Retheorizing Sexual Harassment in Medical Education: Women Students' Perceptions at Five U.S. Medical Schools

The literature consistently reports that sexual harassment occurs with regularity in medical education, mostly in clinical settings, and most of it goes unreported. Reasons for nonreporting include the fear of retaliation, a reluctance to be viewed as a victim, a fear that one is being "too sensitive," and the belief that nothing will be done.We wanted to examine with greater concentration the stories women students tell about sexual harassment, including what they count as sexual harassment, for more or different clues to their persistent nonreporting.We used focus groups to interview 30 women students at 5 U.S. medical schools. We used systematic inductive guidelines to analyze the transcribed data, linking to and building new theoretical frameworks to provide an interpretive understanding of the lived experiences of the women in our study.Consistent with previous literature, most of the students interviewed had either witnessed or observed sexual harassment. We selected 2 theoretical lenses heretofore not used to explain responses to sexual harassment: 3rd-wave feminist theory to think about how current women students conceive sexual harassment and personality theory to explain beliefs about nonreporting.Medical educators need new ways to understand how contemporary women students define and respond to sexual harassment.