Panel says universities failing in addressing harassment

Years of efforts to prevent sexual harassment of women in the fields of science, engineering and medicine have not succeeded, and a sweeping overhaul is needed in the way universities and institutions deal with the issue, a major new report by a national advisory panel concluded Tuesday.

“Despite significant attention in recent years, there is no evidence to suggest that current policies, procedures and approaches have resulted in a significant reduction in sexual harassment,” said the report, which was more than two years in the making, starting well before the #MeToo era. It was issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, independent agencies that advise the government and the public.

The report offered 15 detailed recommendations, some of them overturning long-entrenched systems of funding and mentoring in academia. It called for significant changes to academic advising practices so that students and junior researchers are not dependent on one senior researcher for mentoring and access to grants. It also urged legislators to pass laws so that lawsuits can be filed directly against faculty and not just their academic employers, and so that university employees who settle harassment lawsuits cannot keep them confidential from another university that might employ them.

The 311-page document is the National Academies’ first report addressing sexual harassment, a problem that has long simmered in academia. Because of its spiraling negative effects, the panel said, “Academic institutions should consider sexual harassment equally important as research misconduct in terms of its effect on the integrity of research.”

The panel said there is often a perceived tolerance for sexual harassment in academia because of its history of being male-dominated, the informal ways that people in academic environments communicate and intensive research projects that can be isolating because they involve small numbers of people.

Academic workplaces are second only to the military in the rate of sexual harassment, with 58 percent of academic employees indicating they had such experiences, according to one study cited in the report. Among the data involving students in scientific fields, the report cited a 2018 survey by the University of Texas system, which found that about 20 percent of female science students, more than 25 percent of female engineering students and more than 40 percent of female medical students experienced sexual harassment from faculty or staff members.

The panel said universities and other institutions have been too focused on “symbolic compliance with current law and avoiding liability and not on preventing sexual harassment.” Fear of being held liable may have kept many institutions from even evaluating their training programs for preventing harassment, because if they did, “they would likely find them to be ineffective,” the report concluded.

“We really have to move beyond a mindset of legal compliance and liability and think about the ways we can change the climate,” saud Paula A. Johnson, president of Wellesley College and a co-chairwoman of the committee that produced the report