The scientific method may be impartial, but the scientific culture is not. From grad-school admission on up through tenure, every promotion can hinge on a recommendation letter’s one key passage of praise, offered — or withheld — by the most recent academic adviser. Given the gender breakdown of senior scientists, most often that adviser is a man.

Perhaps she decides to ignore this first email — and this is often the case — knowing that she has little to gain, and a lot to lose, from a confrontation. Once satisfied with her tendency toward secrecy, the sender then finds a way to get her alone: invites her to coffee, into his office, out for some ostensibly group event. At said meeting he will become tentatively physical, insisting that if people knew, they just wouldn’t understand. At this point, any objection on her part wouldn’t just be professionally dangerous, it would seem heartless — and she’s not a horrible person, is she?

Then there are conferences, field trips, cocktail hours and retreats, whispering co-workers, rolling eyes and sadly shaking heads. On and on it goes, and slowly she realizes that he’s not going to stop because he doesn’t have to. She thought she was there to learn, to work and to be useful. She feels stupid, and she’s been told that stupid is the opposite of what a scientist is supposed to be. She wants to go back in time, before this whole mess happened, and have it not happen. She knows she can’t have that, and so she starts to want the one thing that she feels she can have at this point: She wants out of science.

Brilliant men make for good copy, even when they fail at their jobs. Recently, reports of sexual harassment and assault within science departments at the University of California, Berkeley, Caltech and the University of Chicago have been in the news. Academia will have to respond. A great chorus of formal condemnation shall be lifted up, and my male colleagues will sputter with gall, appalled by the actions of bad apples so rare they have been encountered by every single woman I know.

Female scientists like me will be solicited for constructive solutions that don’t involve anybody getting fired. Female students will be advised to examine how their own behavior might have contributed, and I will have more than my usual trouble keeping my mouth shut. Human resources offices will issue statements reminding employees that “we do not tolerate such behavior.” These statements will be filed within cabinets already stuffed to bursting with reports of jokes that weren’t funny, of grabbing that wasn’t an accident, of infatuations unwelcome and unwanted. And in the end, science — an institution terminally invested in believing itself honorable — will sort of come close to admitting that it isn’t.

IT’S not something I can put on my C.V., but I believe that one of my most important duties is to walk young women through emails like the one my former student received, and I am called upon to do it many times each year. I emphasize to them that the first email is important because it is the one that the powers that be will point to and say, “Why didn’t you do something when you first got this?” I talk to each woman bluntly and advise her to write back immediately, telling (not asking) him to stop.

I teach her to draw strong professional boundaries and then to enforce them, not because she should have to, but because nobody else will. I insist that she must document everything, because someday he will paint this as a two-way emotional exchange. I wearily advise her to stick it out in science, but only because I cannot promise that other fields aren’t worse. And I hope that this is enough to make him stop. But it never, never stops.

My former student is still receiving late-night emails, notes and presents left on her desk, and her co-worker is still insisting that they should meet “outside of the hectic hours of work.” She doesn’t feel that she can go to her personnel office; she’s heard plenty of stories from the other women at her institution about how this happens all the time and how nobody ever does anything about it. She was the best student that I had during the year that we worked together. The last time she talked to me, she told me that she was thinking of quitting.