Harassment Common for National Institutes of Health Employees

More than 20 percent of survey respondents said they had experienced some form of harassment within the last 12 months.

Written byCatherine Offord

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More than one-fifth of people who work for the National Institutes of Health and who responded to a survey by the agency have experienced some form of harassment during the last year, according to an interim report the agency published on Wednesday (June 12). Of nearly 16,000 respondents, 10 percent reported that they had experienced unwanted sexual attention, while 18 percent said they had been subject to gender harassment.

“This report provides further evidence that we have work to do in order to make good on our determination that ‘harassment doesn’t work here,’” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wrote in an email to employees on Wednesday, according to Science.

The interim report, based on data collected between January and March this year, is part of a wider initiative to combat harassment in the agency. More than 40 percent of the approximately ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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