A survey by the Brazilian Academy of Sciences bolsters calls to tackle the problem

In Brazil, one in two female researchers has faced sexual harassment

A survey by the Brazilian Academy of Sciences bolsters calls to tackle the problem

A few years ago, Maria, an undergraduate physics student at the time, faced a delicate and unwanted situation with her then-adviser at a university in southeastern Brazil. “I was the only young woman in our research group, and our adviser started sharing with us how his marriage was in trouble,” she says.

He began calling Maria in the middle of the night, sounding drunk. “In the first two calls, I thought it could be an urgent matter, but then I stopped answering, as I was getting scared,” says Maria, who requested anonymity owing to a fear of retaliation.

Every month, after hosting a sky-observation event with the public, the research group went to a bar. On one occasion, she says, the adviser “touched my thigh, and I got really annoyed — I left and he came after me, trying to hug me. I shoved him away and rushed back to my dorm. I could only cry when I got there.” Maria was unable to face going back to the laboratory for days.

When she did, she learnt that her adviser had removed her from the group — and she lost not only her undergraduate fellowship, but also her hopes of studying in that field, because the former adviser is a well-known name. She filed a complaint through the university’s support group for victims of sexual harassment, but she felt so bad about having been harassed that she couldn’t press forward with the case. “We never had an answer, and after some time I just gave up waiting for one,” she says.

A widespread problem

According to a report from the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) in Rio de Janeiro, this situation is common for female researchers in the country — especially those at early career stages. The report — Profile of the Early and Mid-Career Brazilian Scientist, published last September — finds that 47% of women have dealt with sexual harassment in Brazilian academia, compared with one in 10 men.

The 47-page report is based on a 2022 survey of more than 4,000 scientists who had earned their doctorates between 2006 and 2021. It aimed to uncover their views on aspects such as funding, international mobility and inclusion. The survey found that three-quarters of early-career scientists find it difficult to get funding for their research. Less than 40% of respondents have received funding from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, one of Brazil’s main public research-funding agencies, for example. Also, three out of four researchers said they do not have enough time to work on papers, because they have too many administrative duties.

Brazil lacks studies on the difficulties scientists face in their careers, and the report is an attempt to remedy that, says co-author Ana Chies Santos, an astronomer at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Denise Dau, strategic lead for combating violence against women in Brazil’s Women’s Ministry, based in Brasília, says that universities must look at the issue as a whole and provide education campaigns to curb harassment as well as systems to shelter and guide victims. The ABC report confirms data from other surveys, she adds.

Universities, she says, must have structures “to make sure victims feel safe to file complaints and an ethics committee to investigate and hold harassers responsible”.

Chies Santos says the academy has had a code of ethics in place since 2022, under which proven cases of harassment could lead to expulsion. The report’s results mirror those from other sectors, including the corporate world. “This is a problem that should be addressed not only in the academic environment, but in our society at large,” she adds.

Nanci Stancki da Luz, coordinator of the Gender and Technology Nucleus group at the Federal Technological University of Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil, argues that harassment should be treated very seriously in academia because research should be helping to find solutions to the problem. Instead, she says, academic hierarchies between professors and students often “reproduce this sort of violence”.

At all levels

But harassment is not confined to academic hierarchies, says Carla, a postdoctoral candidate in biosciences at another university in southeastern Brazil, who also requested anonymity because she has been the target of sexual harassment. “I used to have a colleague who would kiss the necks of female teammates in our laboratory,” she told Nature. She and her female colleagues would avoid working alone with him. “He would ask us very personal questions, such as if we had boyfriends or not — and if we did, if we would feel comfortable betraying them.”

Carla was alarmed to learn that he had asked others about when she was normally alone in the lab. One day, he appeared when she was by herself, and she made up a story that another lab mate would be returning soon. Carla reported him to the university’s rights commission and mediation office. His adviser — a woman — then removed him from the research project. “Action came from his adviser, not from the university, even if I used the official channels,” she adds.

Tânia Mara Campos de Almeida, a social scientist at the University of Brasília who researches gender and violence, says one of the biggest hurdles to addressing the problem is the lack of standardized data on sexual harassment in universities. “We don’t have official data compiled in a time series, because every university has its own methodology to deal with harassment complaints,” she says. Almeida, who co-edited a 2022 book on violence against women in Brazilian and other Latin American universities, says that Brazilian universities are starting to look at the problem more closely. Many have created permanent commissions for gender equity that harassment victims can go to, and most public universities have policies, complaint channels and awareness campaigns to combat the problem, she adds.

But institutional channels in universities usually are not enough, according to Da Luz. Victims of sexual harassment should feel safe not only to file complaints through university administrative processes, but also to file lawsuits if appropriate, she says.

“The end of gender violence involves our society as a whole,” Da Luz says. As recently as 1991, Brazil’s Supreme Court outlawed the ‘honour defence’ for men in Brazil who had killed their female partners. In 2006, Brazil introduced legislation to protect victims of domestic violence following a campaign led by Maria da Penha, a biopharmacist who was left paralysed following attacks by her husband. In 1998, Penha brought her case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, arguing that Brazil, by failing to investigate and punish perpetrators of violence, was directly responsible for her paraplegia.

New legislation

Now the country is looking for a similar turning point to protect women in the workplace, including at universities, says Dau. Last April, she says, Brazil started the process of ratifying the Violence and Harassment Convention, introduced in 2019 by the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency that advances social and economic justice by setting international labour standards. The convention aims to curb violence and harassment — including gender-based harassment — in the workplace. To be adopted, the convention must be approved by Brazil’s Congress.

To tackle harassment in academia, the secretariat that Dau leads is collaborating with the Ministry of Education. “Universities have their autonomy,” Dau says, “but we are talking with [the ministry] to create harassment-prevention and ethics committees, which several public universities already have. We have created a working group to discuss the best ways to approach the issue.”

Almeida says that the report, which documents the size of the problem, is an important first step — but the culture of science still has a long way to go: “There’s still a cyphered message that says that women — even [while] making immense efforts to be recognized for their ideas — are an object. And this is a way to disqualify women in the academic environment.”

Maria, who switched disciplines and who graduated last year, says her university does not deal with cases like hers effectively, because there is one official complaint channel that covers more than a dozen campuses. “The complaint office is just there for us to say it exists, but students in each campus look for different ways to deal with harassment and demand solutions,” she says. Universities, she adds, should care for their students’ mental health at the same level that they care for the volume and quality of research production. “We just need universities to take harassment seriously and go beyond beautiful — but empty — discourse.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00045-4

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Meghie Rodrigues