The Harassment Trap

THE HARASSMENT TRAP

 Sexual misconduct in the workplace ruins lives and careers. In science, it also pushes promising researchers away and delays or prevents important scientific breakthroughs. Physiology is not immune.

 By Anne Ford

Donna Morgan* had two advisers during her doctoral work in cardiovascular physiology. One, Dr. Dixon*, frequently accompanied her into the basement facility where she worked. Morgan noticed that he seemed to stand much closer to her than was necessary. When she grew uncomfortable and moved away, he began asking her, “Why are you uncomfortable? Have you been hurt by a man?”

Dixon escalated to touching her.  If he were teaching Morgan to do a surgical procedure, “maybe his right hand was helping to guide my right hand, but then his left hand would be on my shoulder or my thigh,” she says.  “I was 26, this was my doctoral adviser, and I just didn’t know what to do with this at all.”

Dixon asked her over and  over why  she didn’t dress in a more feminine way.  “It seemed as though if I didn’t start making some of these adjustments, I would not move forward,” she says.  “The signals I was getting from him were that part of being a graduate student was going to meetings and making contacts and he would not take me with him to these meetings if he didn’t think I’d be presentable.” So she changed her appearance accordingly—and this, she says, “was when things completely fell apart for me.”

Dixon did take her to a professional meeting. And on the drive back, in the middle of the night, he pulled off the interstate and sexually assaulted her.

For the next three years, he demanded that Morgan provide him sexual favors in exchange for him reading her work.  “I spent those years thinking, ‘Who do I tell? Is this my fault?’”  she says.  “Because that’s the message I got from him:  Now that I looked the part, he was unable to resist.”

Morgan doubted she would be believed if she told anyone what was happening. And if she did, she would have to throw away all the work she’d done so far. Her other adviser noticed her depressed demeanor and told her that whenever he had to interact with her, it ruined his day. Could she please be more cheerful?

HARMING PEOPLE—AND SCIENCE

More than half—58 percent—of female academic faculty and staff have experienced sexual harassment, a workplace rate second only to that of the military at 69 percent, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s 2018 report, “Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture and  Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering and  Medicine.” Sexual harassment and gender discrimination are sometimes mischaracterized as mere annoyances—the equivalent of rude remarks at a dinner party. In truth, this dangerous behavior takes many forms, from comments that objectify or exclude members of one gender to unwanted sexual advances to sexual coercion and assault. For those who experience it, it can be life-altering, even career-ending. It can foster hostile work environments, push promising researchers out of the field and delay or prevent important advances in knowledge. Physiology is not immune.

The National Academies have named five factors that contribute to sexual harassment in academia:

1. A perceived tolerance for such harassment
2. Male-dominated work settings
3. A hierarchal power structure
4. Policies and procedures that focus on protecting the institution
5. An uninformed leadership
   

Like Morgan, postdoctoral fellow Tamara Green* experienced sexual harassment before she was out of graduate school. That’s when a male student she was assigned to work with began asking her about her sexual preferences and experiences. “I had never had anyone ask me any of that before, and I didn’t know what to do,” she says.

Ignoring him did nothing, and Green didn’t think she’d get anywhere by trying to talk to her male principal investigator (PI) about the situation. To make matters worse, she was on three publications with the student, and he had the power to remove her from her experiments. Would speaking up jeopardize her future career?

The harassment finally stopped when a female lab tech overheard him asking Green: “I noticed you shave your arms.  Do you shave anything else?”  The tech stepped in and said, “What did you just say to her?”  That seemed to silence the harasser for good, “I think because he realized that other people were listening and that he could get in trouble,” Green says.

More recently, during her postdoctoral fellowship, Green encountered a similarly uncomfortable situation with a visiting professor, who said things to her such as “You look nice in those clothes today” and “Would you ever date a married man?” When he escalated to touching her hair and face, she conferred with the lab’s only other female postdoc, who had been a target of the same behavior. Together they told their male PI, who resolved the situation by having the professor work solely with a male postdoc.

While Green is relieved that the harassment stopped, she thinks her PI “appeased the situation, rather than approaching the situation. I don’t know what he and this professor talked about; I don’t know if there was a discussion about how his behavior was inappropriate.”

The situation has negatively affected Green’s own work, not just because of the distraction and distress involved, but because this professor—given his status as a visitor—has access to highly desirable experiments in which Green is now unable to join. But she and the other female postdoc feel loathe to rock the boat by raising the issue again.

Sexual harassment like this does more than harm a single individual and their career. Green says it hurts all of physiology. “I think it hinders progress because it makes people feel uncomfortable listening to each other, and you have to be extremely collaborative in order to move science forward,” she says.  “What’s the point of diversity if we’re not working together?”

DAMAGING CAREERS

University professor Gabriella Feliciano* has taught at the university level for several decades. She remembers during her younger days doing a poster session about her work in sexual behavior. She smiled stoically as male colleagues routinely asked, “Do you need a subject?” or “Is it true that Latin women are great lovers?”

“When you’re young, and these are established people, you don’t feel comfortable” speaking out in a situation like that, she says.  “You don’t know if it could impact your future career. All you can do is smile and try to change the subject.”

The discrimination and harassment didn’t end there. In her first job, she was promised her own laboratory, only to see it given to a male colleague instead. Then another male colleague—recruited at the same time she was—was given a class with 18 students, while she was assigned a class with more than 100. “So even the academic load was different because I was a female,” she says.

When it came time for her to go on maternity leave, Feliciano planned to extend it by adding the two months of vacation time she had earned, but her male department chair said she couldn’t because he needed her to teach a certain course during a particular term.  As she puts it, “I have a lot of stories, but they’re more or less the same.”

Now that Feliciano has more seniority—and now that times have begun to change—she feels more comfortable objecting when she sees sexual harassment or gender discrimination taking place. “It’s getting better, with the #MeToo movement,” she says. “Still, we haven’t gotten to the point where males and females are equal. My goal is to see that we’re all treated equally.”

PERVASIVE DISCRIMINATION

Nick McMillan* hasn’t experienced gender discrimination. But as the husband and colleague of a fellow scientist, he has had a front-row seat to its effects.

Twenty-five years ago, McMillan and his wife, Irene*, worked at the same pharmaceutical company, where Irene was the only woman in her division. At one point, she took maternity leave, then returned to work.  When it came time for performance evaluations, her boss downgraded her performance from previous years. “She said, ‘I don’t understand. I was just as productive as I ever was,’” McMillan remembers. “And he said, ‘It’s because you were gone.  Think of it as being a factory worker. If you’re off for three months, you can’t make your quota of widgets.’”

Irene decided shortly afterward that she didn’t need to keep working there. But even after Irene and her husband both left that company and moved into academia, it didn’t take long for her to experience discrimination again.

This time, the couple held equal positions within a university department. Again, Irene went in for her annual evaluation, where the department chair told her, “We’re really happy with your work.  We’re going to give you a 3 percent raise.” But Irene knew that her husband had received a 5 percent raise. Upon pointing this out, she was told, “Well, when you look at what the two of you earn together, you’re doing better than the other faculty in the department.”

Irene stood her ground, consulting with a labor lawyer and eventually receiving a salary increase that put her on par with the men in the department.

These days, gender discrimination tends to show up in less measurable ways, McMillan says.  For example, he notices that although both he and his wife have their own labs, people frequently assume they share a lab and that he’s the head of it. Then, too, “a lot of times someone will ask me to speak or to write something, and it’s clearly not in my primary expertise; it’s in Irene’s primary expertise.”

While McMillan emphasizes that he can’t speak on behalf of his wife or any other woman, he believes incidents like these are likely driving women out of science. “They see the kind of environment they have to deal with, and they’re like, ‘I’m going to go do something else.’”

As the National Academies report points out, laws against sexual harassment in academic settings have been on the books for three decades. Yet the prevalence of sexual harassment has not dropped. Rather than relying on the legal system to prevent or end harassment, the report concludes, the science community must look to organizational culture.

Does that mean holding ever more sexual harassment prevention trainings? Not necessarily. As the report states, “While sexual harassment training can be useful in improving knowledge of policies and of behaviors that constitute sexual harassment, it has not been demonstrated to prevent sexual harassment or change people’s behaviors or beliefs, and some training shows a negative effect (or impact).”

Instead, the emphasis should be on implementing strong, effective leadership at all levels, as well as on creating organizational systems and structures that value and support diversity, inclusion and respect. The report also notes, “Reducing hierarchical power structures and diffusing power more broadly among faculty and trainees can reduce the risk of sexual harassment.” Among its additional observations: Standards of behavior must be upheld not just on campus, but also at field sites and professional society meetings. As it concludes, “Professional societies have the potential to be powerful drivers of change.”

WONDERING WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Morgan finally completed her doctorate and moved to another university for a postdoc. But Dixon hampered her career from afar, refusing to move forward with any of the draft publications she’d submitted to him.  He told her that the only way he’d help her was if she visited him at his university, where, she knew, she would have to endure his sexual harassment. So she stayed away—and had nothing to show for all her hard work.  “I got my degree, but I lost everything else.”

Seven years  after graduating, and after receiving psychological care, Morgan felt able to tell her alma mater about Dixon’s  behavior.

While the statute of limitations prevented legal action, he was barred from having female advisees or being alone with a woman in his office. His colleagues learned of his behavior and refused to work with him.  However, he retains his position, although he has never made full professor.

Meanwhile, Morgan, who now teaches at a predominantly undergraduate university, wonders what might have been. “I like what I do, but I didn’t continue with a research career,” she says. “I have never been comfortable working with undergraduate students one-on-one in a low-traffic area of our facility. It’s changed me forever.”

A Road Map for Positive Change

Last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released “Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.” The detailed report provides an overview of sexual harassment research, explores how sexual harassment interfaces with academic environments, discusses job and health outcomes of sexual harassment, provides legal and policy mechanisms and offers thoughts on changing the culture and climate of higher education.

The report offers seven recommendations:

1. Create diverse, inclusive and respectful environments.
2. Address the most common form of sexual harassment: gender harassment. (Gender harassment consists of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey hostility, objectification, exclusion or second-class status about members of one gender.)
3. Move beyond legal compliance to address culture and climate.
4. Improve transparency and accountability.
5. Diffuse the hierarchical and dependent relationship between trainees and faculty.
6. Provide support for the target.
7. Strive for strong and diverse leadership.
   

The full report is available for free download at www.bit.ly/harassmentwomen.

Attention from APS

In late 2018, APS developed a sexual harassment task force to develop policies and procedures that ensure APS members and colleagues can collaborate in harassmentfree spaces that keep the focus on the important work happening in the field of physiology. The Society is committed to creating an environment where individuals can exchange ideas and be safe, accepted and respected. Read more at www.physiology.org/about/welcome/core-values.