One of the most difficult parts of getting a Ph.D. is finishing your dissertation. Beyond the mountain of work a dissertation requires, graduate students also have to face feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, and anxiety about the looming job search. Sometimes, they need a gentle, supportive push to quit stressing about every last comma and—after years of blood, sweat, and tears— finally turn it in.
So when Kate Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chided an old friend who was still a graduate student about taking that last step to finish her thesis, she thought she was doing her a favor. But she was floored by her friend's response.
Clancy remembers her friend saying, "Well, I was sexually assaulted in the field, and every time I open the dissertation files I have flashbacks." That conversation, says Clancy, "was the first time that it really hit me how much these kinds of experiences can not only emotionally traumatize women, but also explicitly hold them back in their research."
So she joined up with three fellow female scientists to study the extent to which sexual harassment and sexual assault occur in the field. On the show this week, the four co-authors—Clancy, anthropologists Robin Nelson and Julienne Rutherford, and evolutionary biologist Katie Hinde— discuss their recently-published survey of scientists who have worked in the field.
This episode also features a short interview with University of Chicago geoscientist Ray Pierrehumbert, who argues that we've been worrying too much about methane emissions from natural gas, and a discussion of a study finding that kids' drawings at age 4 are an "indicator" of their intelligence 10 years later.
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