Hacker News Reader

The NSF itself said that sexual harassment is a problem at the base. They surveyed women there and 59 percent said they had been harassed. There have been a few named individuals accused of harassment there and a few victims who’ve come forward without asking for anonymity, but the point is that it’s so pervasive that there’s almost no point in trying to find individual perpetrators. Over half of all women at McMurdo are harassed!

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/03/1210418182/antarctica-sexual-...

Terribly, 59% is actually lower than the rate of sexual harassment for women in the USA, which is around 77% according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

https://www.nsvrc.org/resource/facts-behind-metoo-movement-n...

77% is over a lifetime, but 59% is just over the one or two summers that someone spends at McMurdo, so it makes sense that it would be lower. But if there weren’t a serious culture of harassment, you’d think it would be much lower.

I want to buttress a sibling comment and dig into how misleading your quoted statistics are.

While there are complicating factors, in general, probabilities add linearly. So for the average woman in the US, who lives for 77 years, she therefore has a 1% chance of being sexually harassed during any 1 year of her life. Obviously, this follows some distribution, but still, the odds of it happening in any one year of her life probably peaks around 5-10%.

I couldn't find good data on how many seasons the average Antarctic worker puts in, but let's say its around 10. That means the average woman working in Antarctica has a 5.9% chance of getting sexually harassed per year. Except, the average contract length in Antarctica is 4-6 months. So while a woman in the US has a 0.5% chance of being sexually harassed in a given 6 month time frame, a woman in Antarctica has an average 11.8% chance of being sexually harassed for the same time frame.

Do you understand the difference?

>While there are complicating factors, in general, probabilities add linearly. So for the average woman in the US, who lives for 77 years, she therefore has a 1% chance of being sexually harassed during any 1 year of her life.

Obviously the average survey respondent was not 77 years old, so the math here is wrong. Other assumptions we could make: prepubescent and post-menopausal women are not being sexually harassed at the same rate as women of reproductive age.

I think your point would stand with steelman math, so why strawman it?

Because my 5-year-old daughter has experienced something akin to sexual harassment. Its grim out there, but its far grimmer in Antarctica, and other isolated places where victims have little recourse in the moment [0].

I went out of my way to provide as conservative of numbers as possible, so if that's a strawman, I don't know what to tell you. Even a cursory glance at incomplete statistics [1] on the subject show that the per-year rate of harassment at the peak ages is commensurate with the per-contract (again 4-6 month hitch, so double or triple that rate to get the per-year average) rate of all women in Antarctica.

0. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles... 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7485046/

not sure about anyone else, but the scientists I know who worked there only stayed for a few seasons, which makes this pretty damning.

    > The NSF itself said that sexual harassment
    > is a problem at the base.

I'm not claiming otherwise, I was commenting on how bizarre it is to work this into an article about a transport bus in Antarctica.

    > They surveyed women there and 59 percent
    > said they had been harassed.

I don't think they did. Did you read the report?

The survey[1] had a 24% response rate, so that 59% number is extrapolated from that, it's actually just over 14%.

The report certainly contains some deeply troubling anecdotes, but (no surprise) there's a wide chasm between what it claims, and how it's been reported on.

But don't take my word for it, read what they have to say on page 28:

    "[...]it is important to note that the survey
    and focus group questions were not
    designed to elicit information regarding
    the prevalence or incidence of sexual
    assault within USAP. This remains an effort
    for the future. Instead, the qualitative
    and quantitative data elicited extensive
    information regarding individuals’
    experiences and perceptions. Team LDSS
    did not independently investigate or
    otherwise seek to verify the accuracy
    of individuals’ reporting."

That 59% claim comes from a footnote on page 33 of the report. 33%/47% of men/women said "sexual assault" was a problem in the USAP, and 48%/72% of men/women said the same of "sexual assault".

The 59% is then women respondents who had a "negative experience" with either assault or harassment.

I don't believe that means, as you claim, that "they had been harassed". Earlier on page 30 they say:

    Approximately 40% of all focus group
    participants discussed a personal
    negative experience with sexual assault
    or sexual harassment

Neither of those percentages in footnotes appear to be supported by accompanying source data. But since they go out of their way to distinguish between a "negative experience" and "personal negative experience", the 59% appears to refer to some broader category than personal experience with harassment or assault.

1. https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/documents/USAP%20SAHPR%20Report....

>The survey[1] had a 24% response rate, so that 59% number is extrapolated from that, it's actually just over 14%.

That's not how statistical extrapolation works.

Here's a recent study that uses modern statistical modelling methods to extrapolate actual harassment rates from reporting rates that suffer strongly from self-selection bias in a similar environment: [0]

Perhaps they can repeat the original study in light of the suggested methods just published.

0. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles...

> That's not how statistical extrapolation works.

Yes, clearly it's going to be somewhere over 14%. I'm mainly critiquing the lazy reporting here. In reality that "59%" number is a wild guess, and should be reported as such.

> Here's a recent study that uses modern statistical modelling methods to extrapolate actual harassment rates from reporting rates that suffer strongly from self-selection bias in a similar environment

It's really not in a similar environment at all. That study is about estimating the rates of harassment, assault etc. of professional fisheries observers. I.e. independently employed "fisheries narcs" (my paraphrasing) who are dropped onto a fishing vessel for a limited time. "Upon returning from deployment, all observers are debriefed to ensure data quality and integrity".

That's a much more controlled dataset than "I hung out in Antarctica for a year, and I and 1/4 of the people that were there with me responded to this survey long afterwards, for whatever reason".

Even then, they have huge error bars on their 95% confidence intervals, e.g. as noted by this revealing paragraph:

> "Our estimates of observer victimization among years indicate that 0.4 to 1.8% of observers experienced assault, 22 to 34% experienced intimidation, coercion, and hostile work environments, and 9 to 43% experienced sexual harassment".

So, e.g. 9%-43%. That's a pretty huge difference.

In any case, we're way into the weeds here. Nothing I'm saying here is calling into question the the important underlying question here, that it certainly seems that the Antarctic program has some pretty screwed up problems with harassment etc., and how they're dealing with it.

I was mainly critiquing the lazy reporting of that study, i.e. to cherry-pick some overly-specific (but ultimately wildly extrapolated) percentage like 59%, and running with that, when (as I quoted above) the very study itself you're quoting is telling you it can't and shouldn't be used like that.

It's doubly unfortunate because if you page through that NSF study, there really are some pretty revealing quotes in some of the free-form answers submitted as part of the survey, clearly from people who've had a lot of time to think about and reflect on the issues they encountered in Antarctica.

This one in particular stuck with me (I looked up the full quote just now, several days later):

    We can’t really have a zero-tolerance
    policy on assault and harassment
    because for 8.5 months there are no
    planes unless there is a really serious
    emergency. And I don’t think the program
    will ever fly planes in to get people out
    who have assaulted or harassed people.
    The issues with it are far too many.
    So, since we can’t have a zero-tolerance
    policy[...]

Those sorts of constraints seem to both drive a lot of the problems with places like Antarctica, as well as well as being a big part of why certain people are drawn to work in those places.

That mandatory debriefing was part of the reason why the data was better. That's what I'm saying.

If the relevant Antarctic authorities were performing an end-of-season debrief with each and every employee, following the paradigm used for marine fisheries observers, they might go from "59%, but some punter can claim its actually 14%" to "actually its like 70%, and here's the mountains of data to prove it".

I specifically referenced the marine-fisheries example because, outside of grievous injury or death, the observers cannot leave until the captain of the boat they're narc'ing (your words) on chooses to return to port, and only if the captain of that boat returns to a port they can easily go home from. Which is a pretty serious problem when the harasser/assaulter is the captain. The analogy to Antarctica is pretty strong in that light.

> That mandatory debriefing was part of the reason why the data was better. That's what I'm saying.

Indeed, and the NSF study notes the limitations of its voluntary survey methodology.

But I don't think it's going to be as easy as your "[...]repeat the original study in light of the suggested methods just published". That study leans heavily into something the NSF can't easily replicate, e.g. all data they got from military personnel is voluntary.

> they might go from "59%, but some punter can claim its actually 14%" to "actually its like 70%, and here's the mountains of data to prove it".

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it's rather telling that you think the number would go up under further scrutiny.

I'm not saying it will or it won't, but neither study we're discussing supports that conclusion, as shown e.g. by the error bars in the one you linked to.

E.g. the "9 to 43% experienced sexual harassment" line. In that case 9-26% is as likely as 26-43%, if we accept the rest of their methodology.

To speculate, I'd think the NSF methodology in particular would lead to a higher extrapolated than actual rate.

Presumably someone who's been the victim of sexual harassment or assault would be more inclined to participate in a time consuming survey to have their voice heard.

Whereas someone who had an entirely uneventful year (at least an that front) in Antarctica would be more inclined to skip it.

In addition to that, the NSF survey in particular does a bad job in conflating questions like "did X happen to you?" v.s. "...or anyone you knew, heard of etc.".

If you attempted to measure e.g. theft with those sorts of questions you'd end up with inflated numbers.

> [...]The analogy to Antarctica is pretty strong in that light.

Somewhat, but it also breaks down in other ways, e.g. McMurdo has around 200-1200 people depending on the season (winter v.s. summer).

The tricky bit about the NOAA affiliated survey was that the debrief was mandatory. The underlying justification for the whole study was that they were finding a higher rate of "I experienced harassment" in the debrief vs. in anonymous surveys and via criminal complaints and they wanted to understand why, and how to apply a correction to the anonymous surveys to address the manifold negative pressures on reporting.

> Presumably someone who's been the victim of sexual harassment or assault would be more inclined to participate in a time consuming survey to have their voice heard.

If you read the paper, you'd see that for certain kinds of incidents, this is true. If its especially egregious harassment or physical assault, those tend to get reported more often, even through regular channels. But if its just the bog-standard hostile-workplace stuff that we all have to attend annual seminars about, the reporting rate is very low, because the victims rarely feel like anything will be done about it. And its rare that anything's done about it, because the leadership doesn't have firm enough evidence that its a widespread enough problem to even do something about. What I'm saying is that even in the light of that NSF report, the Antarctic leadership are doing the same calculus you are and saying "well, it seems pretty endemic, but we don't really have any specifics". To which I say "well, then collect some specifics".

Also, re: data from military personnel, I don't have a clear idea how to address that, except to say that if military personnel are harassing civilian staff, or vice versa, that's a pretty serious problem irrespective of location, and the DoD maintains an office specifically to address that for all situations where military personnel regularly work alongside civilian personnel. So they, too, should be doing the same thing.

I know some people who worked on the NOAA Alaska fisheries study, and they were using pretty widely accepted methods for estimating e.g. "bycatch" - the incidental catching of undesired species during commercial fishing operations, because its impossible to have 100% coverage in the moment of all fishers everywhere. In general, compliance with the Endangered Species Act is evaluated via surveys that are processed and extrapolated using these same methods. The reason the paper even got published was because it turns out that those methods are pretty novel for e.g. human bycatch.

If you look at the figures from the paper, its pretty clear that the stated variance is because of year-over-year variation, rather than absolute uncertainty of the method (which checks out, if Ass-Grab-Greg or whoever finally got fired in 2016, you'd expect the harassment rate to drop in 2017, but you can't just ignore 2016 and prior when reporting for the entire interval).

We've sure kept this thread going.

I'm not sure what if anything we disagree on at this point.

My main point (to the extent I was trying to make one) was that I found the reporting on this issue to be irresponsible, particularly the prominent citing of statistics that the survey authors themselves warned readers from using in that exact way.

Taking several steps back from the issue, I'm not sure the fundamental implicit assumptions that are being made by the NSF here are realistic.

Yes, the issues they're discussing are Bad, and shouldn't happen. But those Bad issues also happen in society at large.

The NSF is effectively creating a small town in Antarctica. It doesn't seem realistic to me to expect what's essentially a small town mostly filled with civilians to conform to HR rule 24/7/365.

At some point it seem like the right structure to run such a thing is the normal structures we've created in society for dealing with these sorts of issues.

Would a small town shut down its bars to some degree because of the "town HR" learning about whatever happened there between various parties "after work", most of which wouldn't rise to the level of criminal or civil offenses?

That, or running it like a military base, which they did away with.

It's somehow related to self-referential news (where most "news" articles aren't reporting that a thing happened, but that another news agency reported that it happened) - it's almost "wikification", where what matters is the link and someone else having said it, original research is forbidden.

Of course, this problem has existed forever - rumor vs fact, the oft-misattributed to Twain "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on".

Thats not how I read the closing and description of the prior era. I read it as one that was more human, before being stamped out and sterilized due to the PR challenges is posed.

> Is there a name for this fever dream style of writing, that even if you follow up on all the loose ends dropped throughout, find that some of them evaporate under scrutiny?

It is called journalism.

> Is there a name for this fever dream style of writing, that even if you follow up on all the loose ends dropped throughout, find that some of them evaporate under scrutiny?

Journalism.