09/01/2021

Revisiting | Breaking the Silence:

Scholarly communication's #MeToo moment

Author’s note: It gives me no great pleasure to revisit this post – I’d like nothing more than a world in which we have no need to talk about this topic again. But the steady stream of high-profile cases over the past few years makes it clear that harassment of and violence against women is still very much part of our culture – including that of our workplaces. Andrew Cuomo’s case is perhaps the most pernicious, as his behavior was far more the “garden variety” harassment that so many women experience and is thus more easily dismissed.

We have definitely seen shifts in the right direction, breaking a longstanding and deafening silence and exposing how predators in senior influential positions abuse their power to harass, humiliate, and bully. The #MeToo movement has contributed to a significant increase in public awareness of the scale of the problem — and a noteworthy acknowledgement from systems of power – including universities and organizations – that this behavior must be eradicated. Employers are no longer as reticent to deliver harsh penalties to high-profile or high-performing offenders (as we’ve seen recently in our own world with the firing of prominent biologist David Sabatini by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

But not all progress has been positive. There has been a backlash against women who choose to come forward, a phenomenon we saw quite clearly in the case of Christine Blasey Ford. (This concern about failure of due process is one reason why HHMI’s careful and independent review of David Sabatini is so important.) But there has also been a different kind of backlash in the workplace. It was assumed that women would benefit from bringing these issues to light, but recent research suggests not. The men surveyed are markedly more reluctant to hire attractive women, to hire women for jobs involving closer interpersonal interactions with men, and to have one-on-one meetings with female colleagues. This is a clear loss for working women. Travel, mentoring and networking opportunities aren’t niceties – they’re integral to how work functions and to career development. Excluding women simply isn’t a legitimate response to our demands that we should no longer have to tolerate discrimination or harassment in the workplace.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.