She had just graduated from a major British university with a Master’s degree in spacecraft engineering and had high hopes for her future. 

A vivacious 20-something-year-old at that time, she was equally excited about the prospects of living in a foreign country and making friends with like-minded young people from all over Europe. It was to be a life-changing year. She moved to the Netherlands to take up her year-long placement at the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) near Amsterdam and threw herself into work, eager to prove herself. But things began to sour quickly. 

One of her managers was unclear about the tasks she was to carry out, then complained about her performance. She requested clearer instructions and guidance on deadlines and priorities, but the more she asked the more difficult her relationship with her manager became. Eventually, she turned to HR for advice. She was up for another shock. 

“They told me I was apparently not dealing well with being away from my home country,” she told Supercluster. “But that was not true. I was really enjoying living abroad. I was making new friends, many of whom I am still in touch with today.”

She began to question herself, working harder and harder to prove her worth to her boss. But the goal posts were constantly moving. 

“Once I was sent for a work trip abroad and he emailed me while I was there requesting me to urgently complete another task,” she says. “I had to work in my free time, late at night in my hotel room.”

She visited an on-site counsellor. But the only outcome of those sessions was a conclusion that she wasn’t a match for ESA. 

“She led me to accept that my values didn’t align with those of ESA.”

Karen left her traineeship, one month early, having saved all her annual leave to be able to quit sooner. The scars from that first confusing professional experience stayed with her for years. Today, she is successful in an engineering field outside the space industry, mentoring fresh-out-of-school engineers making their baby steps in the workplace.

“It took me years after I left to regain my professional confidence,” she says. 

Karen is one of many people who encounter harassment and bullying in the space sector. A survey published by the U.K. Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in May revealed that 44 percent of the survey’s 650 respondents experienced “some form of bullying and harassment in the workplace in the preceding 24 months.” Women and people identifying as non-binary were the most frequent recipients of ill treatment with 59 and 61 percent respectively reporting that they had been targeted. In an internal survey run in 2023 by the European Space Agency’s staff association, one in five people reported either witnessing or experiencing harassment in the previous two years. According to industry association Eurospacehub, 30 to 40 percent of women employed in the global space sector have experienced some form of discrimination and bullying in the workplace. Allegations of bullying and harassment have emerged from major new space companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin or Japan moon exploration start-up ispace.

But why is the space industry so prone to fostering what appears like toxic cultures?

Lisa Steelman, a professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Florida Tech, told Supercluster that the hierarchical structure typical for space industry organizations and companies creates environments conducive to harassment and misuses of power. 

“There is a lot of power imbalance,” said Steelman. “You have senior employees who have significant control over the careers of junior employees. This fosters an environment where harassment is more likely to occur and less likely to be reported.”

Aine O’Brien, a RAS diversity officer and co-author of the RAS report, said the problem begins at the level of universities, where doctoral students and other young researchers are virtually at the mercy of their superiors.

“In research institutions, supervisors hold a lot of power over post-docs and junior researchers,” O’Brien said. “They have so much clout in the institutions because of the grants they bring and therefore they are kind of invincible.”

Incidents reported in the RAS survey included pressure to work extremely long hours, inappropriate jokes and unwanted sexual comments and advances. When victims challenged their offenders or raised a complaint, they frequently discovered how unassailable their harassers were. One third of the RAS survey respondents said their employer took “insufficient action” to address the problem and even twisted anti-harassment policies to cover the organization’s back rather than holding the perpetrator accountable. 

“Many times, people report the incident and then it goes to the university board, and the person you are reporting against is actually sitting on that board,” said Sheila Kanani, RAS outreach and diversity officer and the report’s co-author. “Often, the victim has to leave the institution, sometimes they even leave the sector, and the institution holds onto the perpetrator until they retire. The situation ruins the victims’ life, and the perpetrators don’t tend to get punished.”

In the most optimistic scenario, the perpetrator leaves the institution where the incident was reported, only to get a better job at another institution. 

“It feels like sweeping things under the rug,” said Kanani.

ESA scientist Aisha, described to Supercluster a disappointing experience reporting multiple incidents of alleged harassment committed by a colleague against herself and other subordinates to the space agency’s HR. 

In a report seen by Supercluster, Aisha detailed more than five incidents including yelling, verbal attacks, micro-monitoring a person’s behavior to find faults, smear campaigns and banning subordinates from talking to each other to discuss work.

The behavior of the staff member in question, a senior official with two years left until retirement, spawned an “unwelcoming atmosphere” at the center at which it occurred with a “sustained culture of fear,” deteriorating morale, delays to the delivery of business objectives and high turnover of contractors employed at the facility, Aisha alleged in her report. 

Yet, she said, ESA HR refused to investigate the allegations and dismissed the report. She also pointed out that the alleged harasser had been moved to her center from another facility for reasons unknown several years prior.

Such experiences, Steelman said, make employees feel that speaking out is not safe. In organizations dealing with costly high-tech developments, the consequences could be far more serious than missed deadlines and high turnover of personnel. In a scathing report following the 2003 disaster of space shuttle Columbia, NASA’s Accident Investigation Board found that unhealthy culture at the agency, where dissent was discouraged and concerns of lower-level workers dismissed, meant that potentially serious technical problems were downplayed and brushed under the rug, leading to the incident that killed seven NASA astronauts.

“When there is a lot of backlash, bullying and retribution for reporting problems, people will not feel psychologically safe to raise issues,” Steelman said. “You end up with a culture where people aren’t making fully informed decisions. But if you are dealing with complex technology, this might be a matter of life and death.”

Kanani and O’Brien, both professionals in their thirties, have first-hand experience with harassment, including unwanted sexual advances at space industry conferences. They believe that the sector has a long way to go to change the pervasive boys’ club culture with its self-protective cliqueness and condescension towards female aspirants.

“When the Me-Too movement happened in 2017, I was hoping that the STEM sector would have its Me-Too moment as well,” said O’Brien. “So far, we are talking about it more and that’s good, but I don’t think the organizations have gone anywhere far enough to take action. It doesn’t really feel that the atmosphere in the space industry has changed.”

Steelman points out that a culture change would have to start at the top. Any well-intended top-down attempts, however, are likely to hit resistance from perpetrators in top-rank positions and their protégés down the hierarchy, who’ve been comfortably getting away with misconduct for decades.

“It takes a while and it takes a kind of care and feeding to change a culture,” Steelman said. “You need leaders to show no tolerance for bad behavior and make people accountable when they cross the line. You need to support the behaviors you want and punish the ones you don’t want and be consistent across all your top leaders in the organization so that employees see that the leaders do what they said they were going to do.”

Kanani and O’Brien are aware that the space industry’s dark secret is undercutting the good work done by outreach campaigns that aim to attract young people into STEM fields.

“Sometimes I wonder why we are trying to get more people into this environment when we know it’s not a safe environment for them,” Kanani said.

In their work at RAS, they continue focusing on improving education and awareness of harassment and bullying and help people develop better skills to address problems. Ultimately, they admit, a corporate culture change is mostly in the hands of the higher-ups. 

“We’ll knock the bad eggs at the top off eventually,” Kanani said. “And when our generation is in senior roles, hopefully, it will be a better workplace.”