gathering at the storied New York meeting center as she projected a photo of her redecorating job: She had hung a washcloth over the image of Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s structure, directed the lab for decades—and is well-known for racist and sexist statements.
The washcloth image was part of McLaughlin’s unconventional presentation—by turns sobering, hilarious, passionate, and profane—to two dozen experts who had gathered to wrestle with how to end gender discrimination in the biosciences. McLaughlin, a 51-year-old neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville, displayed the names of current members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She urged other NAS members—several of whom sat in the room—to resign in protest, “as one does.” She chided institutions for passing along “harassholes” to other universities. “The only other places that do this are the Catholic Church and the military,” she said.
In the past 9 months, McLaughlin has exploded into view as the public face of the #MeToo movement in science, wielding her irreverent, sometimes wickedly funny Twitter presence, @McLNeuro, as part cudgel, part cheerleader’s megaphone. In June 2018, she created a website, MeTooSTEM.com, where scores of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) have posted mostly anonymous, often harrowing tales of their own harassment. In just 2 days that month, she convinced the widely used website RateMyProfessors.com to remove its “red hot chili pepper” rating for “hotness.” And after launching an online petition, she succeeded last fall in spurring AAAS, which publishes Science, to adopta policy allowing proven sexual harassers to be stripped of AAAS honors.
“It’s clear that she has a voice and that people are listening,” says biologist Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and a co-organizer of the Banbury Center meeting. “She is really trying to change society,” adds Carrie McAdams, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who sought out McLaughlin by phone last year to discuss how to report long-ago harassment.
In November 2018, McLaughlin shared the second annual $250,000 Disobedience Award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in Cambridge for “ethical, nonviolent” civil disobedience. And, “impressed by the sheer force of her conviction” at the Banbury meeting, Erin O’Shea, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, later pledged the institute’s financial support for a nonprofit, #MeTooSTEM, that McLaughlin is founding to support survivors of sexual harassment.
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