Adapted from a story by Christina Jewett for The Washington Post.
Sexual harassment in medical fields
In a recent survey, 30 percent of women on medical faculties reported experiencing sexual harassment at work within the past two years, said radiation oncologist Reshma Jagsi, who conducted the poll. That share is comparable to results in other sectors and, as elsewhere, in medicine it had been mostly taboo to discuss before last year.
“We know harassment is more common in fields where there are strong power differentials,” said Jagsi, who is director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan. “And we know medicine is very hierarchical.”
Workers in the health care and social assistance field reported 4,738 cases of sexual harassment from 2005 through 2015, eclipsed only by fields such as hospitality and manufacturing, where men make up a greater proportion of the workforce, data gathered by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows.
A Kaiser Health News review of dozens of legal cases involving health-care workers across the United States shows patterns similar to those found in harassment cases that have cropped up in other fields: The alleged harassers are typically male, and they typically supervise or outrank the workers lodging the complaints. There are slaps on the butt, lewd comments and requests for sex. When superiors are confronted with reports of bad behavior, the complainants, mostly women, are disbelieved, demoted or fired.
#MeTooMedicine
But recently, many physicians have taken to Twitter using the #MeTooMedicine tag, sharing anecdotes and linking to blogs that chronicle powerful male doctors harassing them or disrobing at professional conferences.
- Women who work in cardiology recently told the trade publication TCTMD that they felt the problem was particularly widespread in their specialty, where women account for 14 percent of the physicians.
- A Los Angeles anesthesiologist made waves in a blog post urging “prettier” women to adopt a “professional-looking, even severe, hair style” to be taken seriously and to consider self-defense classes.
- Among those speaking out is Jennifer Gunter, a San Francisco obstetrician-gynecologist, who recently wrote a blog post about being groped in 2014 by a prominent colleague at a medical conference, even naming him. “I think nothing will change unless people are able to name people and institutions are held accountable,” she said in an interview. “I don’t think without massive public discourse and exposure that things will change.”
Lawsuits
Lawsuits, many settled or still making their way through the courts, describe similar encounters:
- A Florida nurse claimed that in 2014, a surgeon made lewd comments about her breasts, asking her in a room full of people if he should “refer to her as ‘JJ’ or ‘Jugs,’ ” the nurse’s lawsuit says. The nurse said she “responded that she wished to be called by her name.”
- A phlebotomist in New York alleged in another lawsuit that a doctor in her medical practice gave her a box of Valentine’s Day candy and moved in for an unwanted kiss on the mouth.
- A Florida medical resident alleged that a supervising doctor told her she looked like a “slutty whore.”
- A Nebraska nurse alleged that a doctor she traveled with to a professional conference offered to buy her a bikini if he could see her in it, and an extra night in a hotel if they could share the room. She declined.
- A Pennsylvania nurse described the unsatisfying response she got after reporting that a colleague had pressed his pelvis against her and flipped through her phone for “naked pictures.” A supervisor to whom she reported the conduct, she charged, expressed exasperation, saying, “I can’t deal with this” and “What do you want?” After her request to be transferred to another location was denied, the nurse, who said she suffered from severe anxiety as a result of the encounter, quit her job.
Kayla Behbahani, chief psychiatry resident at University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, did not file a lawsuit but recently wrote about sexual harassment by a subordinate. In an interview, she said her instincts were to pity the man and also to follow a dictate that’s drilled into medical students: Don’t make waves. So she disclosed the harassment only after another woman’s complaint launched an investigation.
“As a professional, I come from a culture where you go with the flow,” Behbahani said. “You deal with what you’re dealt. In that regard, it was a dilemma for me.”
