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 In 1995, more than half of women academic medical faculty surveyed
said they’d been harassed, compared to 5 percent of men. But those
women had gone to medical school when less than 10 percent of the
class was female, noted the lead author of a research letter in the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
“The broader literature on workplace harassment suggests that such
experiences are more common when there is substantial gender
imbalance in the workplace,” said Dr. Reshma Jagsi of the Department
of Radiation Oncology at the University of Michigan.
“I really thought that harassment would be much less commonly
experienced by women in our sample, who went to medical school when
the proportion of women among medical students had exceeded 40
percent,” she told Reuters Health by email.
The researchers mailed surveys to all 1,719 new recipients of K08
and K23 grants from the National Institutes of Health in 2006 to
2009. These career-development awards provide support for younger
investigators focused on biomedical and patient-oriented topics.
Just over 1,000 survey recipients responded. On average, they were
43 years old, 46 percent were female and 71 percent were white.
Among women, 70 percent said they had perceived gender bias in the
workplace and 66 percent had experienced it personally, including
being left out of opportunities for professional advancement based
on gender. That compared to 22 percent of men who were aware of
gender bias at work and 10 percent who experienced it.
The sexual harassment experienced by 30 percent of women included
unwanted sexual comments, attentions or advances by a superior or
colleague. Almost half of these women said their sexual harassment
experiences had also negatively affected their career advancement.
These numbers are not strikingly different from those found in
surveys of women in other fields, Jagsi said.
“On the one hand, female physicians, like all physicians, are
professionals with a privileged position in society and more power
than many other workers, which one might think could insulate them
to some degree against vulnerability to these sorts of experiences,”
Jagsi said. “On the other hand, large power differentials can exist
between individuals in different positions in academic medicine, and
that can increase the risks of having such experiences.”
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Even as more and more women enter medicine, there is a persistent
culture of gender inequality in the workplace, said Dr. Sharon
Straus of the University of Toronto, who was not part of the new
study.
Other industries, like the financial industry, have more systematic
approaches in place to deal with harassment in the workplace, Straus
told Reuters Health, and other countries have made strides to deal
with the issue in academic medicine.
In the U.K., the Athena SWAN Charter was established in 2005 to
encourage and recognize commitment to advancing the careers of women
in science, technology, engineering, math and medicine employment in
higher education and research.
One thing that has helped to change the culture there, Straus notes,
is that since 2011 the National Health Service has had a policy of
not partnering with medical schools or faculties of medicine for
biomedical research unless those institutions have earned at least
the Athena SWAN Charter “Silver Award.”
For individuals, “the big thing is to reach out and tell somebody,
whether that’s your immediate director or boss or whomever,” Straus
said. “A lot of times people don’t feel empowered to report it,” she
said.
“I consider our results to be a sobering reminder of how far we as a
society still have to go to achieve gender equity,” Jagsi said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1TlGeeU Journal of the American Medical
Association, online May 17, 2016.
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