Sexual Harassment and Academic Medicine: Where Do We Go From Here?

By: Carol Bates, MD C. Bates is associate dean for faculty affairs and associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. “It is Time for Zero Tolerance for Sexual Harassment in Academic Medicine” is being published in the midst of a national conversation on sexual harassment across many spheres in society, but the first draft was written well before this, toward the end of the 2016 presidential election season. Most of the recent media attention has been in realms outside of academic medicine, but there have been a few media reports in our domain and we clearly have problems in our midst. Where do we go from here? More information may come from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as they are working on a report that proposes to review the research on the prevalence of sexual harassment, to examine the impact of harassment on women’s careers, and to identify and analyze policies, strategies, and practices that have helped to prevent and address harassment. Their scope extends well beyond academic medicine, but it would be wonderful if that report had the type of impact that some of their past reports have had on our culture (e.g., on medical errors and patient safety). Indeed, in terms of sexual harassment, we are still far from the culture change that has occurred in our approaches to medical error and patient safety since those reports. For example, I have been a primary care internist at Boston’s Beth Israel De...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective academic medine gender sexual harassment women in academic medicine Source Type: blogs