Study to assess sexual harassment training in medical research field
A new study funded by the NIH will assess a novel set of educational interventions around sexual harassment in the biomedical research field and how to incorporate those interventions into practice.
The Ending Sexual harassment: Teaching Of Principal investigators (E-STOP) trial is planned to launch in the fall, with a push for recruitment in August, according to Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD, clinical associate professor and special advisor for diversity equity and inclusion programs in the department of medicine at Stanford University.
“The idea for the trial is to provide principal investigators and mentors who are involved in biomedical research programs with the skills we hope will better prepare them for addressing sexual harassment when it occurs in their lab, or when it affects the people who are in their lab,” Salles told Healio. “As scientists, we’re not actually taught how to navigate these types of difficult circumstances.”
Healio spoke with Salles about the impetus behind this research, her goals for the study underway and what she ultimately hopes it will do for the field.
Healio: What prompted this study?
Salles: We know there are high rates of sexual harassment in biomedical research, and even more generally in STEM fields, but there hasn’t been a lot of change in the rates over time. More broadly, rates of sexual harassment in our society haven’t decreased even with the increased attention to it within the last 5 to 10 years. One of the questions we had is why is that? Most organizations now have mandatory sexual harassment trainings, but we’re not seeing a decrease in the amount of sexual harassment.
We started looking at what aspects of diversity interventions, and specifically sexual harassment interventions, make them most likely to succeed. We found that the data around existing sexual harassment training isn’t very good. For the most part, they’re not necessarily incorporating the evidence-based guidelines for how to create effective training, and the data has not shown that they meaningfully decrease the rates of sexual harassment.
So, we’ve got this major problem — pervasive sexual harassment — and we've got interventions that have been adopted largely to protect organizations from liability, but don’t actually address the real problem at hand.
Healio: Who are the eligible participants and what will the E-STOP study evaluate?
Salles: The study is specifically focused on faculty who are involved in T32 training programs funded by NIH.
We started this study by examining what is known about this space and what the best practices are, and then what does the evidence tell us is important to do if we’re going to create something new?
One of the things that we found is that the Equal Employment Opportunity Council (EEOC), for example, recommends against having modules teaching only about sexual harassment. Instead, they suggest incorporating implicit bias, microaggressions, civility and upstanding as well as sexual harassment into training. The idea being that if we create a workplace that is civil, where people are cognizant of their implicit biases and call each other out on their microaggressions, it’s harder for sexual harassment to exist — much less thrive — because the foundation for it isn’t there.
A major difference between what we’re doing and what a lot of the already established trainings do is that we are talking about all aspects of interacting with people, especially across differences, and hoping to round that out in the way that the EEOC recommends.
We also have incorporated as many characteristics as we could of what are known to be more effective interventions, including things like having the learning distributed over time so that it’s not a one-time sit-down deal for 1 hour and then you receive “a stamp of approval.”
The data actually suggest that we need about several hours of information in this type of space, so our training is 3 hours total, which is a lot, but if we want to follow the evidence, as we would in any other aspect of science, then we should commit that amount of time and perhaps even more. The data we found suggests that 4 hours of training is ideal, but we were concerned people could not commit 4 hours, so we’re trying to use evidence-based guidelines and then make it as feasible as possible for people who we know have a lot going on.
We also created video game elements that allow people to put themselves in a specific situation where they can play around with different ways they might respond and see what happens. Almost like “a choose your own adventure” type thing where they’re presented with a scenario and we ask: “What would you say next?” Depending on what they say, they go down one path or another, and they can go back at any time and make a different choice and explore what would have happened if they had chosen a different response.
We’ve really tried to make the training as engaging as possible. We have videos from experts talking about civility and about how we interrupt bias and all these different things. We’ve made our own videos to give specific content that didn’t exist already. We have all these different ways of people interacting with the content, that hopefully will keep it interesting and engaging, because we know that people are busy, nobody has time to sit through another boring thing of someone lecturing at them — we’re definitely not trying to do that. We just want to give people the tools that we think they need to be able to handle these situations.
We have also been very careful to make this focused on the context in which these folks actually work. We have many examples from people in science, so it’s not this generic kind of HR package where people are in a generic workspace, talking to each other. It’s either real-life examples of scientists, or our own examples of working in science that hopefully make it feel customized to the people who are participating in this so that it feels relevant.
Healio: What do you hope will be the long-term implications of this study?
Salles: I hope that this will be helpful to people and that they will learn something they wouldn't have learned otherwise. I hope that it will help them navigate these situations and that their trainees will feel the impact of this work.
Ultimately, of course, what we want is to be able to help people who come from different backgrounds to feel more included in these labs so that they’re more likely to persist in science careers. That’s the big-ticket goal — to help people feel more included.
Healio: Do you have anything else that you would like to mention?
Salles: Some folks have expressed to us that they don’t need this because “they’re already doing enough” or because they’re already doing their employer-mandated training.
As someone who’s also a faculty member and very busy — I get it.
But most employer-mandated trainings that we have are, on the whole, not effective. So, as much as nobody has extra time, we have not as a society identified what would actually make it different for research trainees and our colleagues, but even more broadly, what actually will decrease the rates of sexual harassment in our workplaces.
We’re still contacting people to try to boost enrollment in this trial. If we don’t get enough people to sign up, in the end we won’t know if we don’t have positive findings because it didn’t work or because we just didn’t have enough people, and that would be an incredibly disappointing outcome.
Reference:
- Ending Sexual harassment: Teaching Of Principal investigators (E-STOP). Information and enrollment available at: https://salleslab.sites.stanford.edu/E-STOP.
For more information:
Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD, can be reached at arghavan@stanford.edu.
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