building strategies for challenging male dominance in academia
(prepared text of a talk for a UC Berkeley Gender Equity Center panel on Strategies for Women in STEM)
So first some trigger warnings: I’m going to talk about sexual violence at various points during this. None of the descriptions will be very graphic, but I just want to let folks know.
When the porn actor James Deen was publicly outed as a rapist, one of the things I read shortly afterward was about the revelation from Sydney Leathers that another porn performer “told me when I first got into the business that I should avoid him — that he has boundary issues, basically that he tries to break women.”
The article I read drew a connection to an older post where Cliff Pervocracy talked about posting publicly about a rapist in a community he belonged to, without mentioning the rapist's name or any identifying information:
I immediately got several emails from other members of that community saying “oh, you must mean X.” Everyone knew who he was! … The reaction wasn’t “there’s a rapist among us!?!” but “oh hey, I bet you’re talking about our local rapist.” Several of them expressed regret that I hadn’t been warned about him beforehand, because they tried to discreetly tell new people about this guy. Others talked about how they tried to make sure there was someone keeping an eye on him at parties, because he was fine so long as someone remembered to assign him a Rape Babysitter.
The metaphor Cliff used to describe this was a “missing stair”:
Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? "Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there's a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it's okay because we all just remember to jump over it."
I’m bringing this up because I think it shows one of the pitfalls of having a conversation like this one. Why do women in STEM need strategies for sustaining ourselves? In one sense, yes, it’s because our fields are male-dominated — but we’re not just talking about numerical dominance here, we’re talking about men engaging in dominating behaviors, we’re talking about being enmeshed in power structures that ensure their continued dominance. We need strategies for sustaining ourselves because men in our departments will talk over us, they will subtly — or not so subtly — turn their chairs away from us in seminars, they will call us abrasive when we insist on being heard, they will hit on us at conferences, they will find ways of reminding us that they’re attracted to us, they will ask us if we’re someone’s wife or secretary, they will treat our office buildings like their locker rooms or living rooms, they will walk up behind us and give us unsolicited massages, they will give us unwanted hugs and kisses and write it off as awkwardness, they will tell us they’re still not convinced women aren’t just worse at math.
And of course they have special ways of exerting dominance over women of color, trans and gender non-conforming women, neurodivergent women, women with disabilities, fat women, women from working-class backgrounds — they will tell us they’re surprised someone with our background made it this far, they will systematically misgender us, they will ask to touch our hair, they will make thinly-veiled suggestions that we probably benefited from affirmative action, they will make “no excuses” absence policies, they will cut our dependent care, they will tell us we really have to accept that research is a more-than-full-time job and if we can’t commit to working 80-hour weeks they’re not really sure why we’re still here.
This is the kind of thing I’m thinking about when I think about being in a male-dominated field. Men’s numerical dominance in our fields isn’t some kind of weird coincidence — it’s directly related to their behavioral and institutional dominance in our departments and in other STEM spaces we’ve had to work our way through.
So, on the one hand, I think our need for survival strategies is immediate and pressing. But I want to make sure that we’re not forgetting that the problem is never our lack of strategies — the problem is that we’re in an oppressive environment that enables inappropriate and abusive behavior. I think it’s especially important to recognize that given that this event is being put on by the Gender Equity Center, which is among other things a branch of the administration. That’s important because the idea of “survival strategies” feels really different to me depending on who it’s coming from. I’ve really valued hearing from other women in the math department who the broken stairs in our community are, knowing that these are women who are engaged in struggle to fix the stair — but the UC administration is empowering and enabling the male domination of our fields, and so their interest in shifting the focus from systemic change onto short-term individualized strategies is pernicious.
Let me clarify that I don’t want to be blaming Cici and Mac for any of this — I don’t think Claude Steele came to Cici and said “we need you to refocus sexual violence activists on a neoliberal frame about what they should be doing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and Cici was like “yep, that sounds like a good plan, as the UC’s director of gendered branding I will do my best.” But I do want to encourage all of us to be thinking carefully not only about how these events function in our interactions with one another, but also how they function institutionally.
So that was a long preamble, and I do want to move to, in some sense, talking about strategy — strategies for sustaining ourselves by fighting back against the structures of male dominance in our fields. The strategies I’ll talk about aren’t super concrete — the strategic considerations that will affect the movement to end sexual violence at UC Berkeley are, I think, only beginning to be understood. But I want to share a little bit of a strategic frame that was developed at the Survivors’ Symposium that was held a couple of weeks ago here on campus — we ended up with a pretty broad consensus about how we’re thinking about our strategies moving forward.
The first point is something I’ve already started to talk about in passing, but want to emphasize a little more fully. Sexual violence in the UC is not mostly a product of the specific people we have in specific positions of power. I happen to think that Claude Steele is a bad person — that he’s venal, that he doesn’t really believe in public universities, that his instincts are to identify with perpetrators of sexual violence rather than survivors. And I think the ways in which he’s a bad person are evidenced in the fact that his response to Sujit Choudhry was to give him a slap on the wrist for egregious violations of an employee’s bodily autonomy, personal space, and sense of safety and respect — a couple of months after Choudhry had been involved in securing Steele a permanent position in the law school.
But many of the problems in what happened in the response to Choudhry’s assault on his assistant had nothing to do with any personal problems with Claude Steele. Whoever is sitting in Steele’s chair will have incentives to act the way Steele did. Their personal prestige will be tied to the prestige of the university, which will be tied to the prestige of its law school dean; their job recruiting prestigious faculty will be easier if those faculty have the perception that their jobs are secure, and that the university isn’t rife with harassment and assault; research grants are often given to faculty rather than to the university, and so the lab or research project may disappear with the harassing professor; and so on.
One of the ways we know this is that Sujit Choudhry is not the first dean of the law school to resign over what is politely termed “sexual misconduct.” In 2000, John Dwyer sexually assaulted an unconscious law student; he also resigned, and then as now it was not the result of a successful administrative process. Robert Bergdahl, who was the chancellor then, "recognized the law professor's accomplishments as dean” and assured the community that Dwyer's "decision to resign from the UC Berkeley faculty at this time is his own.”
One thing that has changed since then is that the Daily Cal has gotten better. In 2002, they ran an article quoting only men. Here are some of the things those men said:
Michael Smith said that this man, whom students had long been calling the Bill Clinton of Boalt Hall, was “very scrupulous about the performance of his duties.” Stephen Barnett said that "Ironically he's been good at trying to heal some of the gender divisions of the faculty”; “I hope the administration has a good explanation for this."
A Stanford University human resources officer who wished to remain anonymous said it was strange for Dwyer to have relinquished his faculty position. "(Tenured professors) essentially have lifetime employment if you will," he said. "It's unusual for them to give up their position for anything."
I’m not saying Robert Bergdahl was a better or worse person than Claude Steele or Nicholas Dirks — I wasn’t around then, I don’t really know — but one thing that’s clear is that the pattern outlasts the people in these positions, and I think that’s partly because the incentives and power structures outlast the people in these positions. So by all means let’s call on Claude Steele to resign, but let’s also not put someone else in a position with that kind of power and that kind of incentives.
We also talked some about the way UC power structures channel dissent, of all kinds — focusing on the channeling of reports of instances of sexual violence, and of dissent about sexual violence policy, but my guess is this will be familiar to folks who have been engaged in struggle on a variety of issues. Many of us have this warm fuzzy feeling when we talk to someone who seems to be supportive, to be genuinely open to our ideas — and often I think those people are supportive, and genuinely open to our ideas. It’s nice to be invited to give input into administrative processes. On sexual violence I’ve had this experience with especially Mari Knuth-Bouracee and Virginia Duplessis from the CARE advocates’ office, and from the faculty on the Diversity, Equity, and Campus Climate committee of the senate; on bathrooms I remember getting this feeling from Billy Curtis. And in all those cases I think it was genuine. But in all of these cases these wonderful and sympathetic people didn’t actually have a policy mandate — they were being asked to serve (or sometimes voluntarily serving) as liaisons between activists and reactionary forces higher in the administration.
There’s a parallel here to the Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination, which I think is much less well-intentioned. Survivors are funneled to OPHD, but all OPHD does is “investigate” those claims and forward them to other bodies that make actual decisions about responses. And often in these processes, there’s something lost in that go-between process. Folks who have filed complaints with OPHD don’t automatically get to see the file OPHD makes on them, but folks who have requested those files have found deeply victim-blaming accounts of how they’re probably reading too much into an innocent interaction, or this is really about their insecurity about their academic incompetence, and so on. Similarly — although, again, more innocently — when Erin Greer and I went to the Coordinated Community Response Team Education and Prevention working group representing the graduate student workers’ union, the working group discussed some critiques of the online “Campus Clarity” trainings, but we also mentioned that we thought no online training was going to be enough, and if we wanted the scale of our educational efforts to match the scale of rape culture acculturation, we needed to be thinking about course requirements. My read of the room was that there was broad sympathy for that, although there were no formal votes — but none of the more aggressive ideas made it into the working group’s presentation to the full CCRT, which we weren’t invited to attend. Now, I don’t think we were lied to, in any meaningful sense — I think this is a natural outgrowth of the fact that the working group we were on didn’t have a policy mandate, nor did the full CCRT as a body — so folks wanted to bring up those ideas that there was a plausible, more or less immediate path to achieving. But I think this is something to be careful of, as activists — the sense we get when we talk to someone in the administration who’s on our side, but whose job is to listen to us and be on our side, not to make policy.
And again, like I was saying before about the folks who set up this panel — I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to blame these people who are genuinely listening to us, and are genuinely on our side. But the administrative decision to create jobs like that functions differently than the individual decisions of people in those jobs.
The second thing picks up on the OPHD thread: the Title IX investigation process is too harmful to survivors to be a result of pure incompetence. There are a whole range of decisions that have been made in designing that process, and at every stage we’ve made the wrong one. Here are just a few examples:
Someone comes to you, a university officer engaged in the prevention of harassment and discrimination, and says they’ve been assaulted. What is your first priority, the one you start with and the one to which the bulk of the process is devoted? Our answer is “the first priority is to decide if the survivor is lying.” This wasn’t a decision we had to make — a lot of us take for granted that we should be approaching harassment and assault like a criminal-justice issue, but while it may be that, it’s also a public-health issue, a mental-health issue, a civil rights issue. And our responses to public health crises and civil rights crises don’t center on court-like processes for adjudicating veracity of people reporting those crises.
There’s very little variation in the process for responding to sexual violence based on the needs or vulnerabilities of the survivor, and a great deal based on the structural position of the perpetrator. Every survivor — regardless of who they might try to talk to, what they might need — is funneled through the Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination, which then writes a victim-blaming report. Where that report goes depends not on the survivor’s needs, but on the perpetrator’s position — if the perpetrator is a student, it goes to the student conduct office, if the perpetrator is faculty it goes through the process described in the faculty code of conduct, and so on.
Survivors are told by the OPHD not to talk to anyone, and especially not press. This is despite what we’ve seen as a result of administrative processes, compared to what we’ve seen as a result of public activism.
There’s really no mechanism in place for putting survivors in contact with one another.
OPHD investigates these claims more or less individually — in the cases of Blake Wentworth and Geoff Marcy, we know that lots of people had separately tried to go through administrative processes, and those claims were investigated (or the survivors were talked out of pursuing investigations) separately, rather than looking at a pattern of egregious behavior.
A third strategic thread we discussed at the symposium has to do with the role of power in the process.
Here I’m going to borrow and critique something from the recent open letter from feminist faculty, not because I think it’s especially better or worse than other feminist responses to campus sexual harassment, but because it was on my mind and it gives a pretty clear illustration:
“The solution is not another education campaign or public statement of administrative resolve but a functional system for reporting harassment and removing harassers from positions of power over their victims."
So, from this, which basically reflects the consensus in this regard, there are three kinds of sexual harassment and sexual violence policy:
Outside the context of a reported incident, you make sure people know it’s not okay to harass or assault people. (These professors are trying to draw focus away from this.)
You think about the process by which harassment gets reported to the administration.
In the context of a reported incident, you address the power of the perpetrator over the survivor, to protect the survivor from continued harassment and intimidation.
That is: with potential perpetrators, we worry about their hearts and minds; with alleged perpetrators, we worry about their due process rights but other than that we think of this as an interaction between the survivor and the administration; and only with confirmed perpetrators do we start to worry about their power over others.
But of course the power of the perpetrator over the survivor, and in general their power within the institution, colors every part of the process. One quick example of this: The Campus Clarity trainings assure you that if you report sexual violence, you will be protected from retaliation. One graduate student in a STEM department accompanied an undergrad to report harassment by her advisor. A few days later, her advisor was in her office asking her about it.
Now, those of you who are graduate students — I think this also applies to postdocs in many hard sciences — think about what it would mean to protect you from retaliation from your advisor or PI. Many of us are in positions where our entire relationship to the academic community depends on our advisor’s good will — their active good will, not just non-retaliation. You need your advisor to introduce you to people doing similar work in other places; your advisor may be one of very few people qualified to speak to the quality of your work; your research funding, or even the funding for your entire lab, may depend on your advisor’s presence. The withdrawal of any of these things may not be retaliation in any meaningful sense — some of them would result automatically from the loss of your advisor’s position of prestige and power, or from your advisor’s recusal from processes in which they had a conflict of interest because you had reported on them.
Remember in thinking about this that these are decisions that the academic community has made about how to structure research. We’ve decided that it makes sense to structure junior scholars’ relationships to the academic community as relationships to particular prestigious, more senior scholars, and it could have been otherwise — this isn’t mostly how other people’s relationships to their professional communities work. Even professional-class people: new high-school teachers may be assigned a mentor, but they also develop relationships with other teachers and with their professional community independently, and are encouraged to do so; interns at media organizations, who are extraordinarily vulnerable in lots of other ways, aren’t in a position where their relationship to the organization depends entirely on the good will of a particular supervisor; I don’t know much about medical internships but on Grey’s Anatomy at least, when Bailey went on maternity leave her interns were just assigned to a different resident and life went on. There are really very few professions structured the way ours is. And it’s also quite rare that grants for the work of an organization be given to particular people in organizations, rather than to the organizations themselves.
We’re still not sure how that broad strategic frame translates into tactics — I’d love to talk to those of you here about ideas for that. But let me sum up by giving a bullet-point account of what we, as an activist community, think are the key components of a strategy for dealing with sexual violence:
We need to rethink what kind of problem sexual assault and sexual harassment are, and what kind of responses we need. These problems are too deep and touch too many of us — there are too many survivors and too many perpetrators — for responses based on a criminal-justice framework to be enough. We also need to acknowledge that because the criminal justice system in the United States is so deeply racialized, the decision to use a criminal-justice framework is also a racialized decision.
We need to resist being managed. The university’s single most valuable asset is its brand, and we should expect institutional responses to value preserving that brand over preserving our safety. This means we need to resist being atomized, to connect to other survivors and activists, and to resist the funneling of our anger into administrative processes where it’s slowly whittled away. It also means the university will be most responsive when we align its brand-management interests with our interests in safety, by making our challenges as public as possible.
Treating the OPHD as a good-faith actor and asking it to change its practices may be a good tactic, but it isn’t a strategy.
We need to center the experiences of survivors, and respond in ways that honor those survivors’ particular needs.
We need to trust survivors.
When power structures are easy to abuse and there are incentives in place to abuse them, we need to challenge those structures, not just respond at the moment of abuse — or worse, after a months- or years-long fact-finding process in response to the moment of abuse.
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