Dr. Nicole Bedera

And one of them said yes.

I still think I had to get really lucky because I went to a few different institutions to find the one where I could do the fieldwork.

What would usually happen is the first person I would talk to would say, absolutely, we would love to have a researcher.

Let's go get everybody else involved who needs to say yes to this.

And then it was usually someone in Title IX or general counsel that would ultimately say no.

And I think the reason that didn't happen at Western University was because the Title IX coordinator was very freshly hired.

And in the past, she'd been a political appointee for places like state governments, federal governments, where oversight and transparency, it's just a part of it.

People who've worked in those roles are so used to having researchers looking at everything you're doing and all of your documents are public documents that anybody can ask to see at any time, that the press can look at at any time.

And so she just didn't think twice about it.

What's sort of funny is that Western University is a public university.

And so all of that degree of transparency and openness that she'd been accustomed to in other government agencies on paper, you should get from a public university too.

But it breaks a lot of norms.

And I think that's part of why I heard no from so many other institutions.

I will say that...

It took a long time to get through the institutional review board process.

So it's the ethics board on a college campus that looks over studies to make sure that they are ethical for participants, but also that they're of low legal risk for the university.

By the time I made it to start my field work, which was about a year later,

I do think the Title IX coordinator at Western University was starting to have some second thoughts and to realize how many norms she had violated.

But nobody ever told me to leave.

So I stayed.