Research funding should be given to individual academics rather than principal investigators to prevent the ¡°financing of sexual abuse¡±, an expert on gender equality has claimed.

Fredrik Bondestam, director of the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research at the 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ of Gothenburg and an expert on feminist theory and gender in academia, said that the move would ¡°be a way of strengthening the economic independence of researchers¡±.

Speaking at the ¡°Research and innovation excellence through gender equality¡± conference in Helsinki, Dr Bondestam said: ¡°One important measure could be to stop financing the PIs as research funders. Instead you should finance the individual researcher in each research group, in each application.

¡°In that sense, if you are being sexually harassed and you have to leave your research group, at least you leave the group with funding.¡±

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Later, when asked to cite the most urgent change the higher education sector could make to prevent sexual harassment, he said: ¡°Stop financing sexual abuse. This means spreading the money not only to the PIs, having ethical contracts, [and] being aware that money produces sexual abuse.¡±

Representatives from research funding organisations in Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic said during a panel later in the day that the proposal would be worth thinking about, but that they would need to check whether it posed any ¡°legal issues¡±.

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Dr Bondestam, who said there were ¡°almost no national statistics updated on sexual harassment in academia¡± in Europe, also told universities to abolish short-term contracts, claiming that these were a ¡°risk factor for creating a culture of silence connected with abuse¡±.

He added that it is ¡°almost impossible to fire a professor¡±, which means that there were legal barriers to preventing and punishing sexual harassment.

However, he said that universities could introduce ¡°academic sanctions¡± to get around this ¨C for example, barring academics found guilty of abuse from supervising PhDs for five years.

¡°We can find other sanctions that are academic, not legal, and they would probably be more useful than the legal ones in a sense,¡± Dr Bondestam said during a panel discussion on sexual harassment and gender-based violence in academia.

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However, he stressed that sanctions must be used ¡°carefully because they are strong instruments¡± and will face a backlash.

Ruth Lewis, associate professor in the department of social sciences at Northumbria 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ and an expert on gender-based violence and feminist activism, who also spoke on the panel, said that moves in the UK over the past decade to ¡°reduce the dependency¡± between PhD students and a single supervisor have been ¡°inadvertently very helpful in potentially reducing the perpetration of abuse and harassment¡±.

¡°The changes have come about to move away from a situation where a student sees their supervisor once and then in three years¡¯ time submits a thesis. Instead, there are lots of other milestones, lots of other opportunities for the student to engage with other members of staff,¡± she said.

However, she said that the ¡°audit culture¡± in the UK and the ¡°obsession with the research excellence framework¡± counteracts this progress as universities ¡°can be very reluctant to lose their research stars¡±.

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¡°If that research star is accused of abusing his student then the university might well be reluctant to take action against that person,¡± she said.

ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com