
The Consequences of Sexual Harassment in Astronomy - curtis
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/sexual-harassment-geoff-marcy/410089/?single_page=true
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JesperRavn
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing)

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watersb
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.)

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JesperRavn
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.

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jhugg
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.

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xname2
What's the proper punishment in your mind? And which specific crime it fits
to?

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tptacek
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.

