 In person, we are excited to have you and to host Dr. Cortina today, I'll just remind you that we are in our 41st year of the ethics lecture series, and this year's series is on gender equity, and we're really excited to have a number of amazing speakers, including Dr. Cortina. We will have three speakers in December. This week obviously is live and also on zoom. Next week also will be live here in P 117 with Dr. Julie Silver from Harvard and then the last one in December the Wednesday after that on December 14 will be Dr. Dr. Melissa Gilliam, who was a former University of Chicago faculty and OB Guiney and is now at Ohio State so be looking forward to hearing from her. But let me go ahead and introduce. And I should just say that we will be monitoring the chat for questions and I will be asking those questions of Dr. Cortina live at the end. If you have anything on zoom please ask it in the chat and then of course in the room, you can ask in person. But let me introduce Dr. Cortina so Dr. Cortina is the University of diversity and social transformation professor of psychology, women and gender studies and management organizations at the University of Michigan. She is an organizational psychologist and investigates workplace experiences of harassment and in civility to date Dr. Cortina has published over 100 scientific works on these topics. This research has won awards but its impact stretches beyond the walls of the Academy. For instance, Cortina is regularly called to serve as an expert witness, translating findings from social science to inform policy and legal decision processes. She recently joined colleagues and co authoring a landmark report on sexual harassment for the National Academy of Sciences, engineering and medicine, and I know she'll be sharing from from that today. So welcome Dr. Cortina. Thanks so much for that nice introduction. It's a pleasure to be with you here today and share some of my work on sexual harassment and organizations. I've been studying this topic for 25 years. More specifically so that we can advance our understanding of as sexual harassment and figure out how to remove it as a barrier to gender equity in organizations. So what I'm going to do with my talk today is basically share some key findings from that body of science as summarized in this 2018 report released by the published by the National Academies. As, as Julie mentioned, just briefly to give you an idea of what to expect. I will talk about some of the key findings from that report. It started with some very basic questions. You know, what is sexual harassment from a scientific perspective. How are people harmed by this behavior and what should we do about it. And then I'll spend a bit of time talking about some new developments that have come out of that big report, including new legislation and a big multi institutional collaboration, which you Chicago is part of. And then there should be plenty of time at the end for Q&A. All right. Let me start by stating the obvious. Sexual harassment is not a new problem. It's not a new area of study for scientific inquiry. Psychologists and sociologists have been studying sexual harassment since the early 1980s. But that research has largely escaped the notice of folks in science, technology, engineering, medical fields. But the National Academies came in and they changed that. So, in case you're not familiar, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is a private nonprofit organization. That's a mouthful of a name. So people often call it the National Academies or NASM. And NASM is not part of the federal government, but it was founded by the federal government in 1863, I believe, to advise the nation on matters having to do with science, technology, engineering, medicine. And the National Academies releases various kinds of products. A big one being their consensus study reports. And these are reports written by committees of experts that reflect the consensus on the state of knowledge about a particular topic. And they've released reports on a whole host of different topics. This is just a small sampling. And in 2016, they commissioned a report, a consensus study report on the sexual harassment of women. So I served on the consensus study panel that that wrote this report. And our charge was specifically to review the research record on the sexual harassment of women, specifically in science, engineering and medical careers, and also identify best practices for the prevention of sexual harassment. And let me note that the research that we covered in this report actually cuts across a lot of different fields and departments and industries. It's actually not limited to STEM or academic medicine or even higher education. Since the research record is broader than those fields. It's a 300 page report so I can't really do it justice today. I will just give you a glimpse into the kind of things that it covers. And it starts with some very basic questions, you know what is this thing we call sexual harassment. How common is this conduct in our organizations today. So, we used Jennifer Bedal's definition she's a social psychologist at UBC and defined sexual harassment as conduct that derogates, demeans or humiliates people based on their sex or gender. And that's a big umbrella definition. The field recognizes several different sub types of sexual harassment. Some of those sub types involve sexual come ons if you will. So that includes sexual coercion, which refers to, you know, making conditions of employment or education contingent upon sexual cooperation. Can I admit this person. No, someone else is doing it. Okay, cool. Thanks. So sexual coercion sexual coercion would be the sort of sleep with me or your fired situation. Right. It's often the first thing that comes to people's minds when they hear the term sexual harassment, but it's actually the rarest form that this behavior takes a little bit more common is unwanted sexual attention, which is exactly what it is. Unwanted touching hugging stroking repeated requests for dates or sexual behavior despite discouragement and unwanted sexual attention sometimes does include sexual assault. So these are behaviors that fall into the come on category. There's another whole set of behaviors that are more like put downs. Gender harassment and gender harassment has nothing to do with sexual pursuit or trying to pull people into sexual relationship relationships. Instead, it's more about pushing people away, or even pushing them out of the institution. So sometimes gender harassment is purely sexist, you know, saying women can't cut it in surgery, or men don't belong in nursing. Other times gender harassment is more crude and lewd. For example, here in comments that, you know, women are dumb sluts taking jobs away from better qualified men. If you hear if you hear remarks like, like that, like that in the workplace, you know, in the setting, it can be pretty shocking. You know, imagine how shocking it would be to hear that coming from one of your coworkers from a supervisor from a student. So gender harassment is not about sex. It's not about sexual conquest. Instead, it's about contempt. But the all of these different behaviors are all forms of sexual harassment. In other words, sex based harassment and organizations, and they're all deeply problematic. So just to give you an idea of how common these different behaviors are, I pulled a few findings from just a couple of organizations that I've studied. We see very similar patterns across different types of organizations of the sub types of sexual harassment gender for gender harassment is always the most common form that we see across industries across institutions. Again, just to illustrate these are data from a large public university in the Midwest, not the University of Michigan, but it's a place a lot like Michigan. And this graph shows you the percent of female and females faculty and staff who have encountered some kind of sexually harassing conduct in the past two years on the job. And a few things to notice about this. So 37% of the women said they had not seen any kind of harassment in the last two years. And these are answering questions not questions like have you been sexually harassed, or have you been gender harassed. It's asking, have you encountered specific behaviors. You know how often has someone touched you in a way that made you feel uncomfortable would be unwanted sexual attention. So 37 says a long list of behaviors, 37% said no, haven't seen any of that. Okay, that's the big slice of the pie the big white slice in the left. But that means that 63% of the women had been sexually harassed in some way. Okay, that's more than six out of every 10 female faculty and staff at this large university. So 37% of the time gender harassment was involved in some way. So every slice of the pie in some shade of blue includes gender harassment. Again, these are data from a single institution, but every institution I've ever studied has had similar kinds of trends. And generally speaking, the more male dominated the context, or the male male more male dominated the industry than the higher the rates of sexual harassment. Alright, so the National Academy's commissioned an interview study during the development of our report where they conducted interviews with women faculty and science engineering and medicine to better understand experiences of sexual harassment in those spaces. And this quote illustrates examples of gender harassment. That's an assistant professor of engineering, who writes about demeaning the woman, shutting her up in the workplace, demeaning her in front of other colleagues, telling her she's not as capable as others are. It's not just, you know, touching or making sexual advances. It's more at the intellectual level. They try to mentally play those mind games so that you won't be able to perform. Okay, so most of what she's talking about here is a put down, not a come on. Okay, so these are experiences of higher ed from the perspective of faculty and staff. What about the perspective of students here are findings from another large public university system this one in the Southwest. And it's based on surveys of students. And in this study, again, you see that gender harassment is the most common form that sexual harassment takes, especially students in medicine. Okay, let me again I'll walk you through what to what to notice here. So for this analysis. That's okay. Are you able to meet them. So for this analysis we broke down findings, depending on the students field of study. So you have data for students pursuing degrees in the sciences, engineering, medicine, and then fields outside of stem several things notice here. So there are differences across fields and experiences of unwanted sexual attention. Those are the small sort of greenish turquoise bars I don't know if you could see the colors that well in this room, but it ranges from 3% 4% 2% to 2% to 4% of women students have encountered some kind of unwanted sexual coercion. And this is specifically asking about behavior from faculty or staff. Okay faculty or staff perpetrated behaviors. 1% and it's no difference across fields. There's also no difference across fields and rates of sexual coercion, which are the very small orange bars. Okay 1% across fields no differences. Now let me be clear, two to 4% is a rate that is two to 4% too high. 1% is a rate that is 1% too high. Okay, no students have to put up with any of this kind of abuse in return for the right to receive an education. Another thing that is striking here are the very high rates of gender harassment, particularly sexist gender harassment which is in the navy blue bar. And particularly in medicine. So medical students report significantly more gender harassment than students in other fields. So what is that about. This is always a question that people ask I would love to hear perspectives from people in the room or people on the zoom about how to make sense of this. Returning to the findings from the interview study medical training settings like residencies were described as breeding grounds for abuse. Medical students came to expect hostile brewing conditions and training. And again the interviews were with people who had knowledge having been harassed in some way. So it might have been a glimpse into the more harassing kind of medical training settings, but the survey was just a survey of students broadly across that institution the Southwest. So the students in med school came to see sort of sexual harassment as just part of this continuum of awfulness that they'd have to put up with at that point in their career. So a few quotes from the interviews. One wrote or one reported the thing about residency training is everyone is having human rights violations so it's just like tolerable sexual harassment. And then this woman said I reported to my program director the chief resident, and then the site director, who told me that maybe if I stopped whining so much, I would have more friends. And we blew off the report. So this last example is an example of a department or a site a training site that didn't take sexual harassment seriously, didn't take the reports of harassment seriously, and that kind of non response and minimization of sexual harassment reports are shown, according to research that that really kind of contributes to the ongoing nature of sexual harassment that there are these systems built to not only prevent it but also respond and put an end to it when it begins and when those systems don't respond appropriately, then it continues. All right, so again these are probably some of the most hostile medical training such as settings in the country, not every setting is like this. But these are some examples of places where things have gone awry. All right, let's see. Why isn't it advancing. There we go. All right, so another thing that's clear from the research record is that sexual harassment is a complex phenomenon. It intersects with racism, homophobia, transphobia and other discriminatory mindsets. What that means is that lesbian and bisexual women, women of color and trans women end up getting harassed at significantly higher rates than their straight white cisgender counterparts. So the harms are even more concentrated on women from marginalized groups. So one question that often comes up is when we're talking about the report is what about men. So the National Academy's report the charge was to focus on the experiences of women. So it didn't take up this particular question but there is research literature that speaks to it. When men be sexually harassed. Yes they can but it doesn't fit what most people are, many people are often picturing. More often than not, the harasser is another man, engaging in what we refer to as not man enough harassment. So it's one man belittling or or berating a male colleague or male subordinate. And engaging in what's seen as sort of stereotypically feminine activity, helping out around the house of taking time off of work to look after a child, expressing vulnerability or so called weak emotions, being too sensitive, too small, too gay, or in some other way, not living up to the ideals of traditional heterosexual masculinity. So yes men do get sexually harassed, but it doesn't fit what what a common stereotype is about that. The way to think about sexual harassment is a sort of iceberg. So unwanted sexual attention, sexual coercion and sexual assault are at the top. So these are the behaviors that break through to public view that make it into the news that are widely recognized as impermissible sexual harassment. So these are the behaviors that tend to make it into our trainings policies procedures so forth in higher education and in the private sector for that matter. But the research record is clear, more often than not sexual harassment is a put down, not a come on. So the bulk of the iceberg reflects examples of gender harassment. So behaviors that demean that derogate that humiliate people that put them down based on their sex or gender and gender harassment is submerged in the image because many people don't realize that gender harassment is a form of sexual harassment in the sense of being sex based harassment. And it definitely is. Alright, so what do we make of these behaviors. A lot of what we're talking about are put downs a lot of what we're talking about are verbal insults, sometimes visual gestures that sort of thing. So our people are really harmed by these behaviors. So a lot of research has looked at this question from different perspectives and found that sexual harassment does take a toll on work and well being. Sexual harassment goes up in a particular setting. We generally find that people working or trying to learn in that setting are less satisfied with it less committed to it. They experience more conflict and less cohesion within their teams if they're sexual harassment in the team. So there's stress and burnout and symptoms of anxiety and depression, substance abuse, and then if the sexual harassment continues day in day out, then you start to see physical symptoms of chronic stress. And these kinds of outcomes emerge even when the harassment solely consists of gender harassment. So, when the sexual harassment entails nothing but sexist insult, even without any kind of unwanted sexual pursuit, it takes a toll on the people who are targeted with it. So a meta analysis came out a few years ago that really drives this point home very compellingly. So this was an analysis that combined data from 88 studies based on surveys of over 70,000 women. And the big conclusion of this analysis is that gender harassment has a similar impact if not a greater impact on outcomes compared to unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. So this is a graph of a few of the effect sizes from the paper, and it kind of illustrates the differences in the relationships across the subtypes of harassment. Just to walk you through a few things to notice here. So the light blue bars show you the magnitude of the correlations between sexual coercion and these different outcomes related to self reported physical health and satisfaction with different aspects of the job. And the effect sizes for sexual coercion, again, light blue, are on the smaller side. Effects for gender harassment are in yellow, and they're significantly larger. Okay, so for example, look at job satisfactions. That's the outcome at the very bottom. The effect size for gender harassment is nearly twice the effect size for sexual coercion. So that's a finding that surprises a lot of people. It flies in the face of popular wisdom. So how do we make sense of findings like that. So the authors do a nice job in their paper explaining this, and they write that sexual coercion and unwanted sexual attention are traumatic for the people involved and more likely to result in court cases and public reporting. However, in many work settings, these intense experiences are low frequency events. Okay, they don't happen that often. The more frequent, less intense and often unchallenged gender harassment appears at least as detrimental for women's well being should not be considered a lesser form of sexism. And another thing to point out here is that one need not be directly targeted with sexual harassment to feel its negative effects. So one metaphor that sometimes used as the idea of secondhand smoke, you know that it's a it's something that that anyone else sharing the same environment can experience harms from being in that environment. So the harms of sexual harassment spreads to spread to witnesses, work groups, teams, entire departments, even, and people leave because of it. Okay, so when women are sexually harassed, they leave their co workers leave, even the men leave. They don't want to stick around and watch their valued colleague be demeaned and disparaged, and they don't want to become the next target themselves. So all faculty, staff and students, female and otherwise suffer from spending time and environments that are degrading or humiliating or misogynistic. So, given all the horrible findings. The big question is always, what do we do about this problem. What do we do about sexual harassment and what could be do be doing better and how can we prevent it. So the National Academy's report goes into this question in great detail. What works, what doesn't, and what should we be doing differently, specifically in science, engineering and academic medicine, but more broadly in higher ed. So, sometimes people wonder, you know, should men stop meeting privately with junior women, women trainees, women students. My answer to that question is always an emphatic no the mentoring, including one on one mentoring one on one training happens in these kinds of one on one meetings in a lot of fields. And it's important to advancement in those fields. It's, it's absolutely vital in some industries so in some organizations and industries you do not get ahead without that kind of individualized attention. So the private meetings are actually important meetings in a lot of ways, and a lot of context. So this question is sort of, you know, behind it is, is a myth. It's the idea that, you know, you better not meet alone you better keep the door open because she might accuse you of something you didn't do. Whether people are saying it this is kind of this lingering idea that's out there. And it's the myth that women commonly fabricate or exaggerate claims of sexual victimization. Yeah, there's no basis for this myth there's no the research has looked into different that's in different ways and there's really no basis for it. What we do find is that formal accusations of any kind of sexual victimization are are rare and false accusations are even rarer. Men are more likely to be sexually harassed by other men than they are to be falsely accused by a woman. That said, maybe a male faculty member doesn't want to meet privately with women students doesn't want to mentor women doesn't want to admit women to his lab. That's fine. That's his prerogative. But in that case he can't meet privately with men students, he can't mentor men students, he can't admit men to his lab. Okay, otherwise he'd be breaking the law. So it's a blatant violation of sex discrimination law to offer training and opportunities to members of one sex and not the other. We don't generally recommend that we address one form of sex discrimination like sexual harassment with another form. So my answer to this is always know. So what about reporting systems, should we build bigger and better reporting systems, should we improve the training so that everyone knows how to use them and everyone knows where to go to make a report, and then sit back and wait for victims to file in with their complaints. So this is what institutions have been trying for decades. And this is what hasn't really worked. Okay. We have seen especially in the last 20 years, a lot of organizations really beef up their their reporting mechanisms. We haven't seen this massive influx or this this big reduction I should say in harassment. So, just to illustrate again here are two findings from finding two different studies and two different contexts and time periods. So on the left you see data from 1996. These are data from employees who've been sexually harassed at a large public university. And among those is your only the harass people, and among them only 4% filed a formal complaint about it. So relatively low rate of reporting. In the last 20 years, the date on the right are 2016. These are graduate employees of a large organization, and among those who've been sexually harassed, a little over 6% filed a formal complaint about it. Okay, so reporting is extremely rare and that's true in general of different kinds of wrongdoing and grievances and crimes, people generally don't necessarily want to engage with formal reporting mechanisms. A lot of people, a lot of reasons people don't want to report sexual harassment, particularly when it's a colleague, a co worker, a boss. They're, they're worried about retaliation, not being believed in action, shame, blame, damage to their career or their future income prospects. Fortunately, the research shows that these fears are real are well founded. So reporting mechanisms are absolutely necessary, they do do important things for our institutions. But they're all together sufficient, excuse me, insufficient, they will not fix the problem of sexual harassment. We need to do a lot more than put in place formal reporting. If you look at the research record actually you find you don't see a lot of evidence that the interventions that are now common throughout higher ed have had much impact in terms of actually reducing sexually harassing conduct. So, one of the big points that the National Academies report makes is that we need to think outside the box if we want to move the needle on this. So we need to think about policies and trainings and interventions that look like that that move beyond formal reporting as as the end all be all solution, and that look beyond only looking only focusing on sexually aggressive acts of abuse. So many intervention systems and response systems are really focusing on the most sexually aggressive acts of harassment and abuse. Those acts simply don't happen without a firm foundation of disrespect. So we need to overhaul the institutional cultures that allow that disrespect to thrive and think about how to how to cultivate a culture of respect. And then the big question is how exactly do you do that how do you cultivate this climate of respect. So there's another whole research literature on workplace and civility workplace bullying workplace undermining different terms for different kinds of hostile behaviors that don't have to do with sex or gender. Literature has a lot of ideas for how to improve respect and civility in the workplace which also applies for educational settings, just to give you a just a few examples of the kinds of recommendations that come out of that literature. We should be making respect a part of hiring criteria, performance evaluation criteria, promotion and tenure criteria, and really taking respectful or inclusive behavior seriously for the, the, the, you know, hiring evaluation promotion of people at all levels of our institutions. We can also scrutinize everyday practices. So is is our department a place where people routinely yell at staff or students. Is it common for women to be interrupted in meetings, or does the department have a star culture where some people are above the rules because they're just so brilliant, or so famous, or they bring in so many grant dollars. So it might be time to rethink some of those norms. We can also take around, take a look at the built environment of the institution. So who's celebrated in photographs in statues and portraits, and who is missing. So universities and academic medical centers are covered with walls of white men and I didn't know I'd be in this room to give this talk but here's an example right here. This is very, very common I've never visited an academic medical center that doesn't have walls like this. This image in the slide is my own department of psychology University of Michigan and that's our dude wall. So, some folks think the walls don't really matter, but I would argue that they send a powerful message about who belongs, who's valued, and who is not. So the walls might be a good place to start if we want to start making our departments and our settings or classrooms so on, more respectful and more inclusive. Alright, so this is a 300 page report that I just distilled down to a short sweet 35 minutes. There's a lot more in the report. I, if you're interested in more detail, you can download the whole report for free from the website you can order a hard copy. So what we read in module and chapters are written as a standalone modules. So if you really only interested in the legal framework surround sexual harassment you can read that chapter if you really want to know more about intervention ideas read chapter six, so on and so forth it's very accessible. So, to date the reports estimated to have reached about 30 million people on social media. So, a million people through news reports. It's changed the conversation around sexual harassment. So people are now understanding sexual harassment as not just a women's issue or just a gender issue, but rather as a science issue, a medicine issue, a training issue. A problem that really derails work and education in these fields and drives people out of the fields. So the reports also prompted sweeping change and changes in policies and practices throughout higher education, and it's made its way into five proposed pieces of legislation, one of which was recently signed into law. So how many of you have heard of the chips act. Certainly some people have chips act is all of the news about two months ago. The full name is the chips and science act of 2022. And it's mostly known for its superconductor investments. Right so if you read that news you would, you would, you would be seeing news about it. But the science piece includes a section on sexual harassment in science, or rather prevention and response to sexual harassment in the broader scientific workforce. So that section of the bill started out as the combating sexual harassment in science act, which was introduced in the house by Eddie Bernice Johnson and introduced in the Senate by then Senator Kamala Harris. That was folded into the chips act, which Joe Biden signed into law two months ago. So the new law sites the National Academy's report extensively and implements various recommendations from the report. For example, it directs the NSF to fund sexual harassment research. If anyone's interested in doing work on these topics. I think different federal agencies will be offering more funding to for new studies and new interventions. The act also directs the NSF and the NAS to create new standards of conduct. There's research dollars away from known harassers. So principal investigators found to have committed committed egregious sexual harassment were never at risk of losing their federal funding, until the chips act, and the act to allocates 32.5 million dollars to fund this new work. And that's in some respects kind of small potatoes, the larger act authorizes some 174 billion dollars. But this funding is drawing more attention to sexual harassment. It's making it more likely that people are going to take it seriously. It's enabling more research and action, including action in fields. Like I said at the outset of my talk that we're formally not really paying much attention to sexual harassment. Alright, a second big thing that's come out of the report is an action collaborative on preventing sexual harassment and higher education. So an action collaborative is simply a coalition of the willing. It's people who come together to work on a system wide problem and develop innovative solutions. So this action collaborative was formed and it's supported by the National Academies. And today it includes 55 institutions, including University of Chicago. And each institution makes a commitment of time and money and effort to develop new approaches to addressing sexual harassment, implement and test new programs, policies and practices every year, and share information publicly about these efforts. And then so they share with the National Academies and then the National Academies shares it with the world. So the resources are shared through several different mechanisms. One are there's a meeting, a summit that happens every fall, every fall convened by the National Academies where it's different member institutions presenting about what they're trying and what's working on their campus. Videos and materials are then made available to the public after the meeting. So there's an annual report that summarizes the accomplishments of that particular year, and it highlights work that's been shared by the member institutions. There is a rubric, which basically lists topic areas aligned with the 2018 report, and it's basically a tool that organizations can use to track kind of where they're doing work or where they might want to start doing work. And one thing that I love is an online repository of work. So this is descriptions from the member institutions of actions that are especially novel and significant and innovative that they're taking on, and there's lots of examples of descriptions of practices in this repository. So this is a publicly available archive. You don't need to subscribe. You don't need to be a member of the action collaborative. Anyone can go to the website and access it. It describes significant policies, procedures, programs, so on and so forth. And the descriptions are categorized into 25 ish areas. There's just a few of them right here. So you can search on whatever topic that you are trying to develop programming and no civility or respect. For example, or leadership education, and then it pulls up all the descriptions from member institutions that fall into that bucket. And just to give you a few examples I'm not going to read through all these, but these are the kinds of work that are described in this digital online repository. So descriptions from different institutions that are doing new things in terms of reference checks to identify people who have been found to have committed harassment at their former institution, and are trying to move institutions, historically personnel policies and records and whatnot are private in the institution that we're applying to can't access them. So these are novel policies that make it legally possible to do this kind of sharing of records across institutions. These are toolkits for leaders, different programs around anonymous reporting programs and that are setting up ombuds offices to give people avenues to confidential advice, non mandatory sort of reporting resources. So different institutions dressing addressing gender harassing behavior, reducing power differentials increasing transparency, so on and so forth, using climate surveys, a lot of campuses are putting in place or conducting some kind of survey to gauge what's going on and figure out how to do it. And these are different institutions talking about the nuts and bolts of how they're doing that. I'm happy to share the slide, the slides afterwards all of these links are live you can click on them and go see what's in the repository, but you can just go to the National Academy's website and you'll find the action collaborative repository pretty easily. If you're interested. The collaborative work is divided into these, these working groups these topic areas that the that the National Academy staff supports organized around prevention response evaluation and remediation. And they work on gathering and summarizing the relevant research, identifying promising practices and so forth. So I've read out some papers in the last few years, which again, these are available to anybody who's interested in downloading them. The first paper again all about climate surveys and how to construct the best climate surveys using the latest greatest science of survey methods to assess sexual harassment prevalence. I've read out some papers on these reference to checking policies that I was mentioning, you know, accessing personal personnel records to stop passing the harasser. A paper on sexual harassment policies and processes through a procedural justice lens and you so using that kind of framework to make them. To make their experiences more fair from the people from the stakeholders in that space, and then a paper on sanctions and early interventions for faculty sexual harassment. Again, these papers are all available for download the action collaborative is all about sharing out resources to to create change in the larger higher education space, including not just universities but also national labs for example, including national centers. Alright, one final set of questions that I want to leave you all with and then I'm happy to take your questions. So sexual harassment policies, procedures, penalties for those who harass have been focused heavily on unwanted sexual pursuit and sexual coercion. But that's literally only taking aim at the tip of the iceberg. The focus that is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient. So what are we doing here. Remember that more often than not sexual harassment is a put down, not a come on. So what are we doing to address the slides and indignities that combine to relegate women to the margins of organizational life. To form our institutional cultures to be more respectful, more inclusive to treat all people with dignity, no matter their sex, race, gender, sexuality, or other social identity. So if we can begin to answer questions like those, then we might need that we might start really moving the needle in the end reducing sexual harassment. Alright, with that, I will take a pause and I'll be happy to take your questions. Question and then happy to take questions from the room. Also, you can type it in the chat and I can read them out. I was really struck by that one of the earlier graphs where, like a third of people said they were had gender harassment but a third of people said they had no harassment. And I, my experience as a leader is that I used to answer no I've never been harass when I took a climate survey or culture survey. And the more I've learned about sexual harassment with lectures like these are like oh actually in my training in, you know, early years, I probably did experience harassment but I always answered. Because I was not sexually coerced at any time. And I wonder, I just wonder if you could just comment on that how, what's the understanding of the perception of how many people actually answer no but maybe have experienced it but don't understand exactly what they're being asked. Yeah, that's a great question. So I'll say a little bit more about how we how we measure it in studies like that. So it's mandatory like I said it's a long list of behaviors, and none of them use the term sexual harassment. So it'll have questions like how often in the past two years or the past year. You heard sexist comments by one of your coworkers supervisors, heard sexually offensive jokes. Someone made obscene remark about women, or you saw a vulgar gesture. Some of the items I think, you know, they cover so much territory that I just think how could you not have encountered all of that or not all that some of that at one point. And the terms and that instrument include like sexist comments. And I think not everyone considers, but I might consider sexist someone else might not. So more recent iterations that measure we've removed language like that that might be less clear. So that's, that's one thought but another thought is that. So we ask all these, these questions and typically the answer is like yes I've experienced this once or twice, sometimes, you know, it's usually not every day, but you know, occasionally. And then at the very end, there's just one broad question have you been sexually harassed. It was originally like a criterion item, and people will say yes, yes, yes. Oh no I've never been sexually harassed. And it looks to your point that a lot of people experienced these and they're, they're so normalized in some settings that they don't even experience it as a problem. So research that's looked at, you know, whether you label the behavior so have calling it sexual harassment, we think of that as a labeling kind of item. It's a difference of, you know, personal professional satisfaction well being and so forth. And does that differ between people who are harassed and they label it harassment, or they're harassing they don't attach the label. And there's actually no difference. So, regardless of how we think about our experiences they seem to have certain impact. Um, so when is Dr. Wooster in nephrology is this an example of the 80 2080 rule, where a small number of people are responsible for the majority of all harassment episodes, and did the same people harass men and women. That's an interesting question so a lot of studies. We have not gotten there there's been less perpetrator research I should say first of all, so studies of sexual harassment from the perspective of perpetrators than the perspective of targets. And when the targets are reporting on the behaviors or sometimes we'll ask them, you know, who done it, so to speak, you know, a person and what was their gender what was their position what was their power level, for example. And we don't know whether they're all talking about the same bad apple, or the same few bad apples, or whether there's a bunch of bad actors. That said, there was a study that the New York Times commissioned a few years back, where they use some of the standard instruments from social sciences, and it's usually a study of, you know, have you been, you know, been targeted with these behaviors and they flipped it around and they actually engaged in these behaviors. And especially gender harassment, there were shockingly high rates of gender harassment. And it wasn't. These are not framed as like here's a study of sexual harassment, because if you frame it in that way, people will say no I've never done any of these things because I wouldn't be a But if you frame it as, have you told an off color joke in the workplace, said lewd or crude things or whatnot. It was surprising how many men in an anonymous survey so on and so forth said yes did they done that. Before I answer the zoom question. Yeah. Thank you very much really enjoyed hearing about it, although it's not happy to hear that. In this context of the war of men, and so I'm wondering whether you have any sense of the idea with respect to different areas of medicine. And so certainly some areas surgery, for example, isn't much more male dominant than others, some subspecies are much more so than others. And so, so is it that they're, you know, is this a greater problem than those that have where this thing is from men, or is it a problem is related to the extent to which it is hierarchical or not hierarchical structure. Oh, that's a really interesting question. So if I'm hearing what you're saying the specialties within medicine, there's sort of a, there's a confound of male dominated in terms of you know who's who's who's there, but also the hierarchy is it a tall hierarchy is hierarchy is a strong one versus some are flatter. Yeah, that's so interesting. We did do a study of this a survey with Reshma Jagsee, I think was here a few weeks ago, and surveyed faculty and students pursuing medical degrees at the University of Michigan. And we looked at we couldn't do individual specialties because we were worried that people wouldn't want to divulge exactly you know they're very small, like they wouldn't want to be identifiable. And collections of specialties like work with women and children kind of I think was one of the big buckets. And I don't remember exactly what our findings are. We've published it. I'm happy to share the paper or pull the paper up. But I do remember that it did not fit any of the stereotypes. It wasn't that surgery is by far the worst and pediatrics is the best. It might have been, I want to say there was a finding that anesthesiology had less patient perpetrated harassment, which kind of made sense. If the patients are asleep. Yeah. It was a study that also separated out harassment from patients and patients families versus coworkers supervisors and so forth. And I think the hope of our medical school was well a lot of this behavior must be coming from the public. It's the patients, the families and whatnot. And sure they were doing some of it, but a lot of it was coming from within the institution. Okay, Dr Aurora is joining us on zoom. Thank you so much for being with us I was curious if you could break if you could discuss how to break through the inertia and silence when such things occur. That's a great question. So Aurora by the way who is on the leadership board of the action collaborative so she's very involved in this work. How to break through the silence. So one of the projects I'm working on right now is actually to address that exact question. And we have thought about silence around sexual harassment as being kind of more multi layered and more complicated than what's often thought about. And this is in terms of not just a victim doesn't want to come forward, but also victims do come forward, often, you know, formally and informally and then they get silenced. Or they actually are discouraged from filing report or when they do their report falls and deaf ears. So they, they do speak up and nobody hears them. And some of the biggest cases that have hit the news have involved people, it took multiple women coming forward multiple times over the course of years for action to actually happen. So one thing that we're doing in this project is trying to figure out what are the antecedents for those those kinds of networks of silence to build. So how do we intervene in those in those antecedents so that it's less likely to lead to the silences, and this project still in the very early stages, it's it's more theoretical at this point. So we don't have the answers yet. But I think it's a really important question to ask. And I do think we've made progress in the sense of, you know, people are talking about sexual harassment. So lecture series like this are including, you know, multiple speakers doing work on sexual harassment. So there's more attention to it. More awareness, you know, a new bill that's addressing it so on and so forth. So I think there's progress. But let me to her point, there's a lot of a lot of work that we still need to do there. This part with this last question from Dr. Landon. Thanks so much for wonderful talk this is so important for all of us in my experience there's not a good way to provide feedback regarding bad meeting behavior, like talking over a woman interrupting women's idea ceiling, etc. I find such feedback often gets framed as overreaction, or as blown off what are best practices for preventing these behaviors in the first place and or successfully addressing and changing them. And I will say, in my role as leaders, people come to me, like, can you give feedback to this person. And it's a funny, it's a funny like whose role is it to like give that feedback. Yeah, that's a great question. So whose job is it to set the climate to cultivate the climate of respect. And I agree people often look to the leader, the department chair, the department head. And suggest that you know it's their job to fix the climate of the of the unit. I try to emphasize that it's everyone's job. And it's not because the person that you know running the unit can't necessarily intervene in the day to day interactions. So, the, the most effective program I've seen to actually change norms of disrespect to respect or in civility to civility is a program that is an acronym cruise civility, respect and engagement in the workplace and things that stands for, and it was a respectful workplace program basically in hospital settings where the the intervention involved some kind of trainers or facilitators coming in, you know, the institution had to want to do this. The groups, the work groups or teams that were part of the study. Received some kind of a toolkit and they met with facilitator and the teams met every two weeks, I think for six months and talked about, you know, here are our standards here are the behavioral ideals that we want to meet here's with respectful disrespectful. And so it's very grassroots, not like the dean telling them here's with respectful whatnot. And then they meet again every two weeks later and you know reassess how are we doing. So in this example, if one of the things that's considered disrespectful is interrupting and meetings, then that would be discussed and then the group would talk about well what do we do when this happens. Well, so and so should say something or everyone should stop whatever the intervention is that so they decide what makes sense for their particular unit their particular team. But they would meet every two weeks reassess reflect back on what's going on. And this crew intervention has been tested through some kind of randomized trials I don't remember the details, but they did see changes that after six months of these sorts of pretty intensive. I don't even want to call it training because it's a series of meetings. They did see a change in terms of the people's perceptions of respect levels of burnout intentions to stay with that institution so on and so forth. So I don't think there's one answer to this question about what it's what to do about problematic meeting behavior. There are some ideas and interventions like that about how kind of it can be ground up and and and grassroots and involves involves everybody like not just the person at the top. Thank you so much. One last round of applause for a great talk and and hearing with our hybrid meeting so thank you so much. We'll go ahead and stop the recording and then I think we're going to have a discussion with the ethics fellows. Thank you so much.