Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors. Very few respondents said their field site had a code of conduct or sexual harassment policy, and of the 78 who had dared to report incidents, fewer than 20 percent were satisfied with the outcome.

The findings are depressingly similar to the data some colleagues and I collected this year from an online questionnaire sent to science writers. We received responses from 502 writers, mostly women, and presented our results at M.I.T. in June during Solutions Summit 2014: Women in Science Writing, a conference funded by the National Association of Science Writers.

More than half of the female respondents said they weren’t taken seriously because of their gender, one in three had experienced delayed career advancement, and nearly half said they had not received credit for their ideas. Almost half said they had encountered flirtatious or sexual remarks, and one in five had experienced uninvited physical contact.

Given their voluntary nature, neither report can be expected to tell us the true incidence of sexual discrimination and harassment among scientists and science writers. Still, the volume of responses sends an unmistakable message: Four decades after Title IX outlawed sex-based discrimination in public education and 23 years after Anita Hill pushed sexual harassment into the limelight, bias and harassment continue to hinder women’s progress.

Dr. Clancy says she decided to collect data after being overwhelmed with responses to a post she published on her blog at Scientific American in 2012. A female student, “Hazed,” recounted life in her graduate program:

“My body and my sexuality were openly discussed by my professor and the male students,” the woman wrote. “Comments ensued about the large size of my breasts, and there was speculation about my sexual history.” Her professor, she said, “often joked that only pretty women were allowed to work for him, which led me to wonder if my intellect and skills had ever mattered.”