There's a lot wrong with the report. But one of the worst things it
does is suggest that Irene prevented or slowed down
communication. There are multiple reasons it's bad, but what I want to
focus on is that it lets the department and the university hide their
failings and absolve themselves of responsibility.

Here's the thing that the report doesn't capture (because we were
never asked about it). When we wrote our letter, we had lost trust in
our lab's faculty. Talking to each other, our experiences didn't match
up with the perception we'd had of them. In my case, I've known some
of them for 7 years. This meant that we became so, so careful about
what we said. We spent hours going over our letter, considering how
someone who isn't receptive to hearing about sexism or might get
defensive over criticism might react. The idea of communicating with
them felt exhausting, because we no longer felt like we knew what
their reaction would be to what we were saying.

Did the department offer to mediate between us? Yes. Have I previously
been in a situation where the department talked to advisors about
student concerns to make things better? Yes. Did the situation get
better? Not as far as I can tell. I left the lab because of the
situation and talking to students still there, it's not gotten any
better. This is the backdrop. The backdrop is that we didn't really
trust our faculty or our department. The backdrop is that given the
presented mediation options, we would not have been candid in our
interactions. To the extent that the university wants this, it's
because they want us to feel like we're lucky to even have the
privilege to speak on this stuff.

Instead, Irene mediated. She was willing to directly ask the faculty
the questions we would otherwise have spent hours waffling over
asking, because we were afraid we might offend them. At the same time,
we were more candid with Irene about our feelings, and she was able to
more accurately represent our true feelings to the advisors than we
ever would have at that point. The report makes a huge deal over how
Irene insisted that communication go through her. Again, no one asked
us about this, but it was always the intent to reestablish
communication after the advisors had clearly educated themselves. It
would not have been helpful for us in rebuilding trust for our
advisors to go to conversations where the advisors were accidentally
saying ignorant things. She specifically set up a conversation between
me, one of the other impacted women and our advisor to facilitate
communication and rebuild trust after it was clear our advisor understood what
our concerns were. This conversation was a couple weeks after we sent
the letter. Is it unreasonable that we would have wanted a couple
weeks of space from the people who had broken our trust?

Here's the thing that I recognize though. Irene's actions only make
sense from the perspective of truly trying to look out for us and do
right by us. But this investigation and the report was not about
that. It was not about us and restoring the trust in our faculty. It
is about the university covering their ass, and to the extent that it
delayed that process? Well, I don't care. We did not ask for the
investigation. We had not decided that we wanted an investigation when
we went to Title IX to gauge our options. We handed over our timeline
that was anonymized, specifically so it couldn't lead to a report and
then suddenly we were being told that we were moving forward with HR
and an HR investigation. It's my understanding that employees can be
compelled to cooperate with an investigation and by moving forward
with HR, the university was deciding that we were employees. The
investigation did nothing to remedy the broken trust with our advisors
nor has the department done anything to attempt to regain our
trust. If anything, the report made it even harder for us to trust the
department by characterizing us as dramatic and demonizing Irene.

Irene was the one who consistently listened to what we actually
wanted, represented our actual interests, and genuinely tried to
repair trust with our advisors where she could. To the extent that the
university or department wanted us to follow their processes, it's
because they see our silence as success. They don't care if they've
solved the problem as long as we stop complaining about it. One way to
try to do that is to drag us through a months-long investigation with
the hope we'll be too emotionally exhausted to do anything afterwards.