Researchers at the University of Michigan published a study in March investigating the reporting rates of sexual harassment among medical interns in the U.S. The study indicated a decline in sexual harassment incidents and an increase in self-recognition of sexual harassment from 2017 to 2023. Despite this decline in incidence, however, 54.6% of the 4,178 interns surveyed reported having experienced sexual harassment in 2023. The report also indicated that among interns who were women, the amount who reported having experienced sexual coercion rose from 2.3% to 5.5%.
The study used data from the Intern Health Study, an ongoing 18-year study that gathers information on stress and mental health during medical residency, the first year of clinical training after medical school.
Elena Frank, director of the Intern Health Study and lead author of the study on sexual harassment, said the Intern Health Study collects data through a wearable fitness tracker and an app that has participants complete quarterly surveys.
“We look at a variety of demographic factors … and we collect our data through a mobile app,” Frank said. “We’re actually able to get data (from the fitness tracker), so we have sleep and steps to get a daily mood score. So we’re able to examine a lot of different pieces and see some of the factors that contribute to declines in mental health and other aspects of well-being during the clinical training.”
Frank said an increase in discussion of sexual harassment following the #MeToo movement, as well as having access to data collected from the Intern Health Study, presented an opportunity to examine sexual harassment in the medical profession.
“A major factor that comes up in medicine and STEM fields that relates to gender disparities is sexual harassment,” Frank said. “We saw it in 2017 when (#MeToo) went viral, and there was a lot more discussion about sexual harassment in many fields. So it seemed like the right situation for us to be able to take a deeper look at this, especially with the large-scale study that we had.”
The Intern Healthy Study started asking participants questions pertaining to sexual harassment in the workplace in 2016. Frank said she designed the questions to address both explicit and implicit forms of sexual harassment because people may experience harassment but not recognize it as such.
“The scale we used evaluated three different types: gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion,” Frank said. “So most people are familiar with the more overt types of sexual harassment, but things that are more subtle, people might not necessarily realize that that’s harassment. So they wouldn’t say that they’ve been harassed if they experienced that or if they witnessed that.”
Although there were more women than men enrolled in medical schools in the U.S. in 2023, Frank said there is still a need for wider recognition of the prevalence of sexual harassment in clinical training.
“There’s this sense that we’ve reached some sort of equity in medicine when it comes to gender, but there’s still a long, long way to go,” Frank said. “This is showing that during training, we’re experiencing this level of harassment where the numbers are really high, and that so many people aren’t even recognizing it means this is a big problem that needs to be addressed.”
Frank was also an author of a similar study, published in December 2023 by Dr. Elizabeth Viglianti, assistant professor of internal medicine, which looked at sexual harassment incidence among medical interns in different institutions and fields of medicine. Viglianti told The Daily that despite an overall decrease in sexual harassment among medical interns, Frank’s study showed an increase in more extreme forms of sexual harassment, which she found concerning.
“I think Dr. Frank’s study is really notable (because) we’ve made improvements on gender harassment, but the worst kinds of sexual harassment are actually increasing, which is like sexual assault and sexual coercion,” Viglianti said. “That’s a number you definitely don’t want to see going up. You just can’t even imagine that we are in 2024 and that’s still a problem.”
Rackham student Katherine Ross, who is pursuing a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, said despite policy changes to address sexual harassment in the University’s clinical training programs, she believes larger scale changes are still necessary.
“We have kind of responded (through) policies that have made reporting and kind of easier to do and people are being recognized,” Ross said. “So we also have trends in recognition increasing, so that is positive, but how can we prevent harassment and other kinds of all forms of harassment in other ways, like addressing culture?”
Frank said although policy changes are critical to minimize sexual harassment, they are not effective in changing the workplace culture that enables harassment to continue.
“Having consistent, clear policies is incredibly important … but culture seems to be the really big problem because you can put a million policies there and it doesn’t change the work environment necessarily,” Frank said. “So especially with medicine, you see this persisting again because some of these cultural norms just aren’t moving fast enough to sort of catch up with where we should be today.”
Daily Staff Reporter Eilene Koo can be reached at ekoo@umich.edu.