The same obstacles that medical students face on their path to becoming doctors — the years of education, the long, brutal hours, the six-figure debt — also make medical school a place rife with sexual misconduct, Bloomberg reports.
Threat level: One recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that almost half of doctors-in-training said they'd experienced harassment from faculty or staff. This is almost double the rate in other science and engineering specialties.
The big picture: The University of Texas found in an investigation that 47% of female medical school students had been harassed, compared to 22% of women students across the entire university.
- "If you're working at a company and you're harassed by the boss, you can just quit and get another job," Philadelphia attorney Patrick Griffin told Bloomberg.
- "That's not an option for medical residents, whether they're accusing supervisors or colleagues. There's a very real fear of their careers being derailed."
Go deeper: The lasting health effects of sexual assault and harassment
