Kavanaugh’s speech reveals sexism
In accepting the president’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh said, “I am proud that a majority of my law clerks have been women.” In that instant, Kavanaugh joined the ranks of those who appear to be supporting gender equity but in fact are holding it back.
When I agreed to join other experts in an ambitious federal effort to better understand sexual harassment in science, engineering and medicine, I learned about the full extent of the largest category of sexual harassment: gender harassment, or behavior that conveys hostile or degrading attitudes based on gender.
Our report for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, released last month, reveals that the data about gender harassment are overwhelming and conclusive. It’s the kind of behavior that’s often shrugged off as minor or annoying, yet it sets the stage for everything else: unwanted touching, sexual coercion, even sexual assault. Gender harassment is the most common, and the most commonly excused, form of sexual harassment. It makes all the better-known forms of sexual harassment more likely.
Examples abound, some of which reveal the harm of comments like Kavanaugh’s. An assistant professor of biology who was interviewed for our report said that even as her postdoctoral adviser hired more women, he continued to imply that women did not have much of a role to play in science. He liked to brag, she explained, about how he had hired all these women to work in his lab. He said this so often that she finally turned to him and said, “Do you want a cookie for that?”
She, like many other scientists, engineers, medical doctors — and lawyers — was a target of sexual harassment.
When a supervisor repeatedly suggests that women are scientists solely because he has been heroic in hiring them, he is not only asserting his male ego, he is promoting gender bias. Far from harmless, this kind of behavior discourages women and other gender minorities from investing in their disciplines and institutions. Moreover, they encourage the less-common types of sexual harassment — sexual coercion and unwanted sexual attention — that most people mistakenly assume are the heart of the problem.
The academies’ consensus report reveals that, despite decades of reform and increasing representation of women, sexual harassment remains prevalent. Women who choose to study science, engineering and medicine today face a high probability of enduring sexual harassment, especially if they identify with the demographic groups that are most at risk: women of color, sexual and gender minorities, migrants and immigrants, and people with disabilities.
Fortunately, we can fix this situation.
Changing the behavior of people in our workplaces can stop sexual harassment. Most sexual harassment is rooted in sexism, not in sexual desire or sexual misconduct. It will stop when we embrace inclusion, diversity and respect as workplace values.
It will stop when we refuse to protect harassers and prevent them from isolating their targets.
It will stop when we support those harmed by sexual harassment and hold institutions accountable.
And it will stop when nominees like Kavanaugh stop taking credit for hiring women as law clerks. Women have been nearly half of law school graduates during Kavanaugh’s entire judicial career. In 2006, when he was confirmed as a federal judge, 48 percent of law school students were women, a number that rose to more than 51 percent by 2016. Why not hire them?