Professor Ethan Siegel writes:
What you’re seeing isn’t a series of scandals indicative of a problem in astronomy; you’re seeing the astronomy community standing up, for the first time, with a commitment to righting one of the most longstanding wrongs in all of academia. Other fields, where sexism, racism and other forms of bigotry are far worse, including:
physics,
computer science,
engineering,
philosophy,
and economics,
are still hotbeds for this type of unacceptable behavior. The big difference is that no scandals have broken (yet), because those communities aren’t taking the steps to make this change happen.
But the change is coming. The offenders aren’t victims of a witch-hunt or political correctness or hysteria. They’re perpetrators of a huge problem, and what you’re witnessing is a reckoning, where the community is coming together to end harassment, discrimination, and their acceptance within the community once and for all. This is hardest now for the women, people of color and LGBTQ people coming through the system now, but it’s up to all of us, especially to those of us who are cis, straight, white men, to push this field in the right direction. The only failure will be — as one of the panelists said during the AAS town hall — if we’re still having these same conversations five-to-ten years down the road.
Ethan Siegel is the founder of Starts With A Bang, NASA columnist and professor at Lewis & Clark. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, G+, Tumblr, and order his book: Beyond The Galaxy, today!
