In mid-2015, the Royal Australian College of Surgeons (RACS) established an Expert Advisory Group to look into sexual harassment and bullying among surgeons in Australia. The final report and guidelines for submission to this group are available on the RACS website.
Level made a submission to this inquiry, detailing our views on strategies to improve gender barriers in medicine. However, two key points that we highlighted in our submission, from our perspective as medical students, were that:
- Sexual harassment and bullying are not simply two sides of the same coin, but in fact are inherently different and require different management approaches; and
- The culture of gender-based inequality in medicine starts not at the specialty training level but within universities and needs to be treated as such
Read our full report here: Level Medicine – Submission to RACS Sexual Harassment Issues Paper.