WiSH Seminar Series - Lilia Cortina, PhD

Date:
March 20, 2023

Lilia Cortina, PhD
University Diversity and Social Transformation
Professor of Psychology, Women’s & Gender
Studies, and Management & Organizations
University of Michigan

Seminar:
Sexual Harassment in the Academy: From Science to Solutions

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Continuing Education Information
This program is approved for 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™.

Synopsis:
Academia should lead and inspire change in other industries. Instead, we have the highest rate of sexual harassment outside the military. But what do we mean by this term? What actions “count” as sexual harassment, and what might we be missing? How does harassment affect work and wellbeing, especially for women? Several decades of social science have taken up questions such as these. According to that research, sexual harassment is typically a put-down not a come-on. It involves insult, intimidation, and assault on human dignity. To move the needle on this problem, we need nothing short of a radical redesign of anti-harassment efforts in organizations. This was the focus of a 2018 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. This presentation will cover key conclusions from that report, and key action steps that followed.

Lilia Cortina, PhD, is University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan. An organizational psychologist, she investigates workplace experiences of harassment and incivility. To date, Dr. Cortina has published over 100 scientific works on these topics. This research has won awards, but its impact stretches beyond the walls of the academy. For instance Cortina is regularly called to serve as an expert witness, translating findings from social science to inform policy and legal decision-making. She recently joined colleagues in co-authoring a landmark report on sexual harassment for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.