NASA is reportedly revising its policies for tracking sexual harassment by the scientists it funds.Credit: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty

Several major US government science agencies say they have received few reports of sexual harassment by the researchers whose work they fund, despite studies that have found such behaviour to be pervasive in US academic science.

In some cases, agencies have turned to news reports to identify researchers under investigation by universities for such behaviour, according to a report released on 12 June by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO)

NASA received three sexual-harassment complaints about its grant recipients between 2015 and 2019, the (GAO) found. The Department of Energy received two complaints, and the Department of Health and Human Services — which includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical research — received one.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), which last year began requiring institutions that it funds to report any finding they make regarding sexual harassment by a grant recipient, received 14 complaints. But a fifth agency, the agriculture department’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, did not receive any.

The overall rate of reporting is “shockingly low”, said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (Democrat, Texas), chair of the House of Representatives’ science committee, at a congressional hearing on sexual harassment in research.

A landmark analysis released last year by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that sexual harassment — ranging from discriminatory behaviour to sexual assault — is widespread in US academic science. The report also concluded that current policies to fight the problem are ineffective.

Policy patchwork

The five agencies examined in the GAO analysis collectively disburse billions of dollars in grants each year to scientists at universities and other private research institutions. But their policies for reporting sexual harassment vary widely.

The NSF is the only one of the five that requires institutions that receive its funds to notify it of any finding related to sexual harassment by a grant recipient — including if an institution puts a scientist on leave during an investigation. But NASA plans to implement a similar policy by the end of this year, said John Neumann, managing director for science, technology assessment and analytics at the GAO, at a House science-committee hearing on 12 June.

The NIH does provide its grant recipients with manuals and best-practices documents that outline how to report harassment, Neumann said, but does not yet require institutions to report automatically. The agency’s working group on harassment is scheduled to present its interim recommendations to NIH director Francis Collins on 13 June.

Neither the energy nor the agriculture departments provide grant recipients with detailed information about what constitutes harassment and how to report it, the GAO says. And none of the five agencies included in the report has evaluated whether its policies are effective at preventing sexual harassment.

“Having uniform policies and procedures across the federal funding agencies would be extremely beneficial to our institutions and our grantees,” said Paula Johnson, president of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and co-chair of the committee that produced the US national academies' report.

In January, Eddie Bernice Johnson introduced a bill aimed at combating sexual harassment in the sciences. Among other things, it would require the NSF to spend more money to study the problem of sexual harassment and the most effective strategies to prevent it.