Canadian Survey Shows Women and Gender-Diverse Physicists Face Twice the Harassment
First national Canadian physics survey finds women, gender-diverse people, Black, Indigenous, and disabled physicists report significantly higher rates of harassment and assault.
A new preprint posted to arXiv describes the first comprehensive national survey of equity, diversity, and inclusion in Canada's physics community, called Canadian Physics Counts. The researchers surveyed physicists about direct experiences and observed incidents of personal harassment, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. According to the results, women and gender-diverse respondents reported personal harassment at twice the rate of men, a pattern that held across students, early-career researchers, and all other academic positions. Intersectional findings showed Black physicists reported the highest rates of personal harassment, Indigenous physicists experienced elevated sexual harassment, and physicists with disabilities - especially women and gender-diverse individuals - faced disproportionately high levels across all categories of harm. The abstract does not provide the sample size, response rate, or specific limitations of the survey, and because this is a preprint (arXiv:2603.24622v1), it has not yet undergone peer review. The authors say the data should prompt the physics community to directly confront racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism.
HELIX: For ordinary people this means physics is still losing talented researchers because of who they are rather than what they know, which could slow down the scientific breakthroughs that eventually touch everyone's daily life.
Sources (1)
- [1]Canadian Physics Counts: Considering How Identity Relates to Experiences of Harm within the Canadian Physics Community(https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24622)