Vanderbilt University Medical Center has joined the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and over 40 other colleges, universities and research institutions — including Vanderbilt University — to launch an Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education.
VUMC and VU are founding members of the action collaborative, which will bring together academic leaders and key stakeholders to prevent sexual harassment across all disciplines and among all people in higher education. The collaborative is designed to be an active space where colleges, universities and research and training organizations can research and develop efforts that move beyond basic legal compliance to evidence-based policies and practices for addressing and preventing all forms of sexual harassment.
Twenty-eight of the institutions, including VUMC and VU, joined the National Academies in founding the action collaborative at the beginning of this year; their statement on founding it can be found at www.nationalacademies.org/sexualharassmentcollaborative.
These founding members provided the initial support to start work and helped refine the goals and plans for the action collaborative during a meeting in March. In the weeks since, additional colleges, universities and research institutions have become members, bringing the total membership to 43 institutions.
The collaborative builds on the National Academies’ 2018 report Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which found that between 20% and 50% of female students and more than 50% of female faculty and staff experienced sexually harassing behavior while in academia. The report provides a road map with a range of promising practices for preventing sexual harassment, such as using bystander intervention, producing annual reports to convey that reports of sexual harassment are taken seriously and people are held accountable, and combining anti-harassment efforts with programs to promote civility and respect.
“We have been engaged and developed training sessions — called Respect@Work: Eliminating Sexual Harassment — prior to the inception of the action collaborative,” said Arie Nettles, PhD, associate professor of Clinical Pediatrics and director of the Office of Inclusion and Health Equity for VUMC. “We have conducted 21 Respect@Work sessions that 1,000 clinicians, staff and senior management have attended. We have been out in front creating a safe, virtuous work environment that is respectful.”
The four main goals of the action collaborative are to:
- Raise awareness about sexual harassment and how it occurs, the consequences of sexual harassment, and the organizational characteristics and recommended approaches that can prevent it;
- Share and elevate evidence-based institutional policies and strategies to reduce and prevent sexual harassment;
- Contribute to setting the research agenda, and gather and apply research results across institutions; and
- Develop a standard for measuring progress toward reducing and preventing sexual harassment in higher education.
The action collaborative will also deal with the issue of sexual harassment in the context of other damaging behavior, including incivility, bullying, and other forms of harassment such as racial harassment.
“We hope that, going forward, even more colleges, universities and other organizations will join us in our efforts,” said Frazier Benya, a senior program officer at the National Academies who is directing the action collaborative. More information, along with letters of commitment from member institutions, can be found at www.nationalacademies.org/sexualharassmentcollaborative.
The members of the action collaborative are listed below (founding members in bold).
Argonne National Laboratory
Boston University
CalTech
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Colorado College
Columbia University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
Los Angeles Community College District
Michigan State University
Mills College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Northwestern University
Olin College of Engineering
Rutgers University
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Stanford University
American University in Cairo
University of California Berkeley
University of California Los Angeles
University of California Merced
University of California Riverside
University of California San Diego
University of California San Francisco
University of California Santa Barbara
University of California Santa Cruz
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
University of Kansas
University of Maryland Medical School
University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin System
University of Southern California
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Wellesley College
Yale University