Hi all, its me again with a fresh new beef to toss onto the grill. This one requires some context.
Lately, #MeToo, the movement started over a decade ago by Tarana Burke, has been absorbed into academic discourse. In the sciences, this has manifested into #MeTooSTEM and #MeTooPhD–with very vocal femmes and men in science taking to Twitter and other venues to throw their voices into the fray. Much of the discourse revolves around whether men who have been accused and found guilty of sexual harassment should lose funding or be barred from receiving funding from agencies like the NSF and NIH. There is also the larger practice now of broadcasting the whisper network–where noted Twitter personalities post the collected accusations and investigations of predators in STEM. For an example, on Twitter, Jonathan Eisen posted a thread of all the accusations and investigations against theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss in response to Krauss’s announcement of “retirement” from ASU. There is also the list by @GeoEdResearch which compiles data on all known harassers in STEM from publicly available data.
While I was initially heartened by these conversations in the digital space, I am now shocked by the cadence in which male professors talk about female students. Whenever #MeTooSTEM comes out around (male) faculty, I get 2 responses. The first is to turn #MeToo into a misogynistic joke that revolves around the idea that men in general should avoid hanging out with women to avoid giving said women fodder for an accusation. It’s a joke that often comes from white “ally” men in private with me, because they think they’ve earned the right to be problematic through their public advocacy (or personal connection).
The second reaction I get from men is that they need to be wary of women of all times, because a single accusation in the current era will destroy their careers–even if that accusation is proved to be false. Don’t get it twisted and think some troglodyte born in 1950 said this to me; instead, it was a junior faculty usually labelled as a “progressive” who said this in response to a question about how male faculty should behave in these “changing times”.
Hearing a faculty member say this to me was devastating, because it proved to me that if anything, even supposedly progressive faculty believe that #MeToo is something aimed or able to hurt men; and not as a tool for social justice and progress. The idea that women have enough power to destroy the careers of men with false accusations is wildly out of tune with current realities of the power dynamics between men and women, both in society and in academia. #MeTooSTEM is only scary to (certain) men because they’re never actually taken the time to actually interrogate which behaviors they’ve gotten away with because of the patriarchal underpinnings of society, and which ones are actually accepted by the people around them. Trust me, if multiple allegations against Florian Jaeger did not take him down and led to other faculty leaving in protest, then a false accusation against white men in academia is even less likely to ruin any man’s career.
The truth of the matter is that these reactions to #MeTooSTEM are rooted in misogynistic views held about women, their bodies, and the role of women and femme-coded people in society at large. If we protest harassment and the men who perpetrate it, we are shrews and stuck up b*tches looking to ruin the career of men who don’t deserve to have their “genius” derailed. If we stay quiet, and take the abuse or run from it, we get blamed for the damage done to our careers because we didn’t endanger ourselves by coming forward. Being a women in STEM is playing the ultimate game of 4D chess, with the advance knowledge that a single wrong move could end our careers.
Somehow, despite the fact that men in STEM have overwhelmingly gotten away with predatory behavior and harassment, it’s still women who have to deal with and work against every bit of fallout from it. Truthfully, if you are a man in STEM who sincerely believes that female students-especially ones in your lab-are a potential liability for you, then you shouldn’t have female students, period. In fact, you probably shouldn’t be in any role where you have to advise anyone within a hierarchical power structure, because these kinds of beliefs and behaviors show that you are critically incapable of understanding power structures and how to participate within them without hurting other people.
If we are going to actually stop the rampant sexual harassment and predatory behavior that permeates academia, then men need to start getting serious about interrogating the power structures that they dominate and their own maneuvering through social spheres. This starts by not giving into misogynistic fears about women and our motivations, and also by taking accountability for the times that boundaries are overstepped. Things are changing, the train towards equity is moving; and if you don’t want to get to a place where women are free to participate in academia without having to fight for survival everyday, then leave.
signing off,
one of those stuck up b*tches