Sexual Harassment Of Medical Personnel – A Huge Problem
Disparate power, vulnerable employees.
While I was contemplating this post, I read a horrible story in Sunday’s New York Times about the gross mistreatment of women in El Salvador. Catalina Lobo-Guerrero wrote:
Women are raped and killed daily. For the past few years El Salvador has been listed among the world’s deadliest countries for women, and ranks first in Latin America. In 2016 alone, 524 women were killed, according to the Institute of Legal Medicine, the organization charged with identifying the dead and figuring out what killed them — one in every 5,000 women. But this number understates the extent of the slaughter. Only the bodies that are taken to morgues are counted, not those found dismembered in clandestine dumping grounds.
She asked around: “Where does this machismo and misogyny come from?” The answer she got: “That’s the way we are.”
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Pretty damn depressing.
She concluded:
If society dismisses these patriarchal attitudes or excuses them as normal, programs by the public sector or civil society organizations geared toward changing the way women are treated will have little impact. Machismo and misogyny are not genetic traits. They are sexist behaviors that must be changed.
In the same day’s Times, Bryce Covert wrote that “The Best Era for Working Women Was 20 Years Ago”:
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The steady, seemingly inevitable march of significant numbers of American women into paid jobs began during World War II. … During and after the war, work suddenly opened for more and more women. In the decades after, the gender wage gap shrank, women became highly educated and the options for more prestigious careers increased. Widely available contraception allowed women to control when they became pregnant and to invest in their careers. Beginning in the late ’70s, surveys have found increasing shares of Americans accept and even support the idea of women working outside the home.
But then, in the early 2000s, the rise in the share of working women came to a halt. And since the Great Recession the figure has even fallen. Today it’s just over 57 percent.
Also pretty damn depressing.
Anyway, with these reports on my mind, I started to write this post about sexual harassment of women health care providers.
Harassment Of Physical Therapists
A new U.S. study has found that “More than 80 percent of nearly 900 physical therapists surveyed [80 percent of whom are women] said they have encountered sexual remarks, touches, indecent exposure and sexual assault. … U.S. health care professionals have 16 times greater risk for non-fatal violence at work than other fields.…” (The study abstract is here.)
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Shocking stats. Furthermore:
Women reported significantly higher rates of harassment, especially staring, suggestive remarks, inappropriate touches, date requests, sexual gestures, requests for sexual activity and masturbation. … Harassment was most common between a female therapist and male patient. Treating mostly male patients increased the odds of harassment by almost 400 percent. …
Shocking stats again, but unsurprising. As the Salvadoran said – “That’s the way we are.”
The upshot of all this?
Several physical therapists also talked about the lack of support, training and policies related to patient sexual harassment. ‘I was told that when patients were inappropriate with me, it was ‘part of the job,’ one therapist reported. ‘I did not have support from management to address the situation or to take further steps.’
Remember this comment for later – it’s an important theme: “lack of support, training and policies related to patient sexual harassment.”
Harassment Of Doctors
Reading about PTs, I recalled a university study from Australia in 2013 which found that more than half of female general practice physicians were subjected to requests for an inappropriate examination; inappropriate exposure of body parts; gender-based remarks; inappropriate gifts; sexual remarks; and touching or grabbing.
Once again, shocking stats. And once again the study found that only a small percentage of these physicians had ever received training on how to deal with sexual harassment committed by patients.
Not much has changed since 2013. Only a few weeks ago I cited an article in the Psychiatric Times about rampant sexual harassment among physicians and medical students:
Sexual harassment appears to be common during medical training.… 59.4% of medical trainees, including medical students, interns, and residents in all specialties, had experienced some form of harassment.
I have written a lot about harassment of vulnerable workers. As I’ve written here earlier:
From farm to Valley, from medical school to morgue, and from diner to library, ‘particularly vulnerable’ employees are subjected to sexual harassment – ‘particularly vulnerable’ when those in ‘a position of power’ are able to ‘leverage’ that position to exploit them.
Disparate power = vulnerable employees.
Harassment Of Science Grad Students
This sexual harassment goes beyond the medical professions.
In August 2014, Christie Aschwandenaug wrote a piece in the Times entitled “Harassment In Science: Replicated,” and cited a published study in PLOS ONE which found that two thirds of all female scientists face sexual harassment at their workplace, especially in field work, “often the most dangerous place where female scientists have encountered sexual abuse and harassment.”
The following month, A. Hope Jahren published an op-ed piece in the Times entitled “Science’s Sexual Assault Problem.” She said that she had been sexually assaulted almost 25 years before when she was a science graduate student.
She cited a study, also published in PLOS ONE in July 2014, by Kathryn B. H. Clancy, Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford and Katie Hinde entitled “Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault.” The study reported that 26 percent of the female scientists surveyed had been sexually assaulted during fieldwork, and noted:
Codes of conduct and sexual harassment policies were not regularly encountered by respondents, while harassment and assault were commonly experienced by respondents during trainee career stages. Women trainees were the primary targets; their perpetrators were predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.
Tech Times quoted Professor Clancy as follows:
Our main findings – that women trainees were disproportionately targeted for abuse and felt they had few avenues to report or resolve these problems – suggest that at least some field sites are not safe, nor inclusive.
Takeaway
Seems that a common thread cited above – besides the obvious misogyny, and abuse of vulnerable women – is the lack of sexual harassment and diversity training and sexual harassment policies (remember?). This is precisely what my partner Amy Epstein Gluck and I have been focusing on for years – exhorting employers to maintain appropriate sexual harassment policies and train, train, train management and employees. And then train some more.
Unfortunately, it will take a lot more than that in El Salvador.
Richard B. Cohen has litigated and arbitrated complex business and employment disputes for almost 40 years, and is a partner in the NYC office of the national “cloud” law firm FisherBroyles. He is the creator and author of his firm’s Employment Discrimination blog, and received an award from the American Bar Association for his blog posts. You can reach him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @richard09535496.
