Sexual Harassment of Women (original) (raw)

Throughout our careers we have worked to encourage women to pursue their interests and capabilities in science, engineering, and medicine. And we are delighted with the continual increase in the percentage of women in these fields. We have also worked to ensure a welcoming and safe environment in academia for women students, faculty, and staff. We believe that universities have a special responsibility to provide a welcoming and effective environment for women students. We believe that this report focuses on the issues that must be addressed for our communities to take the next step. Preventing and effectively addressing sexual harassment of women in colleges and universities has remained a challenge for decades, but over that time a strong research base has been developed that reveals the true nature of sexual harassment and its impacts on women's careers-and also reveals what can be done to successfully address it. The Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine developed the idea for this study on the Impacts of Sexual Harassment in Academia more than 2 years ago, and proposed that a special study committee be appointed to examine the research on sexual harassment to determine what could be done to prevent it in academic settings in science, engineering, and medicine. With this charge, our study committee of distinguished scientists, engineers, and physicians, and experts in sexual harassment research, legal studies, and psychology held a series of workshops and undertook a deep analysis of the literature to gather information for our study and to simultaneously help inform the broader community about the problem of sexual harassment. Over the course of the study, which was launched in late 2016, the topic rose in prominence in the national discourse, most significantly with the rise of the #MeToo movement,