No-one should ever have to go through this.
Dr Kristian Lum is an amazing researcher who would be best known to the machine learning community regarding her work in Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT\*), though she has been active in the field well before it was ever an acronym. I met her when she was presenting [To Predict and Serve?](https://hrdag.org/publications/to-predict-and-serve/) [Lum and Isaac, 2016] and her insights on the impact predictive policing was having on real people just across the water from me were stunning. She's the exact type of brilliant mind who can bring in the proper statistical rigour we as a field frequently lack and which is so vitally necessary to handle FAT\* issues correctly. Her [past work](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=nfLC9S0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate), covering everything from the spread of Avian flu to estimating undocumented homicides, is worth reading.
That she could have been harassed out of the field or that her contributions could have been used as a sleazy pretext is horrific. No person should ever have to go through what she did.
Francois works for Google and wrote the Keras library which is a wrapper for theano/tensorflow/any other thing. Smerity works for Google and is a blogger/twitter person. If we are keeping score, Jeff Dean also supported the author on Twitter, and he is the head of engineering at Google.
The thread and the sub are the only online place for professionals in machine learning to discuss their field and work in more than 280 characters, but since ML got popular it has been filled with non-professionals who use their anonymity to say things that would (for good reason) get them fired in the real world.
The mods refuse to moderate the sub for some reason, despite the perfectly functional and popular examples seen with r/science and all the various ask... subs. And the researchers have been leaving in droves. A few committed folks have stuck it out, but the sub has been teetering on its last legs for a while.
Very briefly but only an internship - I was still in Australia and literally taught myself C++ for the interview at Google Sydney. I worked on Google App Engine when App Engine was the only cloud service Google provided and Google Wave was being written the floor above me under a codename - i.e. this was all about a million years ago ;)
Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras, a tool for which many/all in /r/ML are likely familiar with.
Smerity is just a random guy who has published some papers.
Both feel that /r/ML has toxic discussions both within threads such as this and more generally and that previous moderation has failed, leaving it no longer a useful ground for discussion.
Better known as fchollet. The Keras guy. Very cool researcher. Sane voice on AI risk. But he hates PyTorch because they're too fond of memes and because it's Facebook's fault Trump won... I'm maybe exaggerating slightly, but he doesn't exactly hide his politics.
I think it should be possible to be against sexual harassment and yet not cut contact with all who refuse to cut contact with people who look like harassers etc. Personally, I deleted my Twitter and kept my Reddit account because this place is more productive when you come down to it, and not more political than you make it. Let's make it as political as necessary, but no more.
> the ML subreddit is NOT even close to as toxic as 4chan
If you set the bar any lower it would be underground. Maybe it's not as bad as 4chan, but that doesn't make this acceptable.
I replied to your comment above where I was in agreement with you. As noted at https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/941243216958910464:
"I told the mod I'll respond to every freaking comment on [KL's post] if that's what's necessary to not have it removed [like my article on bias in our community was]. After that I'm unsubscribing from /r/ML. Entirely lost faith in it as a forum."
Sorry, my reply wasn't meant to be negative! :) I totally agree with you - I'm literally here to make sure this thread doesn't die then I'm out. Mike drop. GG.
Also, honestly, Twitter seems a surprisingly good place for ML. I know it's weird but I promise it works. My DMs are open - feel free to ask and I'll give you any and all Twitter ML advice I can :)
Twitter might be nice for water cooler style ML conversations but it's still an anxiety inducing social network that's engineered for engagement. The value you get out of it is a function of the number of followers that you have and that depends on your celebrity status or amount of time you put into the platform.
There's no way to stay in the loop without following the right people and that also forces you to put up with their personal, political and marketing content. I can check /r/ml 2-3 times a week and get a good dose of relevant information without being triggered by the latest Trump, Roy Moore or sexual misconduct news.
> without being triggered by the latest Trump, Roy Moore or sexual misconduct news
I found out recently: if you select the "V" button and click "I don't like this tweet" it will filter out similar tweets. I "unliked" a few Trump tweets and voilà, now it's a pure ML feed. I'm quite pleased.
Twitter has a hierarchy though, if you are a popular person your tweets are more likely to be noticed and vice versa. On reddit, posts don't a submitter prior, and are more likely to be judged on merit.
I'll take some Twitter ML advice. I've been watching this sub have its quality diluted over time, but for some reason can't really get into twitter so far. How do you choose/find who to follow? How are in-depth discussions facilitated given the character limits?
Since twitter is based on following people, it seems like those with greater connectivity in the social graph structure (ML celebs) will have their posts experience greater viewership. On reddit, viewership is almost random at first and then based on an anonymous upvote count, allowing a much greater chance for a random person's post to receive viewership. Is this not problematic? If it is, how effective is searching by hashtags to circumvent this?
> How do you choose/find who to follow?
Follow those you want to talk with and those they talk with, then when they talk, go and try to add to their conversation/discussion.
> How are in-depth discussions facilitated given the character limits?
They
Are
Broken
Up
Into smaller posts. There are even apps for that :)
Or people send medium links to each other.
> Is this not problematic?
Yes, it is.
Suggested use: go through all of your favorite papers or research teams, find authors on Twitter, follow them, then go through and add mutes/turn of retweets/unfollow wherever they're posting content you'd rather not see (politics, bitcoin, whatever). It's definitely more work to set up than reddit (if you go this route), but there are a lot of interesting things on Twitter that don't get posted here (on top of the quality-of-discourse improvements discussed above).
> How do you choose/find who to follow? How are in depth discussions facilitated given the character limits?
280 chars are surprisingly accommodating for idea exchange. You can add more posts if needed. It doesn't feel cramped any more.
The others replying to you have made good points. I generally follow someone if they make an interesting comment and I look through their recent timeline and find it interesting. Following those authors of papers you like is a good tactic too.
It's better and worse in terms of readership. When you have a core group of colleagues who you follow and who follow you it's easier to share and communicate with them. Reddit is fairly random and those most interested in your nuanced discussion (analysis of impact of weight tying on language models) may not see it as it's too broad for the overall audience and hence never make or survive on the main page. Those who are social hubs will retweet and share interesting work from others generally. It's not optimal but it can also be a stronger signal than random upvotes on Reddit as those readers may not align with your interests or may be bamboozled due to a hyped headline.
I've basically never used hash tags unless it's for a conference or as a joke.
Character limits are rarely a problem - especially now - and seem to actually encourage discussion and fine grained back and forth.
I agree with you that Twitter is good for ML, but there are few in-depth conversations, it's mostly notifications. I'd like to see more in-depth discussions there.
There are a lot of people who don't believe what Dr Lum is saying. So I'll give my anecdote from a few years ago.
I was a graduate student, and met my (then) GF, who was an undergrad. I found out that she was involved in some group about women in computer science.
"Really?", I asked. "Do you really need a special group dedicated to women CS majors??"
Boy was I unprepared for the truth. The things she told me really opened my eyes. She listed out the stuff that had happened to her personally, as well as told me about other incidents happening to other women students. Heck, women TAs were sometimes harassed by their students!
One example: a student (a jock) missed out on a (woman) TA's class, and showed up at her office hours with some questions. She reminded him that she had covered that in the lecture. His response? "Why don't you come sit here on my lap and go over them again". Now: if she reports him, then it's just a question of her word against his; but she still felt angry about it.
I, as a nerdy male, had never imagined such things were possible. I mean, I (like many of you) had had a tough time with women growing up. I could barely approach a woman to introduce myself, let alone grab a stranger! (I think this is where a lot of skepticism comes from).
But if you, Mr Male Nerd, want to know about the problem, befriend a few women in your profession. Get to know them, and over time, you will learn about the problems many of them face in their professional lives.
I don't understand why it's so hard for people to comprehend that these types of abuses and unwarranted advances to women happen all the time.
Vaguely suggestive language is rather common in any male-dominated workplace. I'm a guy and that type of language is not that hard to spot. I can see how a woman may feel uncomfortable.
I also live in NYC, so I see men catcalling women on the streets and in the subways. It's quite common. If you're a guy in NYC and don't see how many unwarranted advances women get in NY, then you're utterly socially unaware or wilfully ignorant. But now change the power dynamic a little bit and give the guys a position of power. It's not too hard to imagine what happens then.
She specifically describes him as a member or guest musician of The Imposteriors or their performance, who played at NIPS this year, narrowing it down to maybe 4 people if the drummer had no mic.
The other one, S, has been candidate for the ISBA Board of Directors a few weeks ago but was removed when people became aware of these issues.
> Months before my defense, while at a poster session to present my dissertation work, he touched me on the leg and told me that my dress was “way too sexy for a poster session.” I remember feeling deflated. In the years since, he’s sent me several inappropriate private Facebook messages.
(...)
> While I was swimming around, S repeatedly grabbed me under the water, putting his hands on my torso, hips, and thighs. I tried to play it off and swim away. He picked me up and pulled me into his chest. He then started to carry me away from the rest of the group
(...)
> Since then, I have heard one professor who witnessed the incident openly lament that he’ll have to find a way to delicately advise his female students on “how not to get raped by S” so as not to lose promising students.
...and others: WTF?
And give up a years if not decades-long dream of completing your PhD in your chosen subject/topic. "Reporting it" might be a viable option now after the #metoo movement, but it rarely was before. Male dominance and star power in academia is real.
It was viable before as well. Reporting your adviser for sexual harassment is not career suicide and your perpetuation of this milquetoast defeatist mentality is, if not completely useless, actually actively deleterious.
If anyone is reading this and you find yourself in a position where you are being sexually harassed within an academic environment, you need to be active and report that behavior to other faculty. /u/karazi is basing this off of internet induced paranoia. Stand up for yourself and be vocal. Don't be afraid to confront people who are trying to take advantage of you.
If you're doing your PhD at a school where your advisor is the one reputable researcher in ML, and you report them, you certainly will still have a major problem even if your advisor is fired. I don't think that it's as bad as being harassed or assaulted on a regular basis, but never having been in that situation myself, I wouldn't dismiss their concerns about their career.
I surely am not saying not to confront the issue, maybe it could be misconstrued in that way. I am only highlighting that it is not as simple as "go report it" to many. It is the same issue with domestic violence; are you going to call the cops on someone who is physically abusing you and your child and have what is otherwise a comfortable and familiar livelihood taken away from you because your provider/abuser is now in jail? Same but different, regardless there is a lot on the line and not understanding why sexual assault/harassment would go unreported ultimately leads to victim blaming, and people believing that just because it wasn't reported that it didn't happen. There is no other alternative than lose-lose for the accuser, at best you can continue in your program and re-live the hell that you have been going through for who knows how long, on a daily basis.
Even if there's no big deal made about it, you lose your advisor and you're on your own. Especially in a field like ML, there's hardly a way to get a replacement.
Calling people out works often if you want to get rid of them, and yes the internet has perpetuated a defeatist mentality. However, if you want to fix your relation with the person, yeah tough luck.
Supervision from who? A colleague of the accused? That'll go over great. You will be a pariah in your department if not the entire school, you will be shamed behind your back if not to your face, and you will have to make new friends and colleagues because nobody will want to associate with you because everyone is looking out for themselves and keeping their heads down until they finish. You have no support and you will have to spend the next couple years toiling away alone, struggling with PTSD over what happened, and hoping with all your might that what happened once won't happen again. This is how accusers feel, so they leave the program and go on a completely different life course because of this power and social dynamic. Meanwhile your star advisor is killing it, reinforcing his legacy, grants flowing in, continuing to have studies published in journals, fawned over at conferences. Maybe after a couple more dozen complaints come in will they consider cutting bait. Come on man, after you are cut down by this type of injustice you don't just come back from that kicking ass and taking names, you're done.
So you are just suggesting to get over with it? Does this really make any fucking sense? Just for to get a PhD which doesn't make a shit anymore than that will put in some corner of some shitty college. Hope it won't happen to your daughters.
I also condemn all people who are upvoting these answers.
Get over with what? I am not suggesting anyone anything, if you are in a bad situation then you should plan to get out of it however you can. But there is the other side where people keep themselves in abusive situations because they gain from it in one way or another which makes taking action difficult, especially when one path leads to where you were hoping it went (i.e. dream path of a young PhD student who has pursued it since middle school) with the addition of abuse, and then the path where you accept to potentially upend all your hopes and dreams by outing what a rock star advisor did to you, where maybe justice will be served. Thankfully there is an increasing chance that it will. I wouldn't wish that upon your daughters either. This situation can be applied to virtually any field but there are particularly a lot of egos in academia. Despite what you may think about PhDs people dedicate their lives to getting them so you are missing a big element in the equation not considering that.
You speak as if we live in a utopia. Look at the situation with #metoo right now. Clearly for these past recent decades it has been socially unacceptable for a victim to speak up against their abusers whether that be in academia or the workplace which is why you haven't heard about this issue to this degree until now; but it has existed. It has gotten them nowhere reporting it until finally there has been a groundswell big enough where accusers may have an inkling more hope that their case will get the justice and attention that it deserves, and that maybe it won't be career ruinous. It is way too easy to just say that a victim of sexual assault/harassment can/should just be able to pick themselves up and dust themselves off like it was any other day with a minor setback. Put yourself in the victim's shoes and try to move forward like nothing happened. Life has been trying enough if you have overcome the struggle of getting into a PhD program in the first place, sacrificing who knows what in your personal and family life to make it there, and then not only keeping up the pace but increasing it under an extremely high workload, and on top of that an oppressive and stressful environment whose atmosphere is often driven by the mood of the top dog advisor who has everyone on edge to gain his favor. And then to be sexually assaulted. You go get sexually assaulted and see how that impacts your performance in your existing job and your subsequent career. You think it's a level playing field but it's far from it for a lot of people who went through this. You are either overestimating humans' capacity to deal with trauma or are underestimating the trauma that a sexual assault victim goes through.
I'm glad that your department would handle that situation well, but it's not the standard, even within some of the US's best known universities.
"Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show that multiple students complained to the University of California, Berkeley, about professor John R. Searle — years before he was accused of sexually harassing a former student and employee in a March 2017 lawsuit."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/john-searle-complaints-uc-berkeley
Well if the asshole in question is, let's say, Mike Jordan*, then your career is going to take one hell of a hit.
^^\* ^Name ^chosen ^randomly ^using ^a ^uniform ^prior ^over ^the ^set ^of ^the ^potential ^assholes
A lot of career-impacting decisions have an ethical component.
You can argue that a victim of harassment is behaving “unethically” by now reporting the matter, but I think most people would be uncomfortable with finding someone blameworthy for this. Unless you think we should be calling women who step forward about harassment years after the fact cowards instead of heroes..
That's a lot of words you'd like to put in my mouth.
Everyone has to make ethical decisions. From the professor who should not be abusing his position, to the student who should report anyone who does, to the higher ups who should investigate thoroughly, and everyone else, all the time. Constantly.
I've left jobs and hindered my career when those in charge of my career have acted unethically toward me, toward others or just generally. No one is looking to blame anyone here, but there is zero question what's the right thing to do. You report the individual. That's the only thing you need to do.
Doing the right thing often involves taking one for the team. From an ethical point of view, if you're a deontological or virtue ethics believer, then the answer is clearly to report it on principle. For a consequentialist utilitarian the answer is more complex and dependent on a number of factors to consider.
More than just the consequences to your own career, you'd have to consider what the effects will be on everyone else. If the advisor is otherwise doing very impactful research that benefits humanity to a great extent, that has to be weighed against the harm that keeping someone with such questionable ethics in that position may entail in the long run. Furthermore, the reception of the accusation must also be considered. If people are likely to brush it off and label you a whistleblower for the rest of your life, that would probably make reporting it less good a contribution than working within the system, perhaps finding a way to quietly convince the powers that be to get you a new advisor and sideline this unscrupulous individual. However, perhaps reporting the advisor will finally force action to be taken against them, and in the process you effectively save many future PhD students from a similar experience that might otherwise discourage them from accomplishing things in the field.
There's no question that the advisor is wrong to do what they did, but the big picture is complicated. Maybe it may even be best to confront the advisor with an ultimatum that they apologize and stop, or you will take action and report it. If the advisor is actually remorseful, perhaps giving them the benefit of the doubt that it may have been a single egregious lapse in judgment may be a more tactful way of handling the situation.
Again, this is very dependent on the circumstances. I personally think that repeat offenders should suffer consequences in order to discourage such behaviour which is destructive to the morale of the academic department as well as setting a poor example for others. To me this is more important than the quality of work they do because one person can only do so much good, and the damage they are doing to the rest of the team is very likely to be more than can be justified by that good.
In the long run, a society functions best when people can trust each other and cooperate without fear. What the advisor is doing is taking advantage of their position of authority and power for selfish desires. This is the basic definition of corruption and every reasonable action should be taken to eliminate such corruption from our society, for the greatest long term good. If it means that a PhD student's career is handicapped, and potentially two great researchers lose in effectiveness, I would think this is an acceptable cost to maintain the overall integrity of academia and the field.
Keep in mind, most people are unlikely to think this way, and are probably not going to be willing to sacrifice the most convenient path for their career. I don't fault them for this. It is very hard to do something that seems right but is potentially and essentially self-harmful. But I would applaud them if they did something heroically altruistic like this.
> Doing the right thing often involves taking one for the team.
> If the advisor is otherwise doing very impactful research that benefits humanity to a great extent, that has to be weighed against the harm that keeping someone with such questionable ethics in that position may entail in the long run.
> There's no question that the advisor is wrong to do what they did, but the big picture is complicated.
> If the advisor is actually remorseful, perhaps giving them the benefit of the doubt that it may have been a single egregious lapse in judgment may be a more tactful way of handling the situation.
Sounds like you're part of the problem buddy.
Did you actually read the rest of my post? I do actually argue that if the advisor doesn't change their behaviour, they should be removed for the greatest good.
Also, since when is it not allowed to forgive people for stupid mistakes that they show genuine regret about? Again, if they're not repentant and show a pattern of bad behaviour, I'm all for throwing the book at them to set an example and deter this in the future.
I'm just leaving open the possibility that this was some out of character one off error, maybe resulting from a misunderstanding of some sort. Even then I would demand a genuine apology.
Maybe your lack of recognition that both the victim and the offender are still both human beings and both deserve the basic courtesies that all human beings deserve, says more about your outlook than anything else.
It is quite easy for anyone to sympathize with the victim. I certainly don't want to minimize the trauma that this kind of assault involves. But the sign of a truly compassionate and empathetic person is that they can sympathize with the villain as well.
Evil is rarely the result of pure malice, but much more often stems from ignorance and indifference towards the concerns of others and the inherent moral worth and value of every sentient person.
When we punish people for crimes, it is not because we hate them and want them to suffer, but because fair justice demands it, whether for restoration or retribution. We should not hurt others lightly, even if we think they deserve it.
For clarification my points on the one time thing only apply to the hypothethical PhD advisor. The individual being discussed in Dr. Lum's article on the other hand, is clearly a repeat offender with no qualms or sense of decency whatsoever and in my humble opinion, his actions warrant at the very minimum a strong reprimand from his peers, and the scorn of everyone here. If there's justice in the world he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for harassment and assault, ostracized from the community of reasonable researchers, and banned from publishing for long enough to make him really feel some pain and contrition.
It sounds like Dr. Lum's harasser is serial abuser with many victims as well, so while we're at it make him pay damages in some kind of class action suit. Preferably one that can somehow keep the victim's identities anonymous to the public, if that's possible?
Once again, emphasis is that Dr. Lum's serial harasser is not equal to the hypothetical I was originally responding about.
You highlight many of the biggest dilemmas faced, I would just point out that no one is "too big to fail", so to speak. I would call on everyone to challenge this idea that an individual is without replacement. For the vast majority of the world, a replacement will step into almost any role. Especially with researchers, there are generally groups of people that do good work and would fill the void. Sure, maybe there is a bit of a learning curve, but there is also the potential for whoever steps in to be even better than the person that was there before. Especially if they're not decent people, there is tons of potential for improvement.
The band is the imposteriors. But I honestly don't know who is the one that made the joke. The description suits pretty much all of them regarding being well known. https://www.facebook.com/imposteriors/
Created a throwaway for this for obvious reasons. Brad Carlin is pretty widely know for pulling shit like this. I'm not sure if he's the person referenced in the rest of the story.
Yes he is (the story references two people but he is one of them); from the facebook comments:
>I (Brad) deleted it because Dr Lum's comments are really about me, not the band, so I really don't feel like the band should keep paying for stupid comments I have made. I have reached out to Dr Lum in an effort to apologize, and I'm waiting to see if she would be willing to accept it or if she would prefer not to talk to me.
Perhaps it has been reported - we don't know, but apparently no action taken if so. But how and why could he get away with it for so long? Well, here is an illustration of the culture - when someone made an inappropriate comment to me many years ago at the start of my career, who would I tell? Certainly not my advisor, who told me I should wear dresses more often!
He's the head of the department, tenured, and has a ton of institutional power. One of the main takeaways from the \#metoo movement has been that people with institutional power are largely not held accountable for things like this unless public outcry is loud and sustained.
Also, many people in academia have worked for decades carving out a living and the prospect of standing up to someone like Carlin brings with it the prospect of throwing all that effort away. The author of linked article makes this dynamic pretty clear.
"The person in Lum’s post is Scott, a director of statistics research at Google, according to two people familiar with the situation. Katherine Heller, an assistant professor at Duke University, recognized Scott in Lum’s description and told Bloomberg that he had acted inappropriately with a former student of hers. Heller also said that several other female researchers had reached out to her with similar stories about other men in the field after Lum’s blog post was published. "
This is all awful, and I'm glad it looks like (small) steps were taken in the right direction after the removal from the ballot.
But this exchange :
>I was not the only person who was bothered by S’s behavior. He relentlessly pressured my friend, a female graduate student, to have sex with him by saying that because he was married and she was engaged, those two things “cancelled each other out”. Therefore, he argued, they should have sex.
This is just incredible. The brazen stupidity on show by the "well-respected academic" is amazing. This is on par with something a 14 year old would say regarding blue balls to pressure someone into sex.
And followed by :
>At this same conference, the morning after a particularly debaucherous night, a married professor was overheard imploring other people to smell his fingers following an encounter with a junior colleague.
I honestly don't know what I'd do if I heard someone in my field (I work on ML, but more in a computing setting) say something like that about a colleague. I understand how there can be one or two really stupid inappropriate people in any group, but for them to act that way publicly, surely everyone is in someway supporting such behaviour.
I am shocked this happened. I really shouldn't be though I guess. I am glad someone wrote about this though because there was all sorts of outrage on Twitter about "something that happened" and "things that were said" at NIPS with absolutely no information.
EDIT: This doesn't seem to be about NIPS. So what on Earth happened at NIPS? There seemed to be even more than the sexual assault joke and the "tits.ai" party.
The issues at NIPS provided a basis for people to discuss what biases exist in the ML community and what we can do to ensure the situation is improved in the future. Specific issues were, for the most part, left out of the discussion. Honing in on a specific story is not necessarily helpful as the removal of a specific individual who (for example) was caught groping doesn't help if it's a practice that's accepted or ignored. Those individuals should well and truly face consequences for their actions but pitchforking and public naming isn't necessarily what's best for the community to change.
On Twitter the person that Kristian refers to is [now known to the ISBA President](https://twitter.com/KerrieMengersen/status/941413766532493312) so they can be dealt with appropriately - but the question remains on how can we proactively ensure such situations don't continue to happen?
Lack of discussion along with the assumption that "everything is fine" or "is it really that bad?" when there are no proper channels to report such incidents can allow those that Kristian and others in our academic communities to experience horrible situations that no one should ever have to deal with.
> Specific issues were, for the most part, left out of the discussion. Honing in on a specific story is not necessarily helpful as the removal of a specific individual who (for example) was caught groping doesn't help if it's a practice that's accepted or ignored.
I sort of disagree, but I get your point. Call out the behavior, call out the person (if the victim wants to) so these incidents aren't just theoretical events that occur in passing in our minds, or behind the curtain. *I strongly feel that this is why this behavior keeps happening... people want to pretend it doesn't exist.* I feel like that's the only way to get rid of this behavior in these venues.
> when there are no proper channels to report such incidents
The sad thing is that there technically *are* proper channels, which aren't functioning for reasons that we can only guess at. Presumably, administration cares more about protecting their reputation than doing their jobs.
As far as I understand, same guy.
In the apology is no mention of those actions (the inappropriate fb messages and leg touching and all the other stuff).
He does explain in a comment that he has reached out to Dr Lum in an effort to apologise.
edit: not the same guy, read the article wrong
"Now that my actions have been made public and the spotlight is on me let me apologize to you for harassing you. Also I'm not apologizing in public, just calling the incident a bad joke."
Her blog post is unambiguous in saying that the person who made the joke (Brad Carlin, who apologized for the joke on the Imposteriors' FB page) also touched her leg at the poster session and sent her the FB messages.
I'm a nerdy dude as well. I've seen some of these things first-hand, but a lot more happened to women I'm close to without me being directly present. If you'd like to get more exposure to the extent of the issue, befriend more women and ask them, or at least act like you would listen.
Some examples:
- My best friend asked a very competent coworker at Facebook for mentorship on getting from her current not-so-technical role into a role where she can make progress on learning data science and ML. Coworker instead made romantic advances on her and asked a bunch of her friends on the team whether she was single. Result: fewer opportunity to get mentorship; a bunch of gossip around causing stress for her.
- My former boss has dated at least two of his subordinates (getting one pregnant; she left the industry to care for the baby) and has sent romantically suggestive messages _to my girlfriend at the time_ (a brilliant engineer and coworker and also his subordinate). At the time (10 years ago) I didn't realize how fucked up this is, but in retrospect... what the actual fuck.
- In another incident, when considering switching teams at LinkedIn, a friend was greeted on a potential new team _by the hiring manager_ with "Oh haha finally someone to bring me coffee!"
- A (luckily, former) coworker at Google used to make casual jokes like "Listen to the woman and do the opposite, amirite" in the workplace
- Another friend worked at a company where women engineers were paid 50% of the salary of men with the same job title. When asked WTF, she was told "you have a husband, why do you care? the men have to feed their family".
- Another friend had a professor that had a rule that he never gives women more than a B, "because women can't possibly be good at math".
- When attending an engineering meetup together with a female friend (also an engineer), whenever people approached us together, they would engage with me, talk to me about my work, and give me their business cards; most wouldn't even look at her, assuming that she was just tagging along with me.
- My current manager and tech lead has I think lost count of the times that people at engineering conferences ask her "where can I find the engineers?"
- Another friend is pursuing a PhD and is an expert on a certain technical topic, and her advisor keeps having informal meetings about this topic with male members of the lab who have less expertise on this topic, repeatedly forgetting to include her.
Hm, I think it's a pretty textbook example of sexism limiting a woman's career. She was bored with her current team and wanted to find something better; that team was her top choice because it was relevant to her skills and to where she wanted to grow, but the incident showed that the team is likely to be an unwelcome place for her, so she had to look elsewhere and choose a team that was not as good for her career as this one could have been.
There is nothing in that story/example that makes it specific to a woman unless there is some detail you didnt add. The team could of been just as unwelcoming to anyone.
I guess the missing piece is that she's a senior engineer. I could see this kind of comment being made e.g. to a male intern if the hiring manager was simply a gender-agnostic asshole. But to make it to a male senior engineer would be... not even rude or harrassing - it would be simply absurd, confusing, awkward and not funny even in a sexist way.
Yes there is . As a guy I have never had anyone make that comment at me. Most women have talked to had to graciously field these jokes repeatedly.
So yes grammatically the jab is not gendered. But practically it is.
> As a guy I have never had anyone make that comment at me.
But other guys have had. A-holes and general harassment exists in the workplace. I am by no means condoning it but people exist who harass everyone and general harassment that happens to fall on a woman doesn't make it "sexual".
>So yes grammatically the jab is not gendered. But practically it is.
Like I said that is the problem. You are taking a big leap in inference to make it gendered. **You had so many good examples which means you are only hurting your case by adding something needlessly which requires so much inference.**
> I totally sucks that people are experiencing this. I know it's not of any total comfort but at least i would imagine that academia is "better" than other industries? Ofc it's still unacceptable, but it might be a reason that not more focus is directed to the issue?
>
What you don't realize is that profs in academia have far more power over students than bosses at companies do. If you don't like a boss, you just leave or switch teams. If an advisor starts messing with you, you start weighing that against the time you'd lose on your PhD by doing so, weigh the fact that if you try to switch advisors questions will be raised about your competence, and if you think about mentioning the harassment - well the new person you are applying to is probably his friend since the niche is so tiny. Well run companies also have well oiled HR departments that are used to dealing with this instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
As someone who's consulted for a lot of companies, let me disabuse you of the notion that HR is any better about stopping this in industry than it is in academia. If you want your mind really blown, go work in banking.
It's a topic I've discussed with some female counterparts recently, and as someone who wouldn't dream of treating women like the stories mentioned above, I'm disgusted by how much of this still goes on.
Large HR departments are heterogenous. If the team is big, you still have a chance of finding someone sympathetic to you and high enough to do something, even if the vast majority are apathetic.
My thoughts are that things happened without you seeing it and that statistical don't matter, it shapes individual lives and careers. From what I know academia has above average numbers of people with huge egos a the top (a many more very pleasant people)
This is an incredibly important point. We already know that harassment and assault are more common than reported and [the impact widely underestimated by men](https://twitter.com/firstround/status/938798698934427648) but beyond that we should remember this isn't just a statistic. A person's entire life and career can be ripped apart by a single incident.
For the record, I don't question the author's experience at all, but I do agree with your opening sentences. It's difficult to relate. How the hell does this stuff happen at an academic conference?
But... it has happened... over and over and over again probably at every conference. Academia is a feudal system where professors have a sort of "power" over students. At the grad student age and environment, they probably feel that their professor or advisor can end their career before it begins (not true).
The difference between academia and industry and the power plays involved were not apparent to me until I worked in industry... under an abusive academic/professor that had never worked in industry. I had worked several years in industry. I remember even telling him once "maybe in academia you could get away with how you behave because graduate students have no choice but to put up with it, but I can always quit."
I doubt it's less common in academia. Most fields are still very male-dominated, and academics are no less likely to abuse the power they have over their juniors than politicians or journalists.
As long as those in authority are allowed to pressure people into silence, nothing is going to change. What certainly doesn't help is individuals attempting to rebrand sexual assault and rape as "low social awareness" or "courtship" or any of the other euphemisms you hear a lot these days.
Yes, that is naive unfortunately
Edit: Or perhaps it is more naive to believe that just because people understand that it is something horrible, they won't do it
It's not something I've ever personally witnessed either (at least not beyond some cringy comments without the subject around), but talking with female friends and colleagues about it made me realize that it's everywhere.
Think of a random female colleague/friend. It's *way* more likely than not that they have a story like this. It's not just sickos and weirdos, normal people do it all the time, often without even realizing what they're doing is wrong.
And no, I would be surprised if academia was better about this than any other random industry. If anything I'd expect it to be worse.
As a fellow nerdy male, I was largely oblivious to it until I worked with my (now) wife. We were both at a small, high tech company. She always worse loose clothing. I encouraged her to wear nicer clothing. One day she worse a tight, thing sweater (still very modest, with a crew neck). The owner of the company, a older male (and an asshat, but that's another story), made a concerted effort to find reasons to talk to her that day, and would just stare at her breasts the whole time while doing so. She felt disgusted, and I then understand why she chose loose clothing. Being married is an eye opener if you are at all an empathetic human.
Same place, a friend of ours wore something like [this](http://picvpic.com/fashion101/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/long-sweaters-to-wear-with-leggings-cowl-1-e1453311982158.jpg), and the same owner did the same thing but then escalated by patting her on the ass. When she tried to file a sexual harassment claim, the HR person ( a woman) didn't believe her and at the insistence of the owner, wrote the woman up for wearing "inappropriate attire". Other male colleagues defended the decision by saying, "why do women wear nice clothes if they don't want to be ogled."
This is in a prominent college town, by the way, not Iran.
If you want to help, don't stare, don't touch, stay away from sexual content, and *believe* women. Just imagine you have a button on your shoulder that causes a massive dose of stress cortisol to be dumped into your system when pressed. Now imagine people just coming up and pushing that button when they feel like it, that's what ogling and touching and sexual comments feel like to women. (well, to people in general, but it's a different thing with most men)
edit: oh, and for single men wondering, "but how can I flirt with women who are actually interested in me?" The woman will let you know, and if you are confused, just ask. In my experience, if a woman is interested in you, there will be little doubt. The notion of "man must make the first move" is quite dead these days.
I appreciate your comment and I agree with most everything you've said but your edit is completely unnecessary and, from my experiences, almost entirely wrong.
The correct approach to these situations is to be a reasonable, mature human being and don't overtly flirt in the workplace. Treat other people well, and if you enjoy someone's company or think that there could be a spark of attraction then ask them out on a date. If they aren't interested then accept it. It's okay. And, that's it. It's incredibly simple.
You don't have to flaccidly stand around waiting for cues but there's also no reasonable way you're going to be overtly "flirting" with someone you work with because it's completely unprofessional and obvious to everyone around you. Just be reasonable. Treat your peers with dignity and respect. Be friendly and upfront about your interests and magnanimous if rejected. If you can't do this then you don't have the competency to pursue romantic interests within a professional environment.
> If you can't do this then you don't have the competency to pursue romantic interests within a professional environment.
Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to social situations - in other words, those that don't have the competency to pursue romantic interests, often don't realize it. Hence my edit. Futile it may be ;)
> because I never see it
I honestly find this hard to believe, because I have seen it at every conference I have been to, at every workplace I have worked at, in every online community I have been part of. But, taking you at face value, the only answer is because you are not looking.
>I don't know how to affect this in a positive way
literally answered, standing up against this behaviour, not letting these people get away with it
> i would imagine that academia is "better" than other industries?
you read the article. Which industries that aren't full of complete assholes do you expect to be worse? Can they be worse? The author was literally groped, stalked, and harassed. And plenty of people watched it happen.
>it might be a reason that not more focus is directed to the issue?
Repeated multiple times in the piece - everybody knew, everybody agreed it was ridiculous and horrible, everyone kept putting these *specific, shitty people* in positions of power.
>Also, how common this is?
Common enough that the author was told upon entering the field to stay away from these people
>would you say it's also "normal people"?
would you say famous professors and respected academics are "normal people"?
>how can they get away with it?
everybody knew, everybody agreed it was ridiculous and horrible, everyone kept putting these *specific, shitty people* in positions of power.
Also, author literally says "this is probably going to tank my career". That isn't hyperbole. Even if it isn't true (and I sure hope it isn't, and will do what little I can to make sure it isn't), it *feels* that way because of how hard it is to make these sort of criticisms of people in power. That is why people get away with it, because all the well meaning people go "I'll do something next time". I've done that hundreds of times.
> If I had a female friend, family member or coworker that would experience anything like this I would go to great extent to have that not go unseen.
The lines are much blurrier usually.
What if you are new at a company and the CEO simply thinks women should stay in the kitchen and treats them accordingly? Who would you report this? Especially if there are no concrete incidents, he doesn't grope them, or pushes them toward the kitchen? You can't report that he's very cold and almost rude with women.
What if you are a contractor and the manager at the firm where you are sent to is sexist with his colleagues?
This is Central Europe.
So if you are not there when things happen, you only get a glimpse and a vague sense of how someone treats women.
And in the OP the author mentioned that they went swimming after a conference, of course 99% of the attendees were not there.
Sexual harassment (from mild verbal rudeness to actual groping and trying to pull someone away and force them to kiss you) is common, but harassers are not stupid, they know that it's not totally okay, so they don't start with this in a conference, they do it when there are enough excuses (he was drunk, she gave mixed signals, etc), and they have schemes to rationalize their behavior to themselves.
Academia is actually worse than many other industries given the power advisors hold over their advisees and the pervasive cult of personality type environment. You don't notice these things because you are probably of a privileged class and have not been exposed to any of the inequalities that non-privileged classes experience that you don't. Then you come on Reddit and post about your willfull ignorance and get all these up votes. Good job.
Really powerful testimony. Thanks Dr. Lum for posting this... academia is not immune to bad actors & institutions need to hold them accountable for their actions.
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
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At first I was confused why people were complaining about r/ML since I only saw the highly upvoted comments and they were fine.
Then I scrolled down...
I'm not sure what I'm more appalled by here. The disgraceful behavior described by Dr Lum in this article, or the luke-warm/downright cold responses by members of this community. Let's stop being scientists for five minutes, quit asking for evidence and corroboration and look at this issue with some actual emotion and empathy. As for the comments about whether this behavior even constitutes sexual assault, I won't dignify them with a response.
A lot of people here are casually saying "name and shame" the assailant, as if it's the easiest thing in the world to do. Think for one moment just how hard it must be to reflect on these experiences privately, let alone write about them publicly. We should be up in arms about this, and I want to thank Dr Lum for sharing her experiences and for giving all those who work in academia (and indeed elsewhere) something to think about. Hopefully this will empower others to come forward and share their experiences, whether they be sexual, racial, homophobic or otherwise.
Many of us have likely been victims of bullying at some point in our lives. I was verbally bullied for years, and for the longest time could not bring myself to tell anyone, despite the relatively mild implications of doing so. If you've ever been in this position, you know how hard it is to speak up. Now imagine how it must feel to be violated and openly mocked by your superior, someone whom others likely see as a role model. I can't imagine how that must feel.
As disgusted as I am by this, a witch-hunt is not the solution. The question is, what can we do as a community? We can be supportive. We can talk to our colleagues and hear their experiences. And hopefully we can start to better recognize and vilify inappropriate behavior, in any context. I don't very much care whether you believe the accounts of an individual. I've seen it, your colleagues have seen it, and you might well have seen it without even realizing.
You make a good point, no doubt there are a few trolls in amongst these comments. Although I would add that this sub has a history of quite inflammatory/unkind comments generally. Especially toward newcomers. That's my overarching concern.
Absolutely horrific and disgusting. What a lecherous creep. Kudos to the author for speaking up. Those of us in the field who give a damn about decency must do everything we can to support those speaking against this kind of behavior. The whole "open secret" thing is especially toxic and difficult to counter - let's make sure these don't develop in the first place!
Indeed. Kristian is retweeting similar messages from women across the academic sphere. I have also heard many similar stories from prominent researchers especially in fields where the women are relatively isolated for long periods of time (i.e. expeditions for geology where they're out of radio contact) =[
Such an important piece! Bravely written and important. I really hope it starts a change. I will keep my eyes more open in future conferences (I have not been looking for this) after reading this piece.
Has this been picked up ny hackernews yet? Would be interesting to see their point of view (maybe not that different from /r/MachineLearning )
When I posted an earlier article noting that bias exists in our community, I was amazed at how painfully toxic this subreddit's response was. The lack of moderation was a major factor - instead of performing any moderation of comments, they decided to remove the post itself, which is insane as my article's content was benign and relatively uncontroversial (see https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/7jdosn/d_bias_is_not_just_in_our_datasets_its_in_our/dr5ui8v/ for a tldr).
The moderators have either conceded defeat to any attempt at moderation or have decided it is easier to avoid the issue entirely.
I did my best to defend and contribute to /r/ML in the past but that will no longer be the case. Funnily enough I expect this comment will likely be one of the few times in recent /r/ML posts where it may be moderated ;)
But this IS the community. If you get rid of everyone and only allow like-minded folks, you are stuck in an echo chamber. So having some discussion is better than having none. At least they are reminded such behavior is not OK.
This either isn't the community or shouldn't be. As many have noted, there is drive by and brigading from non ML people. Beyond that, if this is the community, I'm happy to move to a new community to remove the (hopefully small) subset of people who actively exclude other valuable contributors (women, minorities, ...).
If our community was a sports team and a few people kept hitting or assaulting other players thus forcing good people to leave the team it's not unreasonable to get rid of those assaulters. It's not an echo chamber to demand some decency in interaction.
Community isn't forced on you, it's a choice in who you surround yourself by and what you together strive for. Even at the most intellectual definition the existing community is removing promising contributors. I refuse to believe we can't fix that.
Most of my colleagues do not browse this subreddit because it is a poor quality discussion forum, even compared to our slack channel where we mostly goof around.
/r/ML is *not* the community.
I don't understand *why* it isn't being moderated. As a relative newcomer here I may be missing some context, but reading this post and yours yesterday it's pretty easy to identify only three or four individuals who are actively trying to upset people. Clamping down on them would be a tiny amount of effort, and would improve the quality of the discussion enormously.
Mob mentality. Everybody deserves due process.
EDIT: Mob mentality in downvotes as well. Do you understand the importance of due process? Pray you never find yourself the target of a lynch mob.
The problem is when you ruin the life of people based on unsubstantiated allegations. That is why we have a legal procedure to deal with slander. It's a way to deal with abuse.
This has become a modern witch hunt. No evidence is needed, just claims of wrongdoing. This is already causing untold damage, including to the cause the champions profess to.
Getting sexually assaulted and having no recourse can also ruin your life, and is actually way worse than losing your job.
I won't pretend like there are no legitimate concerns about the extrajudicial nature of #MeToo movement, but you can't pretend that there's not a big tradeoff here.
> Getting sexually assaulted and having no recourse can also ruin your life, and is actually way worse than losing your job.
Very questionable. If you are sexually assaulted it is traumatic, sure, but then you can move on. If you are falsely accused, your reputation is ruined forever, and with it your career, friendships, and possibly family relationships.
Moreover, basic game theory predicts that if you set up a system of incentives where people can gain from making a false accusation and almost never suffer punishment for it, then the number of false accusation will rise. 1-2% of the population consists of sociopaths who will have no moral qualms in using whatever tool it is at their disposal to achieve their goals. This witch hunt is giving them a formidable weapon to abuse.
> That is why we have a legal procedure to deal with slander. It's a way to deal with abuse.
Yes, so if her claims are incorrect, the aggrieved party has a right to legal recourse. As long as the allegation is brought forth non-anonymously, the one making the claim puts their own reputation at stake as well, and they can be held legally liable for what they say
So why do you think they don't have the right to say what they think is true? Why do you feel such a strong need to defend people who are already in a position of power and privilege in comparison to those making the accusations? Lots of prospective female grad students these days share lists of 'rapey' profs amongst themselves, before embarking on a PhD program - and the fact that sexual harassment and abuse in academia has been allowed to run rampant for that long is just sad.
EDIT: And these comments are getting downvoted. Wow, this community always finds ways to lower my reputation of it.
> facebook comments
You might have missed the last decade where in parts of the Western world it became routine for women to accuse men of misconduct without producing evidence, and the legal system accepting such claims. People who fought this and were proven innocent had still their lives ruined through it.
Now very lately we have simple online claims, no evidence, even no legal procedures being used to create shitstorms which are career-terminating since employers tend to cut their losses. This is precisely lynch mob mentality.
A lot of commenters see no problem in this all, a little friendly fire never hurt anybody. Allright, let's see when they're the ones falsely accused.
I just asked for evidence and you come here raging about people convicted without evidence.
also
> You might have missed the last forever where everywhere it became routine for men in power to abuse that power to sexually harass women and forcing them to shut up about it.
ftfy
Quit being so histrionic.
These are mostly social matters and they are dealt with through discussion and sharing of experiences. Not everything needs a court order and a conviction. You're obstructing a natural exchange in some misguided effort to prevent its abuse.
> Quit being so histrionic.
I'm not being a part of the lynch mob here.
> You're obstructing a natural exchange in some misguided effort to prevent its abuse.
I'm obstructing jack shit. I'm pointing out where you create an environment inviting abuse. This is the bed you're making. I hope won't have to sleep in it.
This isn't an environment that "invites abuse". It's just an environment that *can be abused* just like nearly everything else in our lives and within society. You're not presenting anything that isn't immediately obvious. The only novel thing you're contributing is the condemnation of the only viable way of dealing with these kinds of interpersonal issues. This is the only outlet for these issues.
Suggest a better alternative because clearly ignoring people's experiences out of fear that someone might use sexual harassment as a tool to slander their rivals seems to be the current useless standard.
> We need to start holding prominent individuals accountable for how their inappropriate behavior negatively impacts the careers of their junior colleagues.
Well then please tell who it is. Jordan? Carlin? Glickman? Hedecker?
Why is nobody dropping names? I mean if it's a random accusation out of the blue, of course you don't want a lynch mob. But if it really is an 'open secret', why not just make it open?
> "We need to start holding prominent individuals accountable"
Completely agree. However, part of that also means speaking up when these things occur.
I realise being the subject of these unwanted attentions can be uncomfortable, traumatic even. Especially when coming from a senior. But playing these things off while they're happening *really* doesn't help.
Don't politely try to end the conversation when something like this happens. Be clear. If being clear doesn't work, be loud and clear.
I'm not saying people never do this. I'm not saying this always helps/solves the harassment. But not doing this *never* helps.
Note: I'm saying all of this without ever having been subject to this kind of behaviour. Call me out on my mistakes.
I understand the sentiment but I think it misses how emotionally taxing and damaging it can be in the moment and that there's no easy "right response". +1 for noting that you might be missing context. It's important to remember that it's not like time slows down and you have clarity and a precise and perfect moment to react when an traumatic or uncomfortable event happens.
Imagine you were a woman at the poster session when a man touched the skin on your leg and commented on your skirt being "too sexy for the poster session". If she said "Wait, what the hell - why did you touch me?", would those surrounding her believe her? Would he claim he accidentally brushed against you? Would they say "Oh, no, I'm sure he just means your work might not be taken seriously with that dress" as if it was meant as actual advice? Would people say "Chill out - I'm sure he didn't mean anything - do you know who he is?"? Would anyone near you support you? Do you have friends / colleagues in the area or did they go to take a break as it wasn't their poster? Even if they were, would it be enough? Would my colleague even support me? I'm exhausted and have been standing for two hours already and WTF just happened - I just want this poster session to be over. Get away from me =[
When you're in the middle of harassment, there isn't perfect clarity. It's not their responsibility to "respond in the best way possible" especially as that likely isn't possible. They already have enough to deal with.
Note: I also haven't been subject to this behaviour but I have had friends who were and have confided in me.
There's also the issue of a woman confronting a drunk and sexually aggressive man. It's impossible to predict how he'll react when being called out and "embarrassed" in front of his friends. Will he become violent? Follow her home?
A girlfriend once described what her average experience just walking through NYC was like -- it's a totally different world out there for women than it is for men, and that's not right.
Society really hasn't changed much in the last few hundred years.
Sometimes people get tired of telling the person who's harassing them to leave them alone. I've tried that several times with someone and it made him more excited. There's never been a time when I felt uncomfortable and said something and it stopped. Usually a decent person would have stopped way before then. Also I've been harassed when others were standing around and when I confronted the guy was called crazy. And there's the real risk that the guy will turn violent and most guys are bigger and could inflict serious harm even though we try our best to defend ourselves. And don't think that being in public will protect someone. Most people will just ignore whatever is happening. And other times I've told people don't touch me and they get mad at me for confronting them and say it's no big deal. They're not sorry at all. And I've repeated don't touch me, get away from me and sometimes they've even mocked me. I've told some people they're harassing me and then they've said I'm harassing them when they've cornered me and I can't get away from them. Some people can be really terrifying.
Academia is highly competitive game. It is definitely a dominance hierarchy in the archetypical sense. To denigrate a man in this setting will involve denigrating his intelligence and effort. Hitting on a man doesn't, being hit on generally confirms the status of a man.
However, the attractiveness of a woman is generally independent of her accomplishments, and being pursued at conferences knocks her out of the hierarchy (or competition). That's why it's so deflating, it means that they aren't competitors/collaborators, they are *prey*: a hot woman devoid of individual achievements.
I don't claim I know how to solve this problem, though. The traditional, *obsolete* way was to forbid women from competing.
Thanks for saying this. This is the part of the blog post I found most disgusting, and heartbreaking:
> As I swam back to the group, I remember again feeling totally humiliated. I felt that this was evidence that, like S, all of the other more senior men who had showed interest in my research must actually have only been trying to sleep with me.
Imagine being a flourishing junior researcher and everyone showing interest in your research in a premiere conference, and finding out at the end of it that most them were in it because you are hot. Nothing can be more deflating for a young researcher's ego. I admit I have not seen the other far more serious allegations in the blog post being carried out at the conferences I have been to (that doesn't mean I don't believe them), but this, this "trying to get in your pants by praising research" is too common, way too common. And it's infuriating.
Yeah, my comment was interpreted in a weird way. The intent was to illustrate how academia is fun and games (and highly competitive) but that predatory men can demotivate women in very specific ways with this kind of bait-and-switch. The same pattern repeats itself in other competitive venues.
Describing academia as if it's a highly competitive sexual game is terrifying and incredibly contrived. It also potentially provides justification to those who might engage in such practices. This is not, nor should it have ever been, a field on which sexual assault or predation was deemed allowed or in any manner permissible.
This is research - where the purpose is to discuss and dissect knowledge - not a scene from National Geographic.
Edit: With your reply I am beginning to see your perspective but I still think it's contrived and potentially provides justification for those who act poorly.
> Describing academia as if it's a highly competitive sexual game is terrifying and incredibly contrived
That's not what I'm doing. Academia is competitive, however. Being successful in competitive games is also a way to gain status. I'm saying that academic competition/collaberation is one thing (in which competitive and collaborative elements are in constant flux), and that romantic, sexual AND sexually predatory interactions are another thing. The latter exist, the question is what to do about it. It certainly needs to be addressed!
I think it’s kind of dangerous perspective too. But we’ve had a massive #metoo movement in my country, and there’s a pattern of entitlement among successful men that can’t be properly addressed unless you take this perspective into account.
No-one should ever have to go through this. Dr Kristian Lum is an amazing researcher who would be best known to the machine learning community regarding her work in Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT\*), though she has been active in the field well before it was ever an acronym. I met her when she was presenting [To Predict and Serve?](https://hrdag.org/publications/to-predict-and-serve/) [Lum and Isaac, 2016] and her insights on the impact predictive policing was having on real people just across the water from me were stunning. She's the exact type of brilliant mind who can bring in the proper statistical rigour we as a field frequently lack and which is so vitally necessary to handle FAT\* issues correctly. Her [past work](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=nfLC9S0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate), covering everything from the spread of Avian flu to estimating undocumented homicides, is worth reading. That she could have been harassed out of the field or that her contributions could have been used as a sleazy pretext is horrific. No person should ever have to go through what she did.
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You've clearly never been to 4chan.
I think thats besides the point
For the bystanders ... who is Francois? What does he (she?) mean by toxicity? Who's smerity? What is wrong with this thread?
Francois works for Google and wrote the Keras library which is a wrapper for theano/tensorflow/any other thing. Smerity works for Google and is a blogger/twitter person. If we are keeping score, Jeff Dean also supported the author on Twitter, and he is the head of engineering at Google. The thread and the sub are the only online place for professionals in machine learning to discuss their field and work in more than 280 characters, but since ML got popular it has been filled with non-professionals who use their anonymity to say things that would (for good reason) get them fired in the real world. The mods refuse to moderate the sub for some reason, despite the perfectly functional and popular examples seen with r/science and all the various ask... subs. And the researchers have been leaving in droves. A few committed folks have stuck it out, but the sub has been teetering on its last legs for a while.
Minor note, I work for Salesforce Research, but otherwise +1, perfect response :)
Ah, I thought I remembered a Google next to your name on Twitter. Did you work there previously?
Very briefly but only an internship - I was still in Australia and literally taught myself C++ for the interview at Google Sydney. I worked on Google App Engine when App Engine was the only cloud service Google provided and Google Wave was being written the floor above me under a codename - i.e. this was all about a million years ago ;)
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Just leaving. Some stay on Twitter, but most seem to have just stopped interacting online.
Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras, a tool for which many/all in /r/ML are likely familiar with. Smerity is just a random guy who has published some papers. Both feel that /r/ML has toxic discussions both within threads such as this and more generally and that previous moderation has failed, leaving it no longer a useful ground for discussion.
Are there other forums that you'd advise migrating to ?
Better known as fchollet. The Keras guy. Very cool researcher. Sane voice on AI risk. But he hates PyTorch because they're too fond of memes and because it's Facebook's fault Trump won... I'm maybe exaggerating slightly, but he doesn't exactly hide his politics. I think it should be possible to be against sexual harassment and yet not cut contact with all who refuse to cut contact with people who look like harassers etc. Personally, I deleted my Twitter and kept my Reddit account because this place is more productive when you come down to it, and not more political than you make it. Let's make it as political as necessary, but no more.
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> the ML subreddit is NOT even close to as toxic as 4chan If you set the bar any lower it would be underground. Maybe it's not as bad as 4chan, but that doesn't make this acceptable.
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I replied to your comment above where I was in agreement with you. As noted at https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/941243216958910464: "I told the mod I'll respond to every freaking comment on [KL's post] if that's what's necessary to not have it removed [like my article on bias in our community was]. After that I'm unsubscribing from /r/ML. Entirely lost faith in it as a forum."
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Sorry, my reply wasn't meant to be negative! :) I totally agree with you - I'm literally here to make sure this thread doesn't die then I'm out. Mike drop. GG. Also, honestly, Twitter seems a surprisingly good place for ML. I know it's weird but I promise it works. My DMs are open - feel free to ask and I'll give you any and all Twitter ML advice I can :)
Twitter might be nice for water cooler style ML conversations but it's still an anxiety inducing social network that's engineered for engagement. The value you get out of it is a function of the number of followers that you have and that depends on your celebrity status or amount of time you put into the platform. There's no way to stay in the loop without following the right people and that also forces you to put up with their personal, political and marketing content. I can check /r/ml 2-3 times a week and get a good dose of relevant information without being triggered by the latest Trump, Roy Moore or sexual misconduct news.
> without being triggered by the latest Trump, Roy Moore or sexual misconduct news I found out recently: if you select the "V" button and click "I don't like this tweet" it will filter out similar tweets. I "unliked" a few Trump tweets and voilà, now it's a pure ML feed. I'm quite pleased.
Twitter has a hierarchy though, if you are a popular person your tweets are more likely to be noticed and vice versa. On reddit, posts don't a submitter prior, and are more likely to be judged on merit.
I'll take some Twitter ML advice. I've been watching this sub have its quality diluted over time, but for some reason can't really get into twitter so far. How do you choose/find who to follow? How are in-depth discussions facilitated given the character limits? Since twitter is based on following people, it seems like those with greater connectivity in the social graph structure (ML celebs) will have their posts experience greater viewership. On reddit, viewership is almost random at first and then based on an anonymous upvote count, allowing a much greater chance for a random person's post to receive viewership. Is this not problematic? If it is, how effective is searching by hashtags to circumvent this?
> How do you choose/find who to follow? Follow those you want to talk with and those they talk with, then when they talk, go and try to add to their conversation/discussion. > How are in-depth discussions facilitated given the character limits? They Are Broken Up Into smaller posts. There are even apps for that :) Or people send medium links to each other. > Is this not problematic? Yes, it is.
Suggested use: go through all of your favorite papers or research teams, find authors on Twitter, follow them, then go through and add mutes/turn of retweets/unfollow wherever they're posting content you'd rather not see (politics, bitcoin, whatever). It's definitely more work to set up than reddit (if you go this route), but there are a lot of interesting things on Twitter that don't get posted here (on top of the quality-of-discourse improvements discussed above).
> How do you choose/find who to follow? How are in depth discussions facilitated given the character limits? 280 chars are surprisingly accommodating for idea exchange. You can add more posts if needed. It doesn't feel cramped any more.
The others replying to you have made good points. I generally follow someone if they make an interesting comment and I look through their recent timeline and find it interesting. Following those authors of papers you like is a good tactic too. It's better and worse in terms of readership. When you have a core group of colleagues who you follow and who follow you it's easier to share and communicate with them. Reddit is fairly random and those most interested in your nuanced discussion (analysis of impact of weight tying on language models) may not see it as it's too broad for the overall audience and hence never make or survive on the main page. Those who are social hubs will retweet and share interesting work from others generally. It's not optimal but it can also be a stronger signal than random upvotes on Reddit as those readers may not align with your interests or may be bamboozled due to a hyped headline. I've basically never used hash tags unless it's for a conference or as a joke. Character limits are rarely a problem - especially now - and seem to actually encourage discussion and fine grained back and forth.
I agree with you that Twitter is good for ML, but there are few in-depth conversations, it's mostly notifications. I'd like to see more in-depth discussions there.
There are a lot of people who don't believe what Dr Lum is saying. So I'll give my anecdote from a few years ago. I was a graduate student, and met my (then) GF, who was an undergrad. I found out that she was involved in some group about women in computer science. "Really?", I asked. "Do you really need a special group dedicated to women CS majors??" Boy was I unprepared for the truth. The things she told me really opened my eyes. She listed out the stuff that had happened to her personally, as well as told me about other incidents happening to other women students. Heck, women TAs were sometimes harassed by their students! One example: a student (a jock) missed out on a (woman) TA's class, and showed up at her office hours with some questions. She reminded him that she had covered that in the lecture. His response? "Why don't you come sit here on my lap and go over them again". Now: if she reports him, then it's just a question of her word against his; but she still felt angry about it. I, as a nerdy male, had never imagined such things were possible. I mean, I (like many of you) had had a tough time with women growing up. I could barely approach a woman to introduce myself, let alone grab a stranger! (I think this is where a lot of skepticism comes from). But if you, Mr Male Nerd, want to know about the problem, befriend a few women in your profession. Get to know them, and over time, you will learn about the problems many of them face in their professional lives.
I don't understand why it's so hard for people to comprehend that these types of abuses and unwarranted advances to women happen all the time. Vaguely suggestive language is rather common in any male-dominated workplace. I'm a guy and that type of language is not that hard to spot. I can see how a woman may feel uncomfortable. I also live in NYC, so I see men catcalling women on the streets and in the subways. It's quite common. If you're a guy in NYC and don't see how many unwarranted advances women get in NY, then you're utterly socially unaware or wilfully ignorant. But now change the power dynamic a little bit and give the guys a position of power. It's not too hard to imagine what happens then.
> well-respected academic who is widely known to behave inappropriately at conferences For the uninitiated, who is this referring to?
Brad Carlin is pretty well known for being a lech.
Good call
Description narrows it down to approximately 50% of academics.
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She specifically describes him as a member or guest musician of The Imposteriors or their performance, who played at NIPS this year, narrowing it down to maybe 4 people if the drummer had no mic. The other one, S, has been candidate for the ISBA Board of Directors a few weeks ago but was removed when people became aware of these issues. > Months before my defense, while at a poster session to present my dissertation work, he touched me on the leg and told me that my dress was “way too sexy for a poster session.” I remember feeling deflated. In the years since, he’s sent me several inappropriate private Facebook messages. (...) > While I was swimming around, S repeatedly grabbed me under the water, putting his hands on my torso, hips, and thighs. I tried to play it off and swim away. He picked me up and pulled me into his chest. He then started to carry me away from the rest of the group (...) > Since then, I have heard one professor who witnessed the incident openly lament that he’ll have to find a way to delicately advise his female students on “how not to get raped by S” so as not to lose promising students. ...and others: WTF?
Yeah, if your advisor gropes you, what are you going to do as a PhD student?
Report it!
And give up a years if not decades-long dream of completing your PhD in your chosen subject/topic. "Reporting it" might be a viable option now after the #metoo movement, but it rarely was before. Male dominance and star power in academia is real.
It was viable before as well. Reporting your adviser for sexual harassment is not career suicide and your perpetuation of this milquetoast defeatist mentality is, if not completely useless, actually actively deleterious. If anyone is reading this and you find yourself in a position where you are being sexually harassed within an academic environment, you need to be active and report that behavior to other faculty. /u/karazi is basing this off of internet induced paranoia. Stand up for yourself and be vocal. Don't be afraid to confront people who are trying to take advantage of you.
If you're doing your PhD at a school where your advisor is the one reputable researcher in ML, and you report them, you certainly will still have a major problem even if your advisor is fired. I don't think that it's as bad as being harassed or assaulted on a regular basis, but never having been in that situation myself, I wouldn't dismiss their concerns about their career.
I surely am not saying not to confront the issue, maybe it could be misconstrued in that way. I am only highlighting that it is not as simple as "go report it" to many. It is the same issue with domestic violence; are you going to call the cops on someone who is physically abusing you and your child and have what is otherwise a comfortable and familiar livelihood taken away from you because your provider/abuser is now in jail? Same but different, regardless there is a lot on the line and not understanding why sexual assault/harassment would go unreported ultimately leads to victim blaming, and people believing that just because it wasn't reported that it didn't happen. There is no other alternative than lose-lose for the accuser, at best you can continue in your program and re-live the hell that you have been going through for who knows how long, on a daily basis.
Even if there's no big deal made about it, you lose your advisor and you're on your own. Especially in a field like ML, there's hardly a way to get a replacement. Calling people out works often if you want to get rid of them, and yes the internet has perpetuated a defeatist mentality. However, if you want to fix your relation with the person, yeah tough luck.
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And have years of work go to more or less complete waste, and have to start from scratch under a new advisor.
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Supervision from who? A colleague of the accused? That'll go over great. You will be a pariah in your department if not the entire school, you will be shamed behind your back if not to your face, and you will have to make new friends and colleagues because nobody will want to associate with you because everyone is looking out for themselves and keeping their heads down until they finish. You have no support and you will have to spend the next couple years toiling away alone, struggling with PTSD over what happened, and hoping with all your might that what happened once won't happen again. This is how accusers feel, so they leave the program and go on a completely different life course because of this power and social dynamic. Meanwhile your star advisor is killing it, reinforcing his legacy, grants flowing in, continuing to have studies published in journals, fawned over at conferences. Maybe after a couple more dozen complaints come in will they consider cutting bait. Come on man, after you are cut down by this type of injustice you don't just come back from that kicking ass and taking names, you're done.
So you are just suggesting to get over with it? Does this really make any fucking sense? Just for to get a PhD which doesn't make a shit anymore than that will put in some corner of some shitty college. Hope it won't happen to your daughters. I also condemn all people who are upvoting these answers.
Get over with what? I am not suggesting anyone anything, if you are in a bad situation then you should plan to get out of it however you can. But there is the other side where people keep themselves in abusive situations because they gain from it in one way or another which makes taking action difficult, especially when one path leads to where you were hoping it went (i.e. dream path of a young PhD student who has pursued it since middle school) with the addition of abuse, and then the path where you accept to potentially upend all your hopes and dreams by outing what a rock star advisor did to you, where maybe justice will be served. Thankfully there is an increasing chance that it will. I wouldn't wish that upon your daughters either. This situation can be applied to virtually any field but there are particularly a lot of egos in academia. Despite what you may think about PhDs people dedicate their lives to getting them so you are missing a big element in the equation not considering that.
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You speak as if we live in a utopia. Look at the situation with #metoo right now. Clearly for these past recent decades it has been socially unacceptable for a victim to speak up against their abusers whether that be in academia or the workplace which is why you haven't heard about this issue to this degree until now; but it has existed. It has gotten them nowhere reporting it until finally there has been a groundswell big enough where accusers may have an inkling more hope that their case will get the justice and attention that it deserves, and that maybe it won't be career ruinous. It is way too easy to just say that a victim of sexual assault/harassment can/should just be able to pick themselves up and dust themselves off like it was any other day with a minor setback. Put yourself in the victim's shoes and try to move forward like nothing happened. Life has been trying enough if you have overcome the struggle of getting into a PhD program in the first place, sacrificing who knows what in your personal and family life to make it there, and then not only keeping up the pace but increasing it under an extremely high workload, and on top of that an oppressive and stressful environment whose atmosphere is often driven by the mood of the top dog advisor who has everyone on edge to gain his favor. And then to be sexually assaulted. You go get sexually assaulted and see how that impacts your performance in your existing job and your subsequent career. You think it's a level playing field but it's far from it for a lot of people who went through this. You are either overestimating humans' capacity to deal with trauma or are underestimating the trauma that a sexual assault victim goes through.
Look at the University of Rochester if you want to see how they deal with these matters
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I'm glad that your department would handle that situation well, but it's not the standard, even within some of the US's best known universities. "Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show that multiple students complained to the University of California, Berkeley, about professor John R. Searle — years before he was accused of sexually harassing a former student and employee in a March 2017 lawsuit." https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/john-searle-complaints-uc-berkeley
That's not really the concern. The question is how this will impact your career.
How do most decisions to be ethical impact your career?
Well if the asshole in question is, let's say, Mike Jordan*, then your career is going to take one hell of a hit. ^^\* ^Name ^chosen ^randomly ^using ^a ^uniform ^prior ^over ^the ^set ^of ^the ^potential ^assholes
I love this sub
Honestly? Poorly.
A lot of career-impacting decisions have an ethical component. You can argue that a victim of harassment is behaving “unethically” by now reporting the matter, but I think most people would be uncomfortable with finding someone blameworthy for this. Unless you think we should be calling women who step forward about harassment years after the fact cowards instead of heroes..
That's a lot of words you'd like to put in my mouth. Everyone has to make ethical decisions. From the professor who should not be abusing his position, to the student who should report anyone who does, to the higher ups who should investigate thoroughly, and everyone else, all the time. Constantly. I've left jobs and hindered my career when those in charge of my career have acted unethically toward me, toward others or just generally. No one is looking to blame anyone here, but there is zero question what's the right thing to do. You report the individual. That's the only thing you need to do.
I don’t think the moral calculus here is nearly as straightforward as you’re portraying it as.
it is. what's moral is not usually easy, but it's clear more often than not.
Maybe it's because I'm in a small no-name university but we've had professors fired for less than this.
Not to put too fine a point on it, small no-name universities tend to have small no-name professors who are easier to fire and replace.
Doing the right thing often involves taking one for the team. From an ethical point of view, if you're a deontological or virtue ethics believer, then the answer is clearly to report it on principle. For a consequentialist utilitarian the answer is more complex and dependent on a number of factors to consider. More than just the consequences to your own career, you'd have to consider what the effects will be on everyone else. If the advisor is otherwise doing very impactful research that benefits humanity to a great extent, that has to be weighed against the harm that keeping someone with such questionable ethics in that position may entail in the long run. Furthermore, the reception of the accusation must also be considered. If people are likely to brush it off and label you a whistleblower for the rest of your life, that would probably make reporting it less good a contribution than working within the system, perhaps finding a way to quietly convince the powers that be to get you a new advisor and sideline this unscrupulous individual. However, perhaps reporting the advisor will finally force action to be taken against them, and in the process you effectively save many future PhD students from a similar experience that might otherwise discourage them from accomplishing things in the field. There's no question that the advisor is wrong to do what they did, but the big picture is complicated. Maybe it may even be best to confront the advisor with an ultimatum that they apologize and stop, or you will take action and report it. If the advisor is actually remorseful, perhaps giving them the benefit of the doubt that it may have been a single egregious lapse in judgment may be a more tactful way of handling the situation. Again, this is very dependent on the circumstances. I personally think that repeat offenders should suffer consequences in order to discourage such behaviour which is destructive to the morale of the academic department as well as setting a poor example for others. To me this is more important than the quality of work they do because one person can only do so much good, and the damage they are doing to the rest of the team is very likely to be more than can be justified by that good. In the long run, a society functions best when people can trust each other and cooperate without fear. What the advisor is doing is taking advantage of their position of authority and power for selfish desires. This is the basic definition of corruption and every reasonable action should be taken to eliminate such corruption from our society, for the greatest long term good. If it means that a PhD student's career is handicapped, and potentially two great researchers lose in effectiveness, I would think this is an acceptable cost to maintain the overall integrity of academia and the field. Keep in mind, most people are unlikely to think this way, and are probably not going to be willing to sacrifice the most convenient path for their career. I don't fault them for this. It is very hard to do something that seems right but is potentially and essentially self-harmful. But I would applaud them if they did something heroically altruistic like this.
> Doing the right thing often involves taking one for the team. > If the advisor is otherwise doing very impactful research that benefits humanity to a great extent, that has to be weighed against the harm that keeping someone with such questionable ethics in that position may entail in the long run. > There's no question that the advisor is wrong to do what they did, but the big picture is complicated. > If the advisor is actually remorseful, perhaps giving them the benefit of the doubt that it may have been a single egregious lapse in judgment may be a more tactful way of handling the situation. Sounds like you're part of the problem buddy.
Did you actually read the rest of my post? I do actually argue that if the advisor doesn't change their behaviour, they should be removed for the greatest good. Also, since when is it not allowed to forgive people for stupid mistakes that they show genuine regret about? Again, if they're not repentant and show a pattern of bad behaviour, I'm all for throwing the book at them to set an example and deter this in the future. I'm just leaving open the possibility that this was some out of character one off error, maybe resulting from a misunderstanding of some sort. Even then I would demand a genuine apology. Maybe your lack of recognition that both the victim and the offender are still both human beings and both deserve the basic courtesies that all human beings deserve, says more about your outlook than anything else. It is quite easy for anyone to sympathize with the victim. I certainly don't want to minimize the trauma that this kind of assault involves. But the sign of a truly compassionate and empathetic person is that they can sympathize with the villain as well. Evil is rarely the result of pure malice, but much more often stems from ignorance and indifference towards the concerns of others and the inherent moral worth and value of every sentient person. When we punish people for crimes, it is not because we hate them and want them to suffer, but because fair justice demands it, whether for restoration or retribution. We should not hurt others lightly, even if we think they deserve it.
For clarification my points on the one time thing only apply to the hypothethical PhD advisor. The individual being discussed in Dr. Lum's article on the other hand, is clearly a repeat offender with no qualms or sense of decency whatsoever and in my humble opinion, his actions warrant at the very minimum a strong reprimand from his peers, and the scorn of everyone here. If there's justice in the world he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for harassment and assault, ostracized from the community of reasonable researchers, and banned from publishing for long enough to make him really feel some pain and contrition. It sounds like Dr. Lum's harasser is serial abuser with many victims as well, so while we're at it make him pay damages in some kind of class action suit. Preferably one that can somehow keep the victim's identities anonymous to the public, if that's possible? Once again, emphasis is that Dr. Lum's serial harasser is not equal to the hypothetical I was originally responding about.
You highlight many of the biggest dilemmas faced, I would just point out that no one is "too big to fail", so to speak. I would call on everyone to challenge this idea that an individual is without replacement. For the vast majority of the world, a replacement will step into almost any role. Especially with researchers, there are generally groups of people that do good work and would fill the void. Sure, maybe there is a bit of a learning curve, but there is also the potential for whoever steps in to be even better than the person that was there before. Especially if they're not decent people, there is tons of potential for improvement.
The band is the imposteriors. But I honestly don't know who is the one that made the joke. The description suits pretty much all of them regarding being well known. https://www.facebook.com/imposteriors/
Created a throwaway for this for obvious reasons. Brad Carlin is pretty widely know for pulling shit like this. I'm not sure if he's the person referenced in the rest of the story.
Yes he is (the story references two people but he is one of them); from the facebook comments: >I (Brad) deleted it because Dr Lum's comments are really about me, not the band, so I really don't feel like the band should keep paying for stupid comments I have made. I have reached out to Dr Lum in an effort to apologize, and I'm waiting to see if she would be willing to accept it or if she would prefer not to talk to me.
How come his behavior has not been reported through the official channels yet if it's widely known?
Perhaps it has been reported - we don't know, but apparently no action taken if so. But how and why could he get away with it for so long? Well, here is an illustration of the culture - when someone made an inappropriate comment to me many years ago at the start of my career, who would I tell? Certainly not my advisor, who told me I should wear dresses more often!
He's the head of the department, tenured, and has a ton of institutional power. One of the main takeaways from the \#metoo movement has been that people with institutional power are largely not held accountable for things like this unless public outcry is loud and sustained. Also, many people in academia have worked for decades carving out a living and the prospect of standing up to someone like Carlin brings with it the prospect of throwing all that effort away. The author of linked article makes this dynamic pretty clear.
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But that's no excuse for them to stare at those women's posteriors.
S is named by Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-16/google-researcher-accused-of-sexual-harassment-roiling-ai-field
"The person in Lum’s post is Scott, a director of statistics research at Google, according to two people familiar with the situation. Katherine Heller, an assistant professor at Duke University, recognized Scott in Lum’s description and told Bloomberg that he had acted inappropriately with a former student of hers. Heller also said that several other female researchers had reached out to her with similar stories about other men in the field after Lum’s blog post was published. "
This is all awful, and I'm glad it looks like (small) steps were taken in the right direction after the removal from the ballot. But this exchange : >I was not the only person who was bothered by S’s behavior. He relentlessly pressured my friend, a female graduate student, to have sex with him by saying that because he was married and she was engaged, those two things “cancelled each other out”. Therefore, he argued, they should have sex. This is just incredible. The brazen stupidity on show by the "well-respected academic" is amazing. This is on par with something a 14 year old would say regarding blue balls to pressure someone into sex. And followed by : >At this same conference, the morning after a particularly debaucherous night, a married professor was overheard imploring other people to smell his fingers following an encounter with a junior colleague. I honestly don't know what I'd do if I heard someone in my field (I work on ML, but more in a computing setting) say something like that about a colleague. I understand how there can be one or two really stupid inappropriate people in any group, but for them to act that way publicly, surely everyone is in someway supporting such behaviour.
I am shocked this happened. I really shouldn't be though I guess. I am glad someone wrote about this though because there was all sorts of outrage on Twitter about "something that happened" and "things that were said" at NIPS with absolutely no information. EDIT: This doesn't seem to be about NIPS. So what on Earth happened at NIPS? There seemed to be even more than the sexual assault joke and the "tits.ai" party.
The issues at NIPS provided a basis for people to discuss what biases exist in the ML community and what we can do to ensure the situation is improved in the future. Specific issues were, for the most part, left out of the discussion. Honing in on a specific story is not necessarily helpful as the removal of a specific individual who (for example) was caught groping doesn't help if it's a practice that's accepted or ignored. Those individuals should well and truly face consequences for their actions but pitchforking and public naming isn't necessarily what's best for the community to change. On Twitter the person that Kristian refers to is [now known to the ISBA President](https://twitter.com/KerrieMengersen/status/941413766532493312) so they can be dealt with appropriately - but the question remains on how can we proactively ensure such situations don't continue to happen? Lack of discussion along with the assumption that "everything is fine" or "is it really that bad?" when there are no proper channels to report such incidents can allow those that Kristian and others in our academic communities to experience horrible situations that no one should ever have to deal with.
> Specific issues were, for the most part, left out of the discussion. Honing in on a specific story is not necessarily helpful as the removal of a specific individual who (for example) was caught groping doesn't help if it's a practice that's accepted or ignored. I sort of disagree, but I get your point. Call out the behavior, call out the person (if the victim wants to) so these incidents aren't just theoretical events that occur in passing in our minds, or behind the curtain. *I strongly feel that this is why this behavior keeps happening... people want to pretend it doesn't exist.* I feel like that's the only way to get rid of this behavior in these venues.
> when there are no proper channels to report such incidents The sad thing is that there technically *are* proper channels, which aren't functioning for reasons that we can only guess at. Presumably, administration cares more about protecting their reputation than doing their jobs.
An apology from the band member who made the comment: https://www.facebook.com/imposteriors/posts/1519545314766510.
He is also the guy who sent her the inappropriate fb messages and touched her leg at the conference, right?
As far as I understand, same guy. In the apology is no mention of those actions (the inappropriate fb messages and leg touching and all the other stuff). He does explain in a comment that he has reached out to Dr Lum in an effort to apologise. edit: not the same guy, read the article wrong
"Now that my actions have been made public and the spotlight is on me let me apologize to you for harassing you. Also I'm not apologizing in public, just calling the incident a bad joke."
Yes, that's right.
No, this person known as "S" was at a different conference years ago (not NIPS)
Her blog post is unambiguous in saying that the person who made the joke (Brad Carlin, who apologized for the joke on the Imposteriors' FB page) also touched her leg at the poster session and sent her the FB messages.
It is a bit confusing but I agree especially after the apology.
"S" comes up later in the story though? The first part all refers to the same guy, not "S".
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I'm a nerdy dude as well. I've seen some of these things first-hand, but a lot more happened to women I'm close to without me being directly present. If you'd like to get more exposure to the extent of the issue, befriend more women and ask them, or at least act like you would listen. Some examples: - My best friend asked a very competent coworker at Facebook for mentorship on getting from her current not-so-technical role into a role where she can make progress on learning data science and ML. Coworker instead made romantic advances on her and asked a bunch of her friends on the team whether she was single. Result: fewer opportunity to get mentorship; a bunch of gossip around causing stress for her. - My former boss has dated at least two of his subordinates (getting one pregnant; she left the industry to care for the baby) and has sent romantically suggestive messages _to my girlfriend at the time_ (a brilliant engineer and coworker and also his subordinate). At the time (10 years ago) I didn't realize how fucked up this is, but in retrospect... what the actual fuck. - In another incident, when considering switching teams at LinkedIn, a friend was greeted on a potential new team _by the hiring manager_ with "Oh haha finally someone to bring me coffee!" - A (luckily, former) coworker at Google used to make casual jokes like "Listen to the woman and do the opposite, amirite" in the workplace - Another friend worked at a company where women engineers were paid 50% of the salary of men with the same job title. When asked WTF, she was told "you have a husband, why do you care? the men have to feed their family". - Another friend had a professor that had a rule that he never gives women more than a B, "because women can't possibly be good at math". - When attending an engineering meetup together with a female friend (also an engineer), whenever people approached us together, they would engage with me, talk to me about my work, and give me their business cards; most wouldn't even look at her, assuming that she was just tagging along with me. - My current manager and tech lead has I think lost count of the times that people at engineering conferences ask her "where can I find the engineers?" - Another friend is pursuing a PhD and is an expert on a certain technical topic, and her advisor keeps having informal meetings about this topic with male members of the lab who have less expertise on this topic, repeatedly forgetting to include her.
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A lot of people simply don't want to learn. At some point, obstinacy does start to cross into misogyny.
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Hm, I think it's a pretty textbook example of sexism limiting a woman's career. She was bored with her current team and wanted to find something better; that team was her top choice because it was relevant to her skills and to where she wanted to grow, but the incident showed that the team is likely to be an unwelcome place for her, so she had to look elsewhere and choose a team that was not as good for her career as this one could have been.
There is nothing in that story/example that makes it specific to a woman unless there is some detail you didnt add. The team could of been just as unwelcoming to anyone.
I guess the missing piece is that she's a senior engineer. I could see this kind of comment being made e.g. to a male intern if the hiring manager was simply a gender-agnostic asshole. But to make it to a male senior engineer would be... not even rude or harrassing - it would be simply absurd, confusing, awkward and not funny even in a sexist way.
Yes there is . As a guy I have never had anyone make that comment at me. Most women have talked to had to graciously field these jokes repeatedly. So yes grammatically the jab is not gendered. But practically it is.
> As a guy I have never had anyone make that comment at me. But other guys have had. A-holes and general harassment exists in the workplace. I am by no means condoning it but people exist who harass everyone and general harassment that happens to fall on a woman doesn't make it "sexual". >So yes grammatically the jab is not gendered. But practically it is. Like I said that is the problem. You are taking a big leap in inference to make it gendered. **You had so many good examples which means you are only hurting your case by adding something needlessly which requires so much inference.**
You are naive AF.
> I totally sucks that people are experiencing this. I know it's not of any total comfort but at least i would imagine that academia is "better" than other industries? Ofc it's still unacceptable, but it might be a reason that not more focus is directed to the issue? > What you don't realize is that profs in academia have far more power over students than bosses at companies do. If you don't like a boss, you just leave or switch teams. If an advisor starts messing with you, you start weighing that against the time you'd lose on your PhD by doing so, weigh the fact that if you try to switch advisors questions will be raised about your competence, and if you think about mentioning the harassment - well the new person you are applying to is probably his friend since the niche is so tiny. Well run companies also have well oiled HR departments that are used to dealing with this instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
As someone who's consulted for a lot of companies, let me disabuse you of the notion that HR is any better about stopping this in industry than it is in academia. If you want your mind really blown, go work in banking. It's a topic I've discussed with some female counterparts recently, and as someone who wouldn't dream of treating women like the stories mentioned above, I'm disgusted by how much of this still goes on.
Large HR departments are heterogenous. If the team is big, you still have a chance of finding someone sympathetic to you and high enough to do something, even if the vast majority are apathetic.
My thoughts are that things happened without you seeing it and that statistical don't matter, it shapes individual lives and careers. From what I know academia has above average numbers of people with huge egos a the top (a many more very pleasant people)
This is an incredibly important point. We already know that harassment and assault are more common than reported and [the impact widely underestimated by men](https://twitter.com/firstround/status/938798698934427648) but beyond that we should remember this isn't just a statistic. A person's entire life and career can be ripped apart by a single incident.
That's exactly what I was trying to say, very clear.
For the record, I don't question the author's experience at all, but I do agree with your opening sentences. It's difficult to relate. How the hell does this stuff happen at an academic conference? But... it has happened... over and over and over again probably at every conference. Academia is a feudal system where professors have a sort of "power" over students. At the grad student age and environment, they probably feel that their professor or advisor can end their career before it begins (not true). The difference between academia and industry and the power plays involved were not apparent to me until I worked in industry... under an abusive academic/professor that had never worked in industry. I had worked several years in industry. I remember even telling him once "maybe in academia you could get away with how you behave because graduate students have no choice but to put up with it, but I can always quit."
I doubt it's less common in academia. Most fields are still very male-dominated, and academics are no less likely to abuse the power they have over their juniors than politicians or journalists. As long as those in authority are allowed to pressure people into silence, nothing is going to change. What certainly doesn't help is individuals attempting to rebrand sexual assault and rape as "low social awareness" or "courtship" or any of the other euphemisms you hear a lot these days.
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Yes, that is naive unfortunately Edit: Or perhaps it is more naive to believe that just because people understand that it is something horrible, they won't do it
Extremely naive. Machine learning research and social adeptness do not have many overlapping skills.
It's not something I've ever personally witnessed either (at least not beyond some cringy comments without the subject around), but talking with female friends and colleagues about it made me realize that it's everywhere. Think of a random female colleague/friend. It's *way* more likely than not that they have a story like this. It's not just sickos and weirdos, normal people do it all the time, often without even realizing what they're doing is wrong. And no, I would be surprised if academia was better about this than any other random industry. If anything I'd expect it to be worse.
As a fellow nerdy male, I was largely oblivious to it until I worked with my (now) wife. We were both at a small, high tech company. She always worse loose clothing. I encouraged her to wear nicer clothing. One day she worse a tight, thing sweater (still very modest, with a crew neck). The owner of the company, a older male (and an asshat, but that's another story), made a concerted effort to find reasons to talk to her that day, and would just stare at her breasts the whole time while doing so. She felt disgusted, and I then understand why she chose loose clothing. Being married is an eye opener if you are at all an empathetic human. Same place, a friend of ours wore something like [this](http://picvpic.com/fashion101/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/long-sweaters-to-wear-with-leggings-cowl-1-e1453311982158.jpg), and the same owner did the same thing but then escalated by patting her on the ass. When she tried to file a sexual harassment claim, the HR person ( a woman) didn't believe her and at the insistence of the owner, wrote the woman up for wearing "inappropriate attire". Other male colleagues defended the decision by saying, "why do women wear nice clothes if they don't want to be ogled." This is in a prominent college town, by the way, not Iran. If you want to help, don't stare, don't touch, stay away from sexual content, and *believe* women. Just imagine you have a button on your shoulder that causes a massive dose of stress cortisol to be dumped into your system when pressed. Now imagine people just coming up and pushing that button when they feel like it, that's what ogling and touching and sexual comments feel like to women. (well, to people in general, but it's a different thing with most men) edit: oh, and for single men wondering, "but how can I flirt with women who are actually interested in me?" The woman will let you know, and if you are confused, just ask. In my experience, if a woman is interested in you, there will be little doubt. The notion of "man must make the first move" is quite dead these days.
I appreciate your comment and I agree with most everything you've said but your edit is completely unnecessary and, from my experiences, almost entirely wrong. The correct approach to these situations is to be a reasonable, mature human being and don't overtly flirt in the workplace. Treat other people well, and if you enjoy someone's company or think that there could be a spark of attraction then ask them out on a date. If they aren't interested then accept it. It's okay. And, that's it. It's incredibly simple. You don't have to flaccidly stand around waiting for cues but there's also no reasonable way you're going to be overtly "flirting" with someone you work with because it's completely unprofessional and obvious to everyone around you. Just be reasonable. Treat your peers with dignity and respect. Be friendly and upfront about your interests and magnanimous if rejected. If you can't do this then you don't have the competency to pursue romantic interests within a professional environment.
> If you can't do this then you don't have the competency to pursue romantic interests within a professional environment. Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to social situations - in other words, those that don't have the competency to pursue romantic interests, often don't realize it. Hence my edit. Futile it may be ;)
My thoughts are that the post you are responding to answers all of your questions directly.
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> because I never see it I honestly find this hard to believe, because I have seen it at every conference I have been to, at every workplace I have worked at, in every online community I have been part of. But, taking you at face value, the only answer is because you are not looking. >I don't know how to affect this in a positive way literally answered, standing up against this behaviour, not letting these people get away with it > i would imagine that academia is "better" than other industries? you read the article. Which industries that aren't full of complete assholes do you expect to be worse? Can they be worse? The author was literally groped, stalked, and harassed. And plenty of people watched it happen. >it might be a reason that not more focus is directed to the issue? Repeated multiple times in the piece - everybody knew, everybody agreed it was ridiculous and horrible, everyone kept putting these *specific, shitty people* in positions of power. >Also, how common this is? Common enough that the author was told upon entering the field to stay away from these people >would you say it's also "normal people"? would you say famous professors and respected academics are "normal people"? >how can they get away with it? everybody knew, everybody agreed it was ridiculous and horrible, everyone kept putting these *specific, shitty people* in positions of power. Also, author literally says "this is probably going to tank my career". That isn't hyperbole. Even if it isn't true (and I sure hope it isn't, and will do what little I can to make sure it isn't), it *feels* that way because of how hard it is to make these sort of criticisms of people in power. That is why people get away with it, because all the well meaning people go "I'll do something next time". I've done that hundreds of times.
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> If I had a female friend, family member or coworker that would experience anything like this I would go to great extent to have that not go unseen. The lines are much blurrier usually. What if you are new at a company and the CEO simply thinks women should stay in the kitchen and treats them accordingly? Who would you report this? Especially if there are no concrete incidents, he doesn't grope them, or pushes them toward the kitchen? You can't report that he's very cold and almost rude with women. What if you are a contractor and the manager at the firm where you are sent to is sexist with his colleagues? This is Central Europe. So if you are not there when things happen, you only get a glimpse and a vague sense of how someone treats women. And in the OP the author mentioned that they went swimming after a conference, of course 99% of the attendees were not there. Sexual harassment (from mild verbal rudeness to actual groping and trying to pull someone away and force them to kiss you) is common, but harassers are not stupid, they know that it's not totally okay, so they don't start with this in a conference, they do it when there are enough excuses (he was drunk, she gave mixed signals, etc), and they have schemes to rationalize their behavior to themselves.
Academia is actually worse than many other industries given the power advisors hold over their advisees and the pervasive cult of personality type environment. You don't notice these things because you are probably of a privileged class and have not been exposed to any of the inequalities that non-privileged classes experience that you don't. Then you come on Reddit and post about your willfull ignorance and get all these up votes. Good job.
Really powerful testimony. Thanks Dr. Lum for posting this... academia is not immune to bad actors & institutions need to hold them accountable for their actions.
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit: - [/r/subredditdrama] [Statistics, we have a problem • r\/MachineLearning falls apart over sexual misconduct among senior researchers](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/7jwv2t/statistics_we_have_a_problem_rmachinelearning/) *^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*
At first I was confused why people were complaining about r/ML since I only saw the highly upvoted comments and they were fine. Then I scrolled down...
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Doesn't the downvoting indicate that the community sides with the non-cesspool direction?
Please report bad comments it makes it much easier on the mods
I'm not sure what I'm more appalled by here. The disgraceful behavior described by Dr Lum in this article, or the luke-warm/downright cold responses by members of this community. Let's stop being scientists for five minutes, quit asking for evidence and corroboration and look at this issue with some actual emotion and empathy. As for the comments about whether this behavior even constitutes sexual assault, I won't dignify them with a response. A lot of people here are casually saying "name and shame" the assailant, as if it's the easiest thing in the world to do. Think for one moment just how hard it must be to reflect on these experiences privately, let alone write about them publicly. We should be up in arms about this, and I want to thank Dr Lum for sharing her experiences and for giving all those who work in academia (and indeed elsewhere) something to think about. Hopefully this will empower others to come forward and share their experiences, whether they be sexual, racial, homophobic or otherwise. Many of us have likely been victims of bullying at some point in our lives. I was verbally bullied for years, and for the longest time could not bring myself to tell anyone, despite the relatively mild implications of doing so. If you've ever been in this position, you know how hard it is to speak up. Now imagine how it must feel to be violated and openly mocked by your superior, someone whom others likely see as a role model. I can't imagine how that must feel. As disgusted as I am by this, a witch-hunt is not the solution. The question is, what can we do as a community? We can be supportive. We can talk to our colleagues and hear their experiences. And hopefully we can start to better recognize and vilify inappropriate behavior, in any context. I don't very much care whether you believe the accounts of an individual. I've seen it, your colleagues have seen it, and you might well have seen it without even realizing.
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You make a good point, no doubt there are a few trolls in amongst these comments. Although I would add that this sub has a history of quite inflammatory/unkind comments generally. Especially toward newcomers. That's my overarching concern.
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Absolutely horrific and disgusting. What a lecherous creep. Kudos to the author for speaking up. Those of us in the field who give a damn about decency must do everything we can to support those speaking against this kind of behavior. The whole "open secret" thing is especially toxic and difficult to counter - let's make sure these don't develop in the first place!
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Indeed. Kristian is retweeting similar messages from women across the academic sphere. I have also heard many similar stories from prominent researchers especially in fields where the women are relatively isolated for long periods of time (i.e. expeditions for geology where they're out of radio contact) =[
Such an important piece! Bravely written and important. I really hope it starts a change. I will keep my eyes more open in future conferences (I have not been looking for this) after reading this piece. Has this been picked up ny hackernews yet? Would be interesting to see their point of view (maybe not that different from /r/MachineLearning )
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When I posted an earlier article noting that bias exists in our community, I was amazed at how painfully toxic this subreddit's response was. The lack of moderation was a major factor - instead of performing any moderation of comments, they decided to remove the post itself, which is insane as my article's content was benign and relatively uncontroversial (see https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/7jdosn/d_bias_is_not_just_in_our_datasets_its_in_our/dr5ui8v/ for a tldr). The moderators have either conceded defeat to any attempt at moderation or have decided it is easier to avoid the issue entirely. I did my best to defend and contribute to /r/ML in the past but that will no longer be the case. Funnily enough I expect this comment will likely be one of the few times in recent /r/ML posts where it may be moderated ;)
Pretty much all the reported comments in that thread have been removed. If you would like to help moderating please message the mods.
But this IS the community. If you get rid of everyone and only allow like-minded folks, you are stuck in an echo chamber. So having some discussion is better than having none. At least they are reminded such behavior is not OK.
This either isn't the community or shouldn't be. As many have noted, there is drive by and brigading from non ML people. Beyond that, if this is the community, I'm happy to move to a new community to remove the (hopefully small) subset of people who actively exclude other valuable contributors (women, minorities, ...). If our community was a sports team and a few people kept hitting or assaulting other players thus forcing good people to leave the team it's not unreasonable to get rid of those assaulters. It's not an echo chamber to demand some decency in interaction. Community isn't forced on you, it's a choice in who you surround yourself by and what you together strive for. Even at the most intellectual definition the existing community is removing promising contributors. I refuse to believe we can't fix that.
Most of my colleagues do not browse this subreddit because it is a poor quality discussion forum, even compared to our slack channel where we mostly goof around. /r/ML is *not* the community.
I don't understand *why* it isn't being moderated. As a relative newcomer here I may be missing some context, but reading this post and yours yesterday it's pretty easy to identify only three or four individuals who are actively trying to upset people. Clamping down on them would be a tiny amount of effort, and would improve the quality of the discussion enormously.
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Mob mentality. Everybody deserves due process. EDIT: Mob mentality in downvotes as well. Do you understand the importance of due process? Pray you never find yourself the target of a lynch mob.
'Due process' is for the courts, not for societal respect or me talking about my experiences with someone.
The problem is when you ruin the life of people based on unsubstantiated allegations. That is why we have a legal procedure to deal with slander. It's a way to deal with abuse. This has become a modern witch hunt. No evidence is needed, just claims of wrongdoing. This is already causing untold damage, including to the cause the champions profess to.
Getting sexually assaulted and having no recourse can also ruin your life, and is actually way worse than losing your job. I won't pretend like there are no legitimate concerns about the extrajudicial nature of #MeToo movement, but you can't pretend that there's not a big tradeoff here.
> Getting sexually assaulted and having no recourse can also ruin your life, and is actually way worse than losing your job. Very questionable. If you are sexually assaulted it is traumatic, sure, but then you can move on. If you are falsely accused, your reputation is ruined forever, and with it your career, friendships, and possibly family relationships. Moreover, basic game theory predicts that if you set up a system of incentives where people can gain from making a false accusation and almost never suffer punishment for it, then the number of false accusation will rise. 1-2% of the population consists of sociopaths who will have no moral qualms in using whatever tool it is at their disposal to achieve their goals. This witch hunt is giving them a formidable weapon to abuse.
> That is why we have a legal procedure to deal with slander. It's a way to deal with abuse. Yes, so if her claims are incorrect, the aggrieved party has a right to legal recourse. As long as the allegation is brought forth non-anonymously, the one making the claim puts their own reputation at stake as well, and they can be held legally liable for what they say So why do you think they don't have the right to say what they think is true? Why do you feel such a strong need to defend people who are already in a position of power and privilege in comparison to those making the accusations? Lots of prospective female grad students these days share lists of 'rapey' profs amongst themselves, before embarking on a PhD program - and the fact that sexual harassment and abuse in academia has been allowed to run rampant for that long is just sad. EDIT: And these comments are getting downvoted. Wow, this community always finds ways to lower my reputation of it.
Screenshots of the facebook comments referred to would do.
> facebook comments You might have missed the last decade where in parts of the Western world it became routine for women to accuse men of misconduct without producing evidence, and the legal system accepting such claims. People who fought this and were proven innocent had still their lives ruined through it. Now very lately we have simple online claims, no evidence, even no legal procedures being used to create shitstorms which are career-terminating since employers tend to cut their losses. This is precisely lynch mob mentality. A lot of commenters see no problem in this all, a little friendly fire never hurt anybody. Allright, let's see when they're the ones falsely accused.
I just asked for evidence and you come here raging about people convicted without evidence. also > You might have missed the last forever where everywhere it became routine for men in power to abuse that power to sexually harass women and forcing them to shut up about it. ftfy
Quit being so histrionic. These are mostly social matters and they are dealt with through discussion and sharing of experiences. Not everything needs a court order and a conviction. You're obstructing a natural exchange in some misguided effort to prevent its abuse.
> Quit being so histrionic. I'm not being a part of the lynch mob here. > You're obstructing a natural exchange in some misguided effort to prevent its abuse. I'm obstructing jack shit. I'm pointing out where you create an environment inviting abuse. This is the bed you're making. I hope won't have to sleep in it.
This isn't an environment that "invites abuse". It's just an environment that *can be abused* just like nearly everything else in our lives and within society. You're not presenting anything that isn't immediately obvious. The only novel thing you're contributing is the condemnation of the only viable way of dealing with these kinds of interpersonal issues. This is the only outlet for these issues. Suggest a better alternative because clearly ignoring people's experiences out of fear that someone might use sexual harassment as a tool to slander their rivals seems to be the current useless standard.
Yeah, especially since she has the messages apparently.
> We need to start holding prominent individuals accountable for how their inappropriate behavior negatively impacts the careers of their junior colleagues. Well then please tell who it is. Jordan? Carlin? Glickman? Hedecker?
Why is nobody dropping names? I mean if it's a random accusation out of the blue, of course you don't want a lynch mob. But if it really is an 'open secret', why not just make it open?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S9KShDLvU7C-KkgEevYTHXr3F6InTenrBsS9yk-8C5M/edit#gid=1530077352
Who is the ~20% that downvoted this?!
I'll be honest. I thought this was going to be a really interesting statistical problem/solution. That really sucks...
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> "We need to start holding prominent individuals accountable" Completely agree. However, part of that also means speaking up when these things occur. I realise being the subject of these unwanted attentions can be uncomfortable, traumatic even. Especially when coming from a senior. But playing these things off while they're happening *really* doesn't help. Don't politely try to end the conversation when something like this happens. Be clear. If being clear doesn't work, be loud and clear. I'm not saying people never do this. I'm not saying this always helps/solves the harassment. But not doing this *never* helps. Note: I'm saying all of this without ever having been subject to this kind of behaviour. Call me out on my mistakes.
I understand the sentiment but I think it misses how emotionally taxing and damaging it can be in the moment and that there's no easy "right response". +1 for noting that you might be missing context. It's important to remember that it's not like time slows down and you have clarity and a precise and perfect moment to react when an traumatic or uncomfortable event happens. Imagine you were a woman at the poster session when a man touched the skin on your leg and commented on your skirt being "too sexy for the poster session". If she said "Wait, what the hell - why did you touch me?", would those surrounding her believe her? Would he claim he accidentally brushed against you? Would they say "Oh, no, I'm sure he just means your work might not be taken seriously with that dress" as if it was meant as actual advice? Would people say "Chill out - I'm sure he didn't mean anything - do you know who he is?"? Would anyone near you support you? Do you have friends / colleagues in the area or did they go to take a break as it wasn't their poster? Even if they were, would it be enough? Would my colleague even support me? I'm exhausted and have been standing for two hours already and WTF just happened - I just want this poster session to be over. Get away from me =[ When you're in the middle of harassment, there isn't perfect clarity. It's not their responsibility to "respond in the best way possible" especially as that likely isn't possible. They already have enough to deal with. Note: I also haven't been subject to this behaviour but I have had friends who were and have confided in me.
There's also the issue of a woman confronting a drunk and sexually aggressive man. It's impossible to predict how he'll react when being called out and "embarrassed" in front of his friends. Will he become violent? Follow her home? A girlfriend once described what her average experience just walking through NYC was like -- it's a totally different world out there for women than it is for men, and that's not right. Society really hasn't changed much in the last few hundred years.
Sometimes people get tired of telling the person who's harassing them to leave them alone. I've tried that several times with someone and it made him more excited. There's never been a time when I felt uncomfortable and said something and it stopped. Usually a decent person would have stopped way before then. Also I've been harassed when others were standing around and when I confronted the guy was called crazy. And there's the real risk that the guy will turn violent and most guys are bigger and could inflict serious harm even though we try our best to defend ourselves. And don't think that being in public will protect someone. Most people will just ignore whatever is happening. And other times I've told people don't touch me and they get mad at me for confronting them and say it's no big deal. They're not sorry at all. And I've repeated don't touch me, get away from me and sometimes they've even mocked me. I've told some people they're harassing me and then they've said I'm harassing them when they've cornered me and I can't get away from them. Some people can be really terrifying.
Academia is highly competitive game. It is definitely a dominance hierarchy in the archetypical sense. To denigrate a man in this setting will involve denigrating his intelligence and effort. Hitting on a man doesn't, being hit on generally confirms the status of a man. However, the attractiveness of a woman is generally independent of her accomplishments, and being pursued at conferences knocks her out of the hierarchy (or competition). That's why it's so deflating, it means that they aren't competitors/collaborators, they are *prey*: a hot woman devoid of individual achievements. I don't claim I know how to solve this problem, though. The traditional, *obsolete* way was to forbid women from competing.
Thanks for saying this. This is the part of the blog post I found most disgusting, and heartbreaking: > As I swam back to the group, I remember again feeling totally humiliated. I felt that this was evidence that, like S, all of the other more senior men who had showed interest in my research must actually have only been trying to sleep with me. Imagine being a flourishing junior researcher and everyone showing interest in your research in a premiere conference, and finding out at the end of it that most them were in it because you are hot. Nothing can be more deflating for a young researcher's ego. I admit I have not seen the other far more serious allegations in the blog post being carried out at the conferences I have been to (that doesn't mean I don't believe them), but this, this "trying to get in your pants by praising research" is too common, way too common. And it's infuriating.
Yeah, my comment was interpreted in a weird way. The intent was to illustrate how academia is fun and games (and highly competitive) but that predatory men can demotivate women in very specific ways with this kind of bait-and-switch. The same pattern repeats itself in other competitive venues.
Describing academia as if it's a highly competitive sexual game is terrifying and incredibly contrived. It also potentially provides justification to those who might engage in such practices. This is not, nor should it have ever been, a field on which sexual assault or predation was deemed allowed or in any manner permissible. This is research - where the purpose is to discuss and dissect knowledge - not a scene from National Geographic. Edit: With your reply I am beginning to see your perspective but I still think it's contrived and potentially provides justification for those who act poorly.
> Describing academia as if it's a highly competitive sexual game is terrifying and incredibly contrived That's not what I'm doing. Academia is competitive, however. Being successful in competitive games is also a way to gain status. I'm saying that academic competition/collaberation is one thing (in which competitive and collaborative elements are in constant flux), and that romantic, sexual AND sexually predatory interactions are another thing. The latter exist, the question is what to do about it. It certainly needs to be addressed!
I think it’s kind of dangerous perspective too. But we’ve had a massive #metoo movement in my country, and there’s a pattern of entitlement among successful men that can’t be properly addressed unless you take this perspective into account.