The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has highlighted the “urgent” need to tackle cross-disciplinary bullying and harassment following a survey of 661 staff associated with the astronomy and geophysical professions.
In summary, 44% of respondents reported suffering in the workplace in the two years prior to the survey, and 65% of these respondents reported that reported concerns were either “ignored” or that their reports were not handled satisfactorily. To be clear, the survey was conducted in 2020 and the soft launch of the data was published in 2021. However, a full analysis of the results, which includes recommendations for moving forward from the glaring issues, called the Bullying and Harassment Report 2023, has just been published on 17 . of May.
“The results presented in this report are grim,” Emma Bunch, RAS president from 2020 to 2022, wrote in the report. “They make a strong case for change.”
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For example, there’s a response that says “one person who bullied me is on a code of conduct committee” – and that’s just a taste of some of the anonymous quotes that appear in the report to illustrate the breadth of concerns identified. within. Others express how those in positions of power and influence are seen as “invincible” and not punished – another says relationships with superiors make reporting or whistleblowing difficult.
“We don’t take the issues around reporting and the horrific cases that people report seriously,” Sheila Kanani, education, outreach and diversity officer at RAS and one of the report’s authors, told Space.com of her thoughts. the most disturbing aspect of these results. “Then the perpetrator goes on to have an extraordinary career and the victim is driven out of the field. I hate feeling powerless.”
It’s not a new problem
It is likely that the resurgence of this report comes at a time of weakness for the astronomy profession as a whole when it comes to allegations of bullying. A lengthy article published in Ars Technica in late 2023, for example, called on court cases, European Space Agency (ESA) documents, and personal accounts of ESA employees to reveal a disturbing pattern of bullying at the agency. The ESA has denied the allegations, according to this article, but the physical and spoken sources cited by the author raise clear doubts.
Earlier in 2020, Lund University in Sweden conducted two independent investigations that revealed that two top astronomers at the institution, Sofia Feltzing and Melvyn Davies, had bullied colleagues. The duo also appeared to have harassed 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 publicly shared allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace, as did a group of current (at the time) and former Blue Origin employees. And just this year, former SpaceX employee Michelle Dopakova sued SpaceX for violations such as sexual discrimination and retaliation.
“It’s a male-dominated field, very competitive and with little job security,” suggested Kanani, as to why this 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 work environment weren’t considered when things started.”
“Also,” she added, “universities as a whole suffer from bullying and harassment, with difficult supervisor-student relationships and no training in things like being an effective manager.”
It is therefore not surprising that the RAS decided to repeat this survey on bullying, especially as it proposed new recommendations for further pathways.
For a quick excerpt, some of these recommendations include encouraging people to join unions, planning social lunches, and keeping up with regular trainings, as well as updating those trainings as needed. But updates are probably key, as one anonymous respondent said: “They’re trying to do all the recommended training and reporting systems. It’s still failing.”
“The current training problem is that senior management don’t think they need to go to training, but in fact they are the ones we need to focus on!” Kanani said. “We should also use mandatory training as a way to be accepted into member organizations like the RAS.”
However, other recommendations would likely have more proactive outcomes, such as making reporting procedures more transparent and establishing a hard time frame within which a report must be addressed.
“Damn” message
For context, the RAS 2020 survey included questions such as: “How often, if ever, have you personally experienced some type of bullying and harassment in your workplace in the past 12 months” and “if you have not been bullied or witnessed bullying, harassment, or other unwanted behavior, would you feel safe if you ever did?”
The RAS circulated it via email to “members, points of contact at universities, space agencies and industry,” according to the report, which helps paint a picture of the kinds of professions represented. According to Kanani, some respondents also specifically stated that they worked for NASA or ESA.
“We also promoted the survey through the RAS website and social media accounts,” RAS officials said.
To the first of the above questions, 56% of the subjects answered that they had “never” been personally exposed to any type of workplace bullying and harassment during the previous year. However, 41% responded that they had experienced some form of bullying or harassment during this time 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% said being bullied or harassed at work every day.
A single percentage may not sound like much, but in a sample of 661 people, it means that about six people were bullied or harassed in their workplace every day. It is for these reasons that RAS blatantly calls this report “damning.”
“The evidence in this report is a wake-up call for 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 any problem is to admit that it exists and gather evidence of its extent and nature. Now that we’ve done that, it’s clear that the problem is both insidious and systemic.”
Perhaps the worst aspect of the report concerns the demographics of the bullies.
Women and non-binary people in the industry were 50% more likely than men to be harassed or bullied; 12% of bisexual astronomers reported being bullied at least once a week; 5% of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer astronomers and geophysicists had been bullied in the 24 months prior to the survey; and younger people in relatively “uncertain” stages of their careers were more likely to report being bullied and harassed. The second group was dictated by whether the respondent was a student, had a fixed-term contract or an open-ended contract.
The disabled, as well as black and ethnic minorities and astronomers and geophysicists, were also found to be 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 multi-ethnic and black Caribbean) and 3% did not state their ethnicity. 80% identified their sexual orientation as heterosexual/straight, 7% as bisexual and 3% as gay/lesbian. In terms of the big picture, not only does this detract from the findings to some extent, but it also points to a serious lack of diversity in the professions surveyed, which likely extrapolates to a serious lack of diversity in the general field.
This is also not surprising. For example, a scathing 2019 report by the American Institute of Physics found that African Americans are incredibly underrepresented in the field of astronomy due to systemic issues, and the Decadal Survey 2021 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine highlighted that racial diversity in the astrophysical sciences is “abysmal.” In 2020, Yale University astronomy students spoke out against institutional racism, and a study of more than 400 people showed how women of color in astronomy experience a disproportionate amount of discrimination.
Moreover, the dynamics of the sample size is why the report includes a disclaimer that the total of 661 respondents is a strong enough group for a thorough statistical analysis, but “we cannot be sure that it is representative of our community and therefore our findings are only indicative of broader issues.”
“This response rate,” the report says, “also means we cannot look at cross-cutting issues while maintaining anonymity.”
However, as the report also notes, the data is largely comparable to the results of a 2013 University College Union report that surveyed a staggering 14,667 participants working in higher education. In this report, 48% of respondents said they had been bullied at work.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s just a ‘space sector’ problem,” Kanani said. “I think if we look, we’ll find it everywhere.
Since the survey was originally scattered in 2020, it also questions whether anything has improved in astronomy workplaces over the past few years – especially given how remarkable the results have been.
“Anecdotally, I think things have already changed for the better,” Kanani said, noting that she believes bullying and harassment are now being discussed more in the field, that bystander and ally training seems to be entering the conversation, and that messages are perhaps more likely to occur. Still, she stressed, “We haven’t done a new survey yet, so I’m not sure.”
“That said,” she added, “since 2020, a lot more work has been done online, so perhaps the focus has shifted to online trolls and such. The world is also more unstable, especially for students and those on temporary contracts, and there are some of people who posted a higher number of problems anyway.”
You can view the full version of the report and all related statistics here.