The internet came down like a ton of bricks yesterday on Alice Huang. The 76-year-old microbiologist and virologist has been a Harvard Medical School professor, New York University dean of sciences, and president of both the American Society for Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also, according to most of the things published about her in the past 24 hours, an idiot.
Huang’s offense was to pen an advice column in the journal Science Careers in response to a (presumably) female postdoc who asked what to do about a male supervisor who keeps “trying to look down my shirt.” As the summaries would have it, Huang counseled the postdoc to just grin and bear it. Her column—which was quickly taken down after a flurry of protest but is archived here—is worth reproducing, and reading, in full:
Imagine what life would be like if there were no individuals of the opposite—or preferred—sex. It would be pretty dull, eh? Well, like it or not, the workplace is a part of life.
It’s true that, in principle, we’re all supposed to be asexual while working. But the kind of behavior you mention is common in the workplace. Once, a friend told me that he was so distracted by an attractive visiting professor that he could not concentrate on a word of her seminar. Your adviser may not even be aware of what he is doing.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defines unlawful sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.” It goes on to say that “harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).” I’m not an attorney, but to me the behavior you’re describing doesn’t seem unlawful by this standard.
Some definitions of sexual harassment do include inappropriate looking or staring, especially when it’s repeated to the point where the workplace becomes inhospitable. Has it reached that point? I don’t mean to suggest that leering is appropriate workplace behavior—it isn’t—but it is human and up to a point, I think, forgivable. Certainly there are worse things, including the unlawful behaviors described by the EEOC. No one should ever use a position of authority to take sexual advantage of another.
As long as your adviser does not move on to other advances, I suggest you put up with it, with good humor if you can. Just make sure that he is listening to you and your ideas, taking in the results you are presenting, and taking your science seriously. His attention on your chest may be unwelcome, but you need his attention on your science and his best advice.
Huang was mocked as an apologist for sexual harassment who encourages the perpetuation of a culture that tolerates it. Arguably, her advice was misguided: It didn’t account for today’s workplace norms, and it waded into legal territory where she was (at her own admission) unqualified. Her critics, many of them far younger than she, are right to insist that nobody should have to feel uncomfortable at work. But in their stridency and self-righteousness, they vilified a woman who deserves more respect.
The criticism overlooks the fact that Huang herself is a pioneer among women in science, who scaled the ranks without any of today’s protections against harassment. When she got her BA from Johns Hopkins University at the start of the 1960s, the university—like Yale, Harvard, and Princeton—did not even admit female undergraduates (according to this interview, she was able to enter the medical school as a transfer student from Wellesley). The US outlawed sexual discrimination in the workplace only in 1964, and not until 1986 did the Supreme Court rule that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination, too.
This was the environment in which Huang established her career. Should she have faced down every colleague who looked down her shirt, or worse? Ideally, perhaps yes; but the pragmatic approach—“As long as your adviser does not move on to other advances, I suggest you put up with it, with good humor if you can”—worked to get her to the very pinnacle of her profession. It’s hardly a surprise that she drew on her life’s experience.
Huang’s critics also imply that her column makes light of sexual harassment and excuses the offending scientist’s behavior. It does neither. Her advice to the postdoc who wrote to her is, essentially: “This is your call.” Indeed, the point at which something becomes harassment isn’t clear-cut. Is it when your colleague’s eyes lock with yours for a moment too long? When he looks at your behind, thinking you haven’t noticed? When he says you look cute? When he says it again? Only the woman—or man—on the receiving end of such unwanted attention can decide if it’s making life uncomfortable.
The fact that the postdoc wrote the letter at all suggests she was indeed uncomfortable, and so perhaps better advice would have been, “Either find a way to talk about it with your supervisor, or raise it with someone else.” But in the end, Huang was telling her, only she could decide whether it was worth taking action—which is undeniably true.
Moreover, that Huang’s advice saw the light of day isn’t her fault alone. Some hapless—and nameless—editor at Science Careers posted it, and that person is taking none of the flak. An editor’s first job with any piece of writing is to perform a reality check. Many illustrious writers would have come to grief long ago were it not for the editors who reined in their wilder ideas. For ideas to flourish, that safety mechanism is essential. In Huang’s case, it failed to deploy.
As a result, many will now remember Huang as the female scientist whose advice to other women could be summed up as, “There’s always going to be a certain level of sexual tension in the workplace, so you might as well put up with it if you can, because doing otherwise might hurt your career.”
Clearly, this is not the message we want to be sending either to the victims of sexual harassment, or to their harassers. But now one of the US’s most distinguished women in science, whose career should be an example to everyone, has been made an object of instant ridicule by the internet’s vultures of judgment. And what kind of message does that send?
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Photo of Alice Huang by Flickr user Aranami, used under Creative Commons License 2.0