The Consequences of Sexual Harassment in Astronomy | Hacker News Reader

The Consequences of Sexual Harassment in Astronomy

theatlantic.com

9 pointscurtis6 comments

The worst stories of sexual harassment I've heard have always been from women in the social sciences. I commented on this to two girls doing PhD's in social psychology, who were describing harassment by their faculty, and they agreed and thought that this was due to self-licensing[0]. That is, these faculty who had proven to themselves that they were good liberals, then had less qualms about their own behavior.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing

Thanks for the pointer to self-licensing. I am sure there are many such mistakes at play here.

(Also, in the context of gender issues, I felt weird when you referred to two Ph.D. students as "girls", because they probably are not children. I have lots of cognitive bias to work on, and so I try to be careful about words like that.)

I don't go out of my way to modify my language (although I can see how without extra context, like the fact that I met these people at a social event not a professional event, you might object in this particular case) because I don't believe that cultural attitudes to gender are the primary cause of this sort of harassment, or are a big problem in general.

On the contrary, I think that men whose behavior is harassing or otherwise immoral, are primarily responsible as individuals for their actions. This is closely related to my original point. I think that another bias is that people, especially men, who attain positions of power tend to be likable, either because that's what got them there, or because people tend to like powerful people. Therefore people make excuses for these men, blaming the culture in general for actions that are really the fault of the individual.

What's disappointing to me about his weak-sauce punishment, is that Berkeley is the kind of place that could actually weather a loss of a guy like that.

What's the proper punishment in your mind? And which specific crime it fits to?

For abusing a position of privilege and overwhelming power (he could end people's careers with a phone call!) in order to sexually harass women? Immediate termination seems like the obvious response.

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