A survey by Griffith University found one in two women have directly experienced sexual harassment from a senior co-worker at an Australian tertiary institution, while 90 per cent of academics have been subject to sexism.

A total of 420 female and non-binary Australian academics contributed to the survey.

The university’s Institute for Educational Research director Leonie Rowan said the figures on everyday forms of sexism were also stark, after 86 per cent of respondents reported they experienced disrespect daily.

“Fifty-six per cent of respondents report being reprimanded and spoken rudely to by a male colleague, 92 per cent feel ignored … and 81 per cent endure the humiliation of being ‘put in their place’,” she said.

"Seventy-four per cent report negative impact on careers [and] 67 per cent say it has impacted a promotion or has had negative financial consequences.

“There were such high numbers of people who were just having these as everyday experiences … which are all precursors to worse behaviours.”

One respondent said the discrimination they faced was impossible to ignore, describing it as “death by a thousand cuts”.

“’They don’t want to sleep with you and you are not going to cook for them. So they ignore you,” another respondent added.

Professor Rowan said sexism can damage women’s careers by impacting the opportunities they’re given and how safe they feel in the workplace.

“It could shape whether or not [a staff member] wants to stay in academic environments,” she said.

Meanwhile, Professor Rowan said the health impacts were also concerning with 71 per cent reporting sexism affected their self-esteem, while 68 per cent have experienced poor mental health.

The survey comes after the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) found incidents of sexual harassment at Australian Universities have increased in the past five years by almost 53 per cent, with one in three staff reporting they’ve experienced an incident.

NTEU president Alison Barnes said it was “hard to fathom” how widespread sexual harassment and sexism was across Australian universities.

“University bosses have failed to address this despite a mountain of evidence showing staff are being sexually harassed and discriminated against at appalling levels,” she said.

“The brutal combination of broken complaints processes and two-thirds of staff being in insecure jobs is fuelling harassment and sexism in universities."

The Action Plan addressing gender based violence in higher education was finalised last week, outlining what needs to be done to solve rife sexual misconduct in universities.

Professor Rowan hopes the results of the survey would further encourage universities to improve the workplace to make it more inviting and safe for female and non-binary staff.

“We really hope [these statistics] will make people feel comfortable to open up conversations and share stories of experiences they had,” she said.

“We want women to feel heard, want non-binary academics to feel heard, and want their voices to not be the end of the conversation.”

What is your name, where are you based and what do you do?

I’m Lisa Wynn, but I publish as L.L. Wynn, and I am an associate professor and the head of the Anthropology Department at Macquarie University in Sydney.

What is your educational background?

I did my undergraduate degree in anthropology and political science at McGill University in Montreal, and after that I did a PhD in cultural anthropology at Princeton University.

Why did you choose this path of study?

I lived in Venezuela for a couple of years when I was a teenager. While there, I ran across a classic anthropology text by Claude Levi-Strauss called Tristes Tropiques, which was based on his research in Venezuela and Brazil. It’s a classic and yet it was also ahead of its time – even back in the 1950s Levi-Strauss was thinking critically about cultural “authenticity” and the blurring of lines between tourist, traveller and anthropologist. I fell in love with the discipline.

You are currently working on a new book due out next year, Love, Sex and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability. Do you lecture on this topic?

I don’t actually teach any classes on love, the Middle East or gender, but I always incorporate my research into the lectures I do. For example, I teach a couple of classes on research methods, and I use my research on love and sexuality to illustrate the value of long-term participant observation as opposed to just a one-off interview. When you interview someone, they often tell you what you want to hear, or what they think makes them look best. But when you watch someone over an extended period of time, you learn so much more about them than you could ever find out from an interview.

And trust takes time. Sometimes it can take months or years before people decide to reveal their intimate lives to the researcher. For example, it took over a decade of knowing one participant before she trusted me enough to tell me about a secret marriage, a painful miscarriage, and a rape that she had survived. But once she did tell me these things, it was like the floodgates opened. Not only did she want me to know, she also insisted that I write about these things in the book she knew I was writing. I tell her story in the book.

Why is this important to you?

Studying love, sex and desire is important because it tells us about how society is organised, about the relationship between gender roles and religious ideologies, and about the theories and rules that societies come up with to control the sexuality of men and, especially, women. I’m particularly interested in people who don’t live up to cultural ideals – the people at the margins, pushing at the edges of respectability, carving out their own way of living within their society that isn’t conformist.

What was the best moment of your academic career?

When I got offered a job at Macquarie Uni after only a 20-minute telephone interview. I couldn’t believe it! I’d never even been to Australia before, but I’d always wanted to visit, and it was the best decision I ever made to move here and raise my family in this fantastic country.

What more do you hope to achieve in academia?

Well, I’m currently working on a project that I’m calling The Toe Dialogues: Adventures in Predatory Publishing. It’s sort of an academic version of Letters from a Nut by Ted L. Nancy.

It all started when I got sick of receiving spam emails from open-access journals inviting me to submit my “valuable research” to journals that publish on topics that are so far from my areas of expertise that it’s laughable. For example, I’ve gotten invitations to publish in journals of astrophysics, robotics and molecular biology.

These for-profit publishers capitalise on academics’ desperation to publish by charging them to have their articles published, but they don’t provide the peer review and editorial functions of reputable publishers. In fact, these types of journals notoriously publish anything as long as you pay them. Australian computer scientist Peter Vamplew proved this when, in response to a spam email from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, submitted an ‘article’ consisting of nothing but the phrase “Get me off your f***ing mailing list” repeated over and over again – in the title, in the text, and in a flowchart diagram. The journal responded, asking him to add more recent references, but “otherwise they said its suitability for the journal was excellent”, Vamplew told The Guardian (25 November 2014), and asked him to send $150 for it to be published.

So, to entertain myself, I started responding to the spam, asking the editors if I could submit a paper about toes. My toes! (I don’t do research on toes, FYI.) When they agreed – and they almost always agree – I would then propose a series of limericks, or a photo essay on toes. Sometimes I’ve offered a short story and promised it would have a happy ending. Each proposal is more absurd than the last. I’ve sent them acrostic poems and photos of my own toes. I continue the back-and-forth until the journal editor either rejects my proposal or asks me for money. Eventually I’ll compile all of my exchanges with these journals and publish them as academic humour.

What are you reading at the moment?

Lately I’ve been re-reading (for the third time) the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s an amazing space opera series, and the author has won more Hugo and Nebula awards than anyone except Robert Heinlein, and yet nobody I talk to has ever heard of her.

The series mostly centres around a man, Miles Vorkosigan, who is deformed as a result of a teratogenic poison used to attack his father (the regent and later prime minister of their planet) while his mother was pregnant. Miles is born hunchbacked, with brittle bones that break all the time. He’s also a manic genius, and as a result of his disability, he learns early on that the way to control people around him is with his words and his imagination. Power, the books show, is all in the mind. But I don’t want to make it sound like they’re all philosophy – the books are all great adventure novels. The first book about Miles is The Warrior’s Apprentice. It’s about how Miles makes up a fake mercenary space fleet and then, through fast talking, luck and sleight of hand, brings the fictional mercenary fleet into being.

What else do you do in your spare time?
I’m a volunteer wildlife rescuer for Sydney Wildlife. I rescue all kinds of animals, but I mainly specialise in snakes and bats. I’m currently raising an orphaned flying fox named Hugh (for Hugh Jackman, because they’re both very handsome, charismatic and attached to older women!) You can follow my wildlife rescue stories on Instagram.

What was your first concert and your most recent?

My first concert was Wham! (George Michael’s first band) when I was 13. I haven’t been to a concert in a very long time, but I guess the last one I went to was James Brown when he performed live at Princeton when I was a graduate student. It was incredible. He was in his 70s and still doing splits on stage. If I were to go to a concert in 2018, I would want to see Gang of Youths. Their latest album is incredible.

What’s the best holiday you’ve been on?
I love going to Flinders Island. It’s this tiny place off the northeast tip of Tasmania that’s very remote and beautiful, with a population of only around 800. In one part of the island, Killiecrankie Bay, you can fossick for topaz right on the beach. It might be the most beautiful spot for fossicking in all of Australia.

What’s your ideal meal?

I adore Ethiopian food. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 10 years old, and Ethiopian food has amazing vegetarian options. When I first moved to Sydney 10 years ago, I couldn’t find a single Ethiopian restaurant here, but now there are several. Abyssina in Blacktown is fantastic. The decor is wonderfully kitschy and the food is superb.

What’s your ultimate Sunday Funday activity?

If I could have anything happen to me on a Sunday morning, it would be to get a call from Sydney Wildlife saying that there’s a tiger snake or a death adder in someone’s house that needs relocating. I’ve rescued a lot of interesting snakes, both venomous and nonvenomous, but I’ve never been called out to rescue these particular snakes, so that would be fun.

If I can’t rescue a rare snake, then I would go on a hike and explore one of the swimming holes described in Inglis and Sreenivasan’s book, Swimming Holes Near Sydney.