Sexual harassment in science: biologists in India speak out Why does the country’s sexual-harassment law sometimes fail to safeguard women?
Nature interviewed 12 female wildlife researchers who say they were harassed while working at conservation organizations in India
It seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime for AM, a young Indian graduate student who loved studying reptiles. In December 2015, she began fieldwork for her master’s thesis at a non-profit organization’s turtle conservation programme.
That New Year’s Eve, the 21-year-old student attended a party with her colleagues at her male supervisor’s house. At around 11 p.m., AM felt the party was getting too rowdy, so she retreated into a bedroom for some quiet and to call her parents to wish them a happy new year. Her supervisor followed her, sat next to her on the bed and leaned in for a kiss.
“He sat on the bed and tried to grope my breasts and kiss me at the same time,” she recalled later. “It all happened in a matter of seconds.” Before he could do any more, she pushed him away and walked out of the room.
The issue of sexual harassment among conservation biologists in India came to light last year, when AM and many other women described their experiences on an Instagram account called Women of the Wild India, which profiles women working in conservation biology and related fields in the country. Akanksha Sood, a wildlife filmmaker who runs the Instagram account, says she receives more complaints of misconduct than she makes public. “It’s not just women, it’s also men who write of witnessing situations and feeling guilty of not having done anything,” she says. “We’ve enabled this kind of working culture where things are brushed under the carpet.”
Nature interviewed 12 female researchers who say they were harassed while working at Indian conservation biology organizations. The allegations involve three men at different organizations. Nature has reviewed e-mails, instant messages and other evidence that shows the women informed others about their allegations of sexual harassment and other kinds of abuse, and that some brought their concerns to the attention of their organizations.
They described incidents including multiple physical sexual advances, receiving sexually explicit messages and letters and, in one case, being manipulated into a non-consensual sexual relationship. More evidence comes from other researchers who say they have heard reports from colleagues about being harassed. The stories point to a broader pattern of misconduct and verbal abuse by some high-ranking people in conservation science in India towards younger women in their charge.
Sexual harassment in science is rife in many nations and scientific fields. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reported in 2018 that 58% of women employed in all academic disciplines in the United States have faced harassment. This is a particular problem in research fieldwork, which often takes place in remote sites that make it harder for people to keep their distance from would-be harassers or to seek help.
In 2013, India enacted a law that is intended to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, and legal scholars say it is, in theory, one of the strongest of its kind in the world. But critics argue that there are major problems with its implementation. For example, the law preserves the confidentiality of all participants, including perpetrators, in workplace sexual-harassment investigations, even if the process determines that someone committed harassment. (As a result, this article does not mention the names of people or Indian organizations involved in particular cases.)
Problems in the field
The field of conservation science is smaller and more competitive in India than in many other countries, which creates an atmosphere that makes all kinds of workplace abuse — including bullying and verbal abuse — more likely, scientists say.
And the power dynamics in the field are skewed against women. In India in 2020–21, women made up 74% of graduate students and postgraduates in ecological subjects such as zoology, environmental science and botany, but most leaders in these fields in the country are men. That’s also true for other areas of science. An analysis by BiasWatchIndia, a website that tracks gender bias in Indian science, found that 17% of faculty members in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects in 2020–21 were women1.
There’s another factor at work in some of the cases of harassment in conservation science in India: it is common for young students to share close living quarters with their supervisor or other colleagues while doing temporary placements far from their homes for reasons including safety and cost concerns.
These factors played a part in the cases of AM and four other women Nature spoke to, who say that between 2014 and 2023, they were sexually assaulted by the same man, a senior researcher with a turtle conservation programme run by a series of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that received funding from the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA), headquartered in North Charleston, South Carolina. Another female researcher told Nature that the same man had verbally abused her.
Two of the women told Nature that between 2019 and 2020, they complained — either directly or through others — to TSA representatives in the United States that the man had sexually harassed them; another reported verbal abuse. They shared their concerns with TSA representatives, they say, because they believed the organization had been overseeing most aspects of the turtle research programme.
Nature has seen some of the communications between the TSA representatives and the women and their intermediaries from that time, in which the complaints were discussed. Although they don’t contain direct mention of sexual harassment, they do mention “harassment” and “physical harassment”, and one discusses India’s law designed to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. The women told Nature they had specifically mentioned sexual harassment in phone calls with TSA representatives.
In a statement, a TSA spokesperson told Nature that during the period 2019 to 2020, the organization’s senior management was not informed about the allegations of sexual harassment against the man. The spokesperson says that at the time, the organization had received different complaints from two women: one alleged that the man had created a “hostile work environment” and the other said the man was deliberately damaging her turtle research.
The TSA spokesperson also says the organization provided the information about the man to his employer, one of the Indian NGOs. It considered that organization to be responsible for managing working conditions and says the NGO had agreed to comply with India’s laws relating to the prevention of workplace sexual harassment.
In March 2023, TSA received a whistleblower complaint from a woman in India alleging that the man had sexually harassed her. According to TSA’s statement, this complaint was the first of its kind it had received, and it advised the woman to file a complaint with her employer, its partner organization in India.
According to TSA, the partner organization said an investigation would be conducted and that it was not permitted to share details with TSA. Then, on 22 May 2023, TSA announced that its partnership with the Indian organization was ending.
Illustration by Patrycja Podkościelny
The TSA spokesperson told Nature that the organization “denies that it shirked any responsibilities” and that during the time it had partnerships with NGOs in India, it never received a complaint suggesting that the partners were not complying with India’s laws relating to sexual harassment.
AM says she spoke up publicly in 2023 because the man was hindering her research, in part by making it difficult for her to get funding. She and others say they finally felt safe enough to speak out because they had moved abroad for graduate studies.
Uma Ramakrishnan, an ecologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, says that young women in conservation biology are already under stress because Indian society expects them to get jobs in fields viewed as conventional for women, such as accounting and computer science. Harassment can be the final straw for some of them. “What is devastating is to see how people feel after those experiences,” Ramakrishnan says. “Their confidence is completely destroyed.”
Legal limits
In theory, there are safeguards to help protect women in such situations. In 2013, India enacted the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, colloquially known as the PoSH Act. The law was the result of decades of feminist and human-rights activism, says Adrija Dey, a social scientist at the University of Westminster in London, who studies sexual harassment in South Asian academia.
Under the PoSH Act, all workplaces — including universities and non-profit organizations with more than ten employees — must set up an internal committee to investigate any claims of harassment. Organizations with fewer employees can instead use a local government committee. Sexual harassment is defined by the PoSH Act as any behaviour, direct or implied, that is sexual in nature and unwelcome.
Megha Mehta, a lawyer based in New Delhi, says the PoSH Act makes it easier for people who have been harassed to lodge complaints, because the information is kept confidential. Without the law, those affected would have to file police reports and take part in criminal cases, which would mean confronting their harassers publicly. “In theory and practice, PoSH is better than a criminal trial,” Mehta says.
Although the PoSH law is comprehensive on paper, it is not always well implemented. In May 2023, the Indian Supreme Court concluded that most women hesitate to report harassment under the PoSH Act. “It is disquieting to note that there are serious lapses in the enforcement of the Act even after such a long passage of time,” Justices Hima Kohli and A. S. Bopanna wrote in their judgment. They also wrote that women do not know who to approach with their complaints, and that many do not trust the process or the outcome.
Some of the women who say they complained to TSA representatives about harassment told Nature that they did not file PoSH complaints, because they were young when the harassment happened and were unaware of the process. Another barrier is that the time limit for filing a PoSH complaint is generally three months from the date of the incident.
Illustration by Patrycja Podkościelny
Even if they had received training and information about how to file complaints, some women said they feared there would be professional repercussions if they did so. AM says her supervisor stopped advising her on her dissertation after she rebuffed his sexual advances. And she felt isolated at her field site, which was located in a patriarchal state that has a high incidence of crimes against women. “It felt like he had instructed people in the organization not to help me,” she says. “This was the worst experience of my life.”
In other cases, the women worried that their families would ask them to leave their profession if they spoke up. “My family was not really supportive of me pursuing a career in wildlife science, so for them to know that at the first internship I went to, something happened, they will not let me study or be in the field with men anymore,” one woman said, explaining why she didn’t speak up publicly sooner. She told her parents only seven years after the incident. Rather than filing formal complaints, women warn each other about the men to avoid, says Tiasa Adhya, an ecologist at the Fishing Cat Conservation Alliance in Mumbai, who says she was harassed earlier in her career at a different organization.
Barriers to reporting
Some researchers in India have apparently been harassing women for decades. They include a prominent conservation biologist who handed sexually explicit letters to his PhD student, one of which was seen by Nature, and who paid unwanted attention to many female colleagues over a period of 20 years. Fears of repercussions stopped people speaking out, one ecologist who experienced the behaviour told Nature.
In 2018, some women got together to discuss whether they should file a formal complaint about the male biologist, but many backed out because this person was on their funding committees or board of trustees, the ecologist says. “[They said] ‘we don’t want to dig up the past’.”
Three women finally filed a formal complaint under the PoSH Act with his workplace that year.
Under the act, an investigating committee can make recommendations only to the employer, with the most serious consequence being termination of the employee’s contract. There can be no criminal punishment.
And women say there are disincentives to making complaints through the PoSH process. One of the three women harassed by the same prominent scientist told Nature that even though she is well established in her career, she still worried about what her colleagues would say if she made a PoSH complaint because people would hear and talk about it, despite the fact that it is supposed to be confidential.
Vrinda Grover, a lawyer based in New Delhi whose practice focuses on Indian Supreme Court cases, says she urges women to file criminal complaints even though taking that route is not easy. “Unfortunately, courts don’t treat sexual harassment with much seriousness,” she says. “There is a constant panic in the legal process that, ‘oh, these are all false cases and the man is going to get defamed’.”
This leaves women with few options. “If you challenge the hierarchy, you’re a bad person; you are disrespectful,” Ramakrishnan says. “If you accept [the harassment], you might be in trouble.”
The confidentiality granted to perpetrators by the PoSH Act can create problems for people who have been harassed, because it places the entire investigation under wraps, even if guilt is established. The conservation non-profit groups that Nature investigated did not issue public notices of their investigations or results, in accordance with the law.
When survivors complain on social media, it signals the failure of due process, says Mehta. “I wouldn’t judge anybody who uses #MeToo because if they’re doing it, it means the system has failed them. But #MeToo cannot be a solution,” she says.
Things are starting to change. Since the revelations by Women of the Wild India on Instagram, some conservation institutes have held workshops to educate employees and institutions on reporting and preventing sexual harassment, Adhya says. And an informal group of 19 wildlife ecologists and conservationists, called CEASE (Conservationists and Ecologists Against Sexual Harassment), has created guidelines so that people in India who have been harassed know their rights. Its website clarifies the legal framework and discusses the challenges of working at field sites.
But for now, some of the conservation biologists who have experienced sexual harassment in India say that speaking out on social media is the best way to warn others, when history shows that using formal channels has had little impact. “My only hope for speaking up,” says AM, “was that other women and also men who want to join the organization would not have to go through such a terrible experience.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02400-x
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Gayathri Vaidyanathan
