Today is March 8th – International Women's Day. With this blog post, we at SFS want to focus on a major problem area within higher education: sexual harassment.
Gender equality in higher education
There are many areas where higher education can become more gender-equal than it is today. Women are overrepresented among students but underrepresented in the proportion of professors. Women have a strictly better throughput than men. Research funding goes to a higher degree to men than women. There are remaining structures at higher education institutions, both among students and employees, that are problematic for the development and quality of higher education. There is simply a lot that can be addressed when it comes to gender equality.
#AcademyAppeal and the work against sexual harassment
One area where discussion is conspicuous by its absence is sexual harassment* in academia. In 2017, #metoo happened, which created waves in many sectors. In academia, there was the #akademiuppropet, which was probably part of UHR received a government assignment on mapping the work of higher education institutions on preventing and managing sexual harassment within higher education, summary can be found hereThe report showed that there were relatively good routines for handling harassment within staff but relatively little for students, in particular there is a lack of support for doctoral students. This despite the fact that students and especially doctoral students are a vulnerable group within academia due to the power relations that exist.
Student unions must take on great responsibility
Regarding students, UHR's report showed that universities largely rely on student unions to do most of the work, both for preventive purposes during receptions, etc., but also when something has happened. The work of handling these difficult situations often falls on organizations and individuals that do not have the resources or sufficient training. Several chairmen among SFS member unions have over the years had to struggle for many weeks with handling tragic cases where students have been victimized. The university's response is often, in the best case, that the case is quickly brought up by the disciplinary committee and that one of the students is suspended for a certain period of time. In the worst case, the university does not have control and may pair a perpetrator with the victim without further action. This has happened at Swedish universities and is unacceptable.
Doctoral students find themselves in an extremely vulnerable position
The situation is even more problematic for doctoral students. Doctoral students often find themselves in a position of dependence on supervisors and others in the research world. Even though we in Sweden have come a long way in creating relatively secure employment forms for doctoral students, much remains to be done and many doctoral students still have to draw their own salary through external funding. It is therefore particularly remarkable that so few efforts are directed at doctoral students to prevent and deal with sexual harassment. Here, SFS calls for improvement at the university level.
Last year, SFS arranged a seminar on the work of universities regarding sexual harassment and the chairman of SFS DK wrote a debate article in connection with this.
What can be done going forward?
We believe that much can be done to improve the situation going forward. In the UHR report, the student unions cite a number of examples:
“Above all, more and clearer information is requested from 53 higher education institutions to students, but also to student unions and employees, and that the information should be more easily accessible, available on websites and integrated into the higher education institution’s teaching. Some student unions also demand more knowledge at the higher education institution, especially among the higher education institution’s staff. Among other things, it is emphasized that training opportunities on sexual harassment for the higher education institution’s staff should not be voluntary. Some student unions believe that their higher education institutions could work differently in terms of prioritizing equality issues more, seeing sexual harassment as part of their work environment work, having clearer guidelines for the work with sexual harassment, and including sexual harassment in annual faculty meetings where the systematic preventive work against discrimination is followed up.”
CLOCK
Here we want to see an expanded dialogue and that the higher education sector itself raises this issue to take up more space than it currently does. The issue is complex and affects many different types of situations, contexts and solutions, but we see that there are good examples that many higher education institutions could implement already today.
During the pandemic, the number of reports of sexual harassment has decreased according to CSN. Although this is positive, we can unfortunately expect them to increase again when education returns to a greater extent to being campus-based. It is therefore an urgent time to start looking at what efforts and structures can be created to improve the situation. Sweden's students and doctoral students deserve a university without sexual harassment, let's work together towards that goal.
Simon Edström, Chairman of the Swedish Federation of Swedish Students (SFS)
Linn Svärd, Vice Chairman of SFS
* To read more about what sexual harassment means and what the statistics look like. Read more at the Swedish Agency for Equality. here.