Taking the battle against sexual harassment in global academia online
Authors: Becky McCall
Journal: The Lancet (2019)

Social media has provided channels to almost instantly name-and-shame alleged perpetrators of sexual harassment in academia. Becky McCall reports. Experiences of gender inequity, sexual harassment, and assault were writ large in 2017 when the #MeToo, movement went viral. It was a watershed moment in the digital era of women's rights. The spread of #MeToo has been so powerful that it was recognised by Australia's Macquarie Dictionary as the word of 2018, where it is listed as a noun, an adjective, and a verb—to be Me Too-ed: to be accused of sexual harassment. This rapid linguistic evolution is symptomatic of a meteoric rise in online activities that support women speaking openly about their experiences of sexual harassment, especially in the workplace. Academia and tertiary education have joined the movement, with the notable examples of #MeTooSTEM and #MeTooAcademia online. Because of its instant and global nature, the fight for gender equality in academia around the world is increasingly taking place on social platforms, although the roots of these movements go back much farther. An increasing number of rape cases across universities in South Africa in the past decade, led, in 2016, to a groundswell of anger among female students. The #EndRapeCulture campaign emerged, within which female students protested against the pervasive normalisation of sexual violence on university campuses. Students at Rhodes University, Cape Town, published a list of the names of 11 alleged rapists on social media. The so-called RU Reference List went viral. The Rhodes University principal said that he would not expel the alleged rapists because he claimed that due process had not been followed. Students across the country marched topless through the streets brandishing sjamboks (whips, a symbol of fighting back), with the message, “stop objectifying our bodies and sexualising them. We take back control over our bodies.” “This was very powerful”, remarks Amanda Gouws, professor of political science, at the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa), who holds a research chair in gender politics and whose students were actively involved in the protests. “Women in South Africa are very aware of gender-based violence because it is so common”, says Gouws. She explained that her interest in the institutional aspects of sexual harassment began just after the country's democratic transition, around 1994. At the time, the definition of sexual harassment was a fundamental issue. “We initiated a study to understand more about what was happening. We found that many students didn't realise that sexist or unwanted jokes and fondling were harassment, as well as the more obvious sexual violence and rape”, Gouws says. One common form of harassment found at universities was a quid pro quo sexual bribery or threat scenario, whereby a professor promises a good grade to a student if they will participate in a sexual act or threaten a fail if they do not. Gouws, who sat on the university Sexual Harassment Task Force, has overseen several quid pro quo cases. “Students are vulnerable because male lecturers are in a position of power and students might feel flattered when a lecturer shows interest in them”, she says. India has also proven to be a hotbed for the growth of social media in tackling gender equity issues. In October, 2017, Indian law student Raya Sarkar published on her Facebook page a crowd-sourced list of academics (in medicine and other areas) who had allegedly sexually harassed women. Later known as the list of sexual harassers in academia (or LoSHA), it included 75 men from 30 colleges and universities across India, the UK, and the USA. The list was shared more than 1000 times. Explaining her actions in an interview with the BBC, Sarkar said: “I wanted to make my friends, and friends of friends, aware and wary of different sexual predators, based on first-hand testimonies. I put the list out to make students safe.” Opinions differ on Sarkar's actions, with some questioning the ethics of publishing such a list and others questioning the privilege of those who oppose it and the dominion of upper-caste men in Indian institutions. Shortly after the list went viral, a statement was published on behalf of a prominent group of feminists led by feminist author and professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, Nivedita Menon. The statement strongly disagreed with Sarkar's list and asked for its withdrawal, highlighting that justice would be better sought through due process, in which the larger feminist community would back them. For decades, Menon and other feminists in Indian universities have struggled to enact procedures to deal with rampant sexual harassment on campuses, including that by professors towards students. “It [the list] individualised the occurrence of sexual harassment rather than seeing it as a structural problem, which can be tackled collectively”, Menon says. Menon explains that “the circulation of such a list with no accountability, information, or context seemed to endanger the gains of decades of feminist politics that have succeeded in naming and defining what sexual harassment constitutes, and in building a climate in which young women can speak up without fear…we felt that the issuing of such a list with no accountability only strengthened the hands of the opposition to feminist politics”. They also objected to the list presenting women as exclusively victims, so scared to speak up that, even anonymously, they could not share the details of their harassment, she adds. Talking about the list published online by Sarkar, Jess Wade, a postdoctoral physics fellow at Imperial College London (UK), says she believes students feel driven to act, not only because the legal system let them down but also because the academic establishment preferentially protects academics and has poor grievance policies and procedures (for more on the imbalance of power perpetuated by the academic system see the panel).PanelThe moustached men anomalyUnder-representation of women at a senior level feeds an imbalance of power in which sexual harassment can escalate. For Esther Choo, women entering senior leadership roles is only one part of the solution towards gender equity.“We need to be much more objective and less subjective about allocation of salary and other resources, including standardisation of starting salary, so we remove disparity at the very beginning of a medical career.”“It became clear to me that the continuing gap in compensation, promotion, and leadership is not explained by anything that makes sense. Gender bias and discrimination at least play some role in these inequities, which are not addressed by medicine as a whole”, Choo says.Salary differences between male and female physicians in equivalent roles exemplify the frustration felt by Choo and her female colleagues. A recent compensation survey by Doximity that accounted for hours worked, specialty, and region of practice found that the gender pay gap had worsened in recent times. In 2017, female doctors earned 27·7% less (US$105 000) than their male counterparts, whereas, in 2016, female doctors earned 26·5% ($91 284) less than male counterparts. Furthermore, no medical specialty was found in which female physicians earned more than male physicians. Obstetrics and gynaecology illustrates just how shocking this finding is. “Obs/gyn is a specialty dominated by women…but has a pay difference that favours men, likewise for paediatrics and nursing too—conventionally female-dominated areas”, Choo says.Choo also highlights that there is a stark under-representation of women at full professor and chair positions in US medical schools. On average, in UK medical departments, women represent only 15% of staff. Currently, a third of UK universities have no established policy on staff–student relationships. A National Institutes of Health study in 2015 found that, in National Institutes of Health-funded institutions across the USA, women were chairs in only 13% of these institutions. A quirky subanalysis comparing the number of women chairs to the number of moustached male chairs found that “women in the USA are so far from equalling men in the number of chairs of medical school departments that they are even outnumbered by the men with moustaches”, she explains. Under-representation of women at a senior level feeds an imbalance of power in which sexual harassment can escalate. For Esther Choo, women entering senior leadership roles is only one part of the solution towards gender equity. “We need to be much more objective and less subjective about allocation of salary and other resources, including standardisation of starting salary, so we remove disparity at the very beginning of a medical career.” “It became clear to me that the continuing gap in compensation, promotion, and leadership is not explained by anything that makes sense. Gender bias and discrimination at least play some role in these inequities, which are not addressed by medicine as a whole”, Choo says. Salary differences between male and female physicians in equivalent roles exemplify the frustration felt by Choo and her female colleagues. A recent compensation survey by Doximity that accounted for hours worked, specialty, and region of practice found that the gender pay gap had worsened in recent times. In 2017, female doctors earned 27·7% less (US$105 000) than their male counterparts, whereas, in 2016, female doctors earned 26·5% ($91 284) less than male counterparts. Furthermore, no medical specialty was found in which female physicians earned more than male physicians. Obstetrics and gynaecology illustrates just how shocking this finding is. “Obs/gyn is a specialty dominated by women…but has a pay difference that favours men, likewise for paediatrics and nursing too—conventionally female-dominated areas”, Choo says. Choo also highlights that there is a stark under-representation of women at full professor and chair positions in US medical schools. On average, in UK medical departments, women represent only 15% of staff. Currently, a third of UK universities have no established policy on staff–student relationships. A National Institutes of Health study in 2015 found that, in National Institutes of Health-funded institutions across the USA, women were chairs in only 13% of these institutions. A quirky subanalysis comparing the number of women chairs to the number of moustached male chairs found that “women in the USA are so far from equalling men in the number of chairs of medical school departments that they are even outnumbered by the men with moustaches”, she explains. Wade has personally written 500 Wikipedia pages for female scientists and crowd-funded £21 000 in 12 days to provide copies of Angela Saini's book—Inferior, How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story—to every state secondary school in England “Universities are built on rules made centuries ago that protect the tenure of academics. In all academic disciplines, there is better gender balance in early career roles. PhD students just want to finish their doctorate without causing a fuss. If there's a bad interaction with the supervisor, that might compromise the next step in their career, and if they speak up about bad behaviour, there is usually little official protection from many universities”, says Wade. “In academia, nobody wants to speak up and rock the boat. There's a culture of subservience to a supervisor or senior team member, coupled with a gender imbalance. That's not a great environment for quiet voices who can't see a way out.” “When I heard about this list, I thought: ‘This is what happens when the regular channels are blocked.’ Out of sheer necessity, women are doing this to keep their peers safe, because the systems aren't”, says Esther Choo, an emergency medicine physician and associate professor at Oregon Health and Science University, Portland (OR, USA), who actively advocates for change in the culture that perpetuates the stark inequities in medical academia and health care in the US workplace. “But this isn't due process, unsubstantiated allegations in the public domain that humiliate people, within which is a mixture of the truth and untruth is non-ideal.” Lucinda Manda-Taylor, a senior lecturer in bioethics and social sciences at the College of Medicine, University of Malawi, says she appreciates the desire of harassment victims to find their voice in bringing sexual harassers to justice. “It's good that women feel empowered to speak up against abuses and find the courage to publicly voice and share their experiences.” However, she adds that guidance on how to tackle and confront the perpetrators of these acts is often poor, which is of great concern. She points to the University of Malawi's gender policy, which was drafted in 2017–18 to address gender disparities in the recruitment of staff and students in line with the government's call for a 50:50 representation of men and women. “The policy provides a statement on how gender discrimination cases will be referred to the college dean of students. However, there remains a lack of clear procedures on how to deal with the reporting of sexual harassment and discrimination in terms of how cases of naming and shaming will be handled at college.” She warns, however, about today's trend towards what she calls digital vigilantism. “Social media today has made it easy to ruin a few innocent peoples' lives as a result of rumours and untruths; it's defamation.” Emma Chapman, a Royal Astronomical Society Fellow, also at Imperial College London, is an active member of the 1752 Group, which aims to improve policies around the expected boundaries and disciplinary procedures in professional academic relationships. She stresses that the silence surrounding disciplinary processes has a stifling effect on much-needed reform in grievance procedures. “Currently, these procedures are vague, often without time limits, and give very few rights and protections to the complainants, who are disproportionately women”, Chapman says. She adds that institutions should be transparent with the outcomes surrounding upheld disciplinary cases. “The current silence shrouding these outcomes has a devastating effect on victims, who are unable to even refer to a process and protect themselves from common retaliation and reputation damage. When no justice is seen to have been meted out, harassers are emboldened, and potential complainants are dissuaded from coming forward as nothing appears to happen.” Reputation management has led to this situation, whereby complainants are silenced and non-disclosure agreements are offered, explains Chapman. “I think we need sector or government oversight to ensure the homogeneous uptake of policies to avoid these cover-ups”, she says. Looking ahead, Choo emphasises that “when there's a toxic environment, it's bad for everyone. When we have a safer and more equitable working environment, it'll be better for the male employees too.” Choo perceives the way an institution and fellow employees treat each other as an extension of some of the fundamental principles of health care. “We cannot provide respectable, safe, and equitable care for patients if we are not treating our fellow workers that way”, she says emphatically. “It's absurd to think we have cultivated this workplace where there is so much unfairness and harassment, but what happens when we walk in and provide care to patients…we just suddenly turn a switch and become different people. If we provide perfectly equitable and safe care to our patients, why can't we do this to each other?” Dr Lucinda Manda-Taylor writes these reflections in her personal capacity and that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to me and not necessarily to the my employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.For more on the #LancetWomen initiative see https://www.thelancet.com/lancet-womenhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Dr Lucinda Manda-Taylor writes these reflections in her personal capacity and that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to me and not necessarily to the my employer, organization, committee or other group or individual. For more on the #LancetWomen initiative see https://www.thelancet.com/lancet-women https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/