Well-being in French Astrophysics

TL;DR

This study surveys French early career astrophysics researchers to assess their well-being, revealing significant issues with overwork, harassment, and mental health challenges, and offers recommendations for improvement.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive survey-based analysis of well-being among early career astrophysicists in France, highlighting key issues and proposing actionable solutions.

Findings

Over 25% work more than 50 hours weekly

Nearly 30% experienced harassment or discrimination

Approximately 45% suffer from mental health issues since starting their career

Abstract

It has become clear that early career astrophysics researchers (doctoral researchers, post-docs, etc) have a very diverse appreciation of their career, with some declaring it the best job that you can have and others suffering from overwork, harrassment and stress from the precarity of their job, and associated difficulties. In order to establish how astrophysics researchers, primarily in France, experience their career, we sent out a survey to understand the impact that their job has on their well-being. 276 people responded to the survey. Whilst around half of the respondents expressed pleasure derived from their career, it is clear that many (early career) researchers are suffering due to overwork, with more than a quarter saying that they work in excess of 50 hours per week and 2\% in excess of 90 h per week. Almost 30\% professed to having suffered harrassment or discrimination in the course of their work. Further, whilst only 20\% had suffered mental health issues before starting their career in astrophysics, $\sim$45\% said that they suffered with mental health problems since starting in astrophysics. Here we provide results from the survey as well as possible avenues to explore and a list of recommendations to improve (early) careers in astrophysics.