Gender Harassment Can Mean ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’ for Women’s Careers. Here’s What Some Colleges Are Doing About It.

Last summer Ann Brown was delivering a presentation about harassment to department chairs in Duke University’s School of Medicine. Brown, vice dean of faculty, handed out a few stories she’d collected from her female colleagues. She asked the chairs, most of whom were men, to read them aloud.

In one, a woman piped up in a meeting about selecting the next speaker for a campus lecture series. She remarked that in the past decade only men had been invited, and she suggested they consider broadening the diversity of the speakers. A colleague responded, “Well, this is a really prestigious lectureship.”

In another, a highly successful young academic told her mentorship committee about her accomplishments and plans for the next year. When she was done, a committee member said, “Wow, but aren’t you a mom?”

The chairs were visibly uncomfortable. That was by design. Brown wanted them to read the words aloud so they would viscerally experience how putdowns and demeaning comments affect women at Duke. “I didn’t want it to be another slideshow where they could walk out and ponder it, or hold it at arm’s length and think about it but not really feel it,” she said.

Brown is one of Duke’s representatives in a new “action collaborative” put together by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, three of the most influential honorary societies in higher education. Fifty-seven institutions are part of the group.

The faculty members and administrators involved have been handed a big task: ending harassment in the academy. That starts, according to a landmark report published last year by the National Academies, with taking on the most common form of it: gender harassment. In other words, the “verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey hostility, objectification, exclusion, or second-class status about members of one gender.”

It’s the kind of behavior that’s not criminal and doesn’t violate campus sexual-misconduct policies. But it happens on a daily basis. It can make women question whether they are being valued for their work, and whether they belong in the academy. Cheryl Sisk, associate dean of faculty development in the College of Natural Science at Michigan State University, described gender harassment as “death by a thousand cuts for women in higher education.”

Offhand comments and uncomfortable moments can be tough to address through a traditional campus disciplinary process. Some faculty critics believe that cracking down on incivility could endanger professors’ academic freedom.

But at the action collaborative’s meeting this month in Washington, Sisk said, there was a resolve to figure out such challenges. She described the feeling as: If not now, then when?

A Deeply Embedded Problem

The National Academies announced in April that they would convene a group of colleges, as well as independent research institutes, to discuss how to carry out the 15 recommendations in its major report, which found that half of women in the STEM fields experience some form of harassment. The collaborative’s objective would be to combat sexual harassment across the academy, not just in the sciences.

Many of the institutions involved have made headlines for high-profile sexual-misconduct cases: the University of California at Berkeley, Northwestern University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College.

And, of course, Michigan State. When the report came out last year, the university was dealing with the fallout from its sexual-abuse scandal involving the former sports doctor Larry Nassar, who had been convicted of abusing hundreds of girls and young women.

University officials knew they needed to revisit their approach to handling sexual misconduct, Sisk said. Last year Michigan State added a “small army of counselors” and hired more investigators for its Office of Institutional Equity. But prevention and cultural change are trickier issues to parse, particularly when it comes to the murkier behaviors that fall into the category of gender harassment, Sisk said.

At the moment, Michigan State doesn’t have an explicit policy on bullying, but Sisk and others are interested in figuring out what that could look like. She’s also considering whether putdowns and abuses of power by a research adviser should be considered forms of scientific misconduct.

Sisk stressed the importance of preserving academic freedom and the “passionate disagreement” that goes along with it. “Those disagreements can be done in a way that doesn’t demean certain groups of people, or put people down, or prevent their progression in their careers,” she said.

One reason that gender harassment is tough to address is that it’s deeply embedded in the history of higher education, said Carole LaBonne, chair of the department of molecular biosciences at Northwestern.

“The putdowns, slights, the lack of a seat at the table — sometimes it’s not premeditated,” LaBonne said. “It’s just part of a culture of how academia was, traditionally, and when you bring in a more diverse work force, that culture doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.”

LaBonne said the action collaborative is a space where Northwestern and other institutions can discuss how to communicate expectations to campuses and how to punish people when the expectations aren’t met. The Title IX process does that for more egregious incidents, she said, but it isn’t designed to deal with behavior that’s more like a microaggression.

In Duke’s medical school, Brown said, there’s a dean’s advisory council on faculty conduct that deals with concerns, like a “lapse of professionalism,” that fall into a gray area. The council evaluates complaints and recommends punishments. The group was originally created to address research-integrity issues, Brown said, but it has taken on a significant role in changing campus culture.

Colleges in the collaborative are also discussing how to make behavior a part of performance evaluations for faculty members. Traditionally, such reviews have focused on teaching, research, and service, said Karen Stubaus, vice president for academic affairs at Rutgers University.

But a university task force has called for chairs and deans to ensure that annual reviews “include discussion of any concerns about the individual’s behavior during the previous year, including informal or rumored behavior issues.” (Rutgers has a faculty union, and Stubaus emphasized that union leaders would be involved in crafting any policy changes.)

‘We Can Actually Fix This’

The action collaborative will meet twice a year for four years. Colleges have divided up into four working groups — focused on prevention, response, remediation, and evaluation — and will meet virtually more frequently.

The faculty members and administrators who are part of the collaborative say there’s strength in numbers. It’s easier to push for new policies and cultural change when dozens of other major institutions are doing the same thing. That the National Academies are backing the effort also conveys legitimacy.

Elizabeth L. Hillman, president of Mills College, said she’s optimistic about what the group will be able to do. “When you hear that gender harassment is actually the lion’s share of the problem, you think, Wow, we can actually fix this,” said Hillman, who was also a member of the committee that produced the National Academies report.

Sexist comments and gestures are often made in plain sight and with witnesses present, not shielded from view like sexual assaults tend to be, she said. So training faculty members to be good bystanders — calling someone out for an offensive remark in a meeting — can be particularly effective, she said.

The hope is that if colleges can figure out how to crack down on those behaviors, they’ll go a long way toward combating the most serious forms of sexual misconduct — and retaining women in the academy.

But some critics are skeptical of the effort. They argue that institutions are given incentives to protect their reputations and shield themselves from liability, not to commit to greater transparency and action.

Sharona E. Gordon, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington, wrote in May that the action collaborative is, in her view, “a step backward for institutions and an insult to scientist survivors of sexual harassment, whistle-blowers, and community members.”

The group excludes the activists who have led the #MeTooSTEM movement and forced scientific societies and federal agencies to stop protecting harassers, she wrote. Women who have experienced harassment, she added, “have no need for another awareness-raising committee that describes how the hierarchical nature of academia fosters sexual harassment.”

Gordon also wrote that the group gives cover to colleges that have mishandled harassment cases and punished victims, allowing them to issue news releases lauding their efforts and giving them an “implied seal of approval” from the National Academies.

“The problem is, you can’t change academia from the outside,” LaBonne, the Northwestern professor, said. “You need those folks at the table.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.