Panel discusses sexual harassment in academia

Sexual harassment in STEM and medicine was the main topic of discussion at this year’s Women in STEM Cooperative’s Summit on Wednesday, with a panel of UB administrators fielding questions about the issue and offering possible solutions.

Serving on the panel were Liesl Folks, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Nancy H. Nielsen, senior associate dean for health policy and clinical professor in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; and Michael Cain, vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School.

Folks open the session by outlining the findings and recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s (NASEM) 2018 report on sexual harassment. The report concluded that 50 percent of women in academia have experienced sexual harassment, and between 20 and 50 percent of science, engineering and medical students have reported experiencing sexual harassment from faculty or staff.

Cain applauded the NASEM recommendation that colleges and universities create a systemic cultural change when it comes to sexual harassment. He said he agreed that universities need to move beyond legal compliance to address culture and climate.

Nielsen said she concurred with this recommendation, especially regarding the student population.

“When you’re a student in a class and you’re getting a bad feeling when an approach is being made by a faculty member or somebody else, you’re terrified that you’ve got to get through that semester,” Nielsen said. “We have to remember that people are still very vulnerable as students. We have to help beyond the official reporting mechanisms and have more of a cultural change that we don’t tolerate this and that we talk about it.

“I don’t think we’ve articulated that well enough so that people have a roadmap,” she said. “I think it’s really frustrating and that it happens to many people where they report at different levels and there may be discussions going on that they’re not a part of, but nobody gets back to them and says what they’re going to do. There’s no follow-up, and it feels like you’re talking in a vacuum, which is both unsatisfying and doesn’t solve the problem necessarily.”

The panelists talked about the need for improvements in organizational transparency, another recommendation by NASEM. Folks said a lot can be achieved by the way leadership communicates to its respective faculty and staff.

“There’s a lot that leaders can do just by being transparent,” Folks said. “One of the things I’ve been doing mindfully is explaining to my faculty and staff unambiguously that no one is touching my students or creating a hostile workplace for them without consequences.”

The panelists were asked what could be done to fully change the culture regarding sexual harassment. Folks said the first thing that needs to continue happening is conversation — even if it’s a difficult subject.

“If you’re not talking about it, nothing is ever going to change,” she said. “Being brave enough to bring up issues about equity, diversity and inclusion absolutely helps get the conversation going.”

Nielsen noted that everything needs to be reported, even if there’s a power dynamic involved. She said the Me Too movement’s challenging of authority figures who are accused of committing acts of sexual misconduct has already significantly changed the systemic culture.

“We’ve seen some very widely reported scandals at prestigious institutions,” Nielsen said. “Part of the thread behind some of those (incidents) is that the people who were the harassers were really important. It’s different depending where you are, but you’ve got to go to somebody who is in some authority and get some advice and move on it.

“How does change happen?” she asked. “When it gets to the papers. When a dean gets removed, you can bet there will be an entire year’s worth of discussion about what to do so it never happens again.”

Folks also said she believes that more needs to be done institutionally at universities to make sure that culture change isn’t hampered by repeat offenders.

“What I’m worried about is I don’t know how we’ll ever get to the bottom of this (issue) if we don’t have a repository where all information is being put into it,” she said. “When a particular person is named as a bad actor, we could go to it and see if there’s a pattern of behavior, rather than an isolated incident. There’s a (current) risk that something gets reported at a department level where a department chair can do a perfectly good job at intervening and protecting the student, faculty or staff member. All of that could be handled perfectly, but five years later if there’s a new department chair, are we treating it as a first-time offense again?”

Another question to the panel focused on an audience member’s male colleagues and their expressed fear of being left alone with female students because of the Me Too movement. Folks called those fears absurd.

“I say that is just ridiculous,” she said. “Just observe normal rules for professional behavior: Don’t touch people and don’t say stupid things. It’s just not that hard and I genuinely think that’s a completely overblown response.”

Cain agreed, noting it also comes down to respecting the individual in question and their definition of needed space. He posed as an example a situation in which someone asked him to leave the door open in his office, to which he took no offense and no problem arose.

“As a male, my exposure to this subject has made it clear that each of us, in our own mind, have our own defined space,” he said. “As a member of a community, I have to respect that your definition of space may be different than mine.”

Asked for her advice to someone experiencing sexual harassment, Folks recommended reporting what happened via email because it puts a time stamp on the issue. Both she and Nielsen stressed that it’s important to tell someone immediately.

“If you feel yourself in a situation that makes you afraid, my advice is to tell somebody right away and don’t wait,” Nielsen said. “That somebody could be your roommate, your significant other, a friend or someone in the institution. The danger of waiting is that if you’re going to be retaliated against because you didn’t respond the way he or she thought you should respond, then you could fail.”