DCL: NSF INCLUDES: Leveraging Field-Campaign Networks for Collaborative Change

Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO

Investigators

Abstract

The project will engage the large networks supporting two upcoming major NSF-supported field campaigns to understand and mitigate harassment in field settings. The project team will develop, implement, test, and propagate effective practices for improving field site climate and safety. Sexual harassment is deeply entrenched in many workplaces including academia and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, and this issue has gained attention recently. While sexual harassment has been studied extensively in workplaces, including in academia, very little research has focused on this problem in field settings. This work is an essential step toward broadening participation of marginalized groups in the earth sciences in field-based scholarship. This project will leverage the large networks supporting two upcoming major NSF-supported field campaigns (Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud Chemistry, Aerosol Absorption and Nitrogen: WE-CAN; Remote sensing of Electrification, Lightning, And Mesoscale/microscale Processes with Adaptive Ground Observations: RELAMPAGO) to better understand and mitigate negative gender-based harassment in the field and during subsequent professional conferences or science-team meetings. The project aims to dramatically reduce sexual harassment in the earth sciences via these objectives: (1)Train participants in two major upcoming field campaign networks to recognize, report, and confront present and future situations of sexual harassment; (2) Build two new multi-institutional and international networks of proactive scientists, including men, who are invested in combating gender inequality; (3)Investigate the perceptions, attitudes, behaviors, and experiences of earth science field researchers regarding sexual harassment; (4) Create a practical guide for future PIs to facilitate collaborative change around sexual harassment within major field campaign networks. The project will engage the field campaign networks throughout the entire lifecycle of the field campaign, from pre-campaign planning to post-campaign conferences. Based on prior research about sexual harassment in the workplace and academia, the study will focus on change in four major areas: (1) sexual harassment behavior (either perpetrated or experienced by participants); (2) sexual harassment knowledge; (3) sexual harassment responses and impacts; and (4) psychological antecedents for sexual harassment. A major strength of the proposal is that it will allow the examination of cross-cultural effects, as the activities will be tested in the context of both domestic and international field campaign settings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.