Last week, Ally Louks (now Dr. Louks), an academic at the University of Cambridge, posted a picture of herself on the social media site X with her fresh PhD thesis titled “Olfactory Ethics: The politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose”. The post received a surprising amount of attention – it has been viewed more than 100 million times, and has attracted over 11,000 responses.
Although most of it was apparently benign, a large proportion was misogynistic and hateful – including death threats. It highlights the hazards for academics engaging with the public, especially on topics with a political dimension, and even more so while being female.
But how common is this type of incident? Should academics avoid engaging the public? Our team at the Swedish secretariat for gender research has just published a report about experiences of threats, violence and harassment in Swedish universities which sheds some light on these questions. Notably we found that much of the abuse academics experienced came from within the university sector, rather than as a result of public engagement.
Earlier this year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) released a report on the safety of scientific researchers. It compiled a large set of studies on the types of threats researchers face, who tends to be responsible for those threats and other contextual factors associated with heightened risks.
The report showed that there are risks when communicating research. It pointed out that this is particularly so when it comes to politically charged and sensitive fields, such as gender studies and climate science. It also reported that women are targeted to a greater extent and in more intrusive, sexualised ways.
In those respects, the experiences of Louks appear to be a good illustration. But it’s worth mentioning that, as the authors of the Unesco report recognise, the available data is patchy at best – better research is sorely needed.
In Sweden, experiences of hate and harassment have been reported from the higher education sector for many years. We’ve had a public conversation about the risks faced by researchers in the public eye and the implications for science in public debate.
The situation was perceived to be akin to that of journalists, politicians, authors or artists. It appeared that the groups that are crucial to the democratic process, by providing information, vision and commentary, are specifically targeted because of their role in society.
But this was mainly based on anecdotal evidence, typically following political fault lines.
We wanted to make a systematic investigation that was open to the possibility that the problem did not look like previously thought.
Our report was based on a survey of 3,000 members of The Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers.
As many as 39% of those answering the survey reported experiences of threats or harassment in some form during their academic careers. Experiences were more common in the humanities and the social sciences, but more than 30% of people in all subject areas had experienced it.
Interestingly, the results did not quite confirm the received view about social media. We did discover a heightened risk for those researchers who are more engaged in media, including social media, but this group was relatively small.
Most of those who reported being targeted with threats and harassment did not associate this with media appearances, but rather with teaching activities – and mostly online.
We found that women were targeted much more than men, and mostly by students. Men were more targeted by their colleagues. Threatening emails were the most common type of incident. Colleagues were most often cited as perpetrators in situations relating to financing decisions and ongoing research.
Interestingly, when it came to people being targeted online or following a media appearance, men reported being targeted more than women (17% v 11%). But, it is worth keeping in mind that we found that women refrained from making public statements due to fear of being targeted to a larger extent.
As many as 25% of the women said they avoided communicating on certain topics, compared to 20% of the men. Louks’ experiences are arguably precisely the sort of things that explain this approach. It is important for universities to ensure that there is support for academics encountering such situations. Also, it may be useful for academics to collaborate when communicating research online, reducing the risk of one person being targeted in the way Louks was.
Ultimately though, the problem with threats and harassment seems to be, predominantly, an internal one in academia. It may have less to do with political issues than previously thought. Indeed, relatively few of the targeted subjects reported perceiving any sort of political motive behind the incident.
That such threat has been the focus of many previous reports may depend on this being much simpler to make statements about. For the employer, it is easier to support their employees who are targeted by political activists than it is to engage with messy faculty conflicts.
When it comes to preventing incidents, it is crucial to have a factual grip on the nature of the problem. You cannot solve the issue by locking doors if the source of the problem is already inside the house. Indeed, if this is partly a work environment problem, we’ll need measures to help academics avoid stressful situations. We also need to tackle under-financed teaching and a lack of proper support structures for teachers.
This is a report about the conditions in Sweden, and a lot of the data concerns a year (2021) that in some respects has to be understood as an outlier due to the pandemic. However, it is likely that the lessons from the report should, at the very least, be applied when it comes to investigating the problem in other countries.
It is important to ask broadly about the types of incidents that may occur – in particular not to underestimate the importance of internal harassment.
Coming to grips with the problem may be much more expensive and a lot less symbolic than universities had hoped for.
