Harassment in Brazilian universities: how big is this problem? The Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) as a case study

Abstract

Harassment is a common problem in many institutions, including academic ones. It creates invisible barriers for attracting and maintaining women and other minorities at academia. In this work, we quantify and qualify this problem in one of the biggest universities of Brazil, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). We applied a spontaneously-responded survey to 25% of its professors, 20% of its staff and 12.5% of its students. Our results present that sexual and moral harassment are very frequent in UFRGS and are not distributed homogeneously among all groups: women, black+parda, and non-heterosexual people are the most common victims. Moreover, the staff has higher percentage of moral harassment victims. We also unvealed an important problem of under-notification, where only around 10% of these cases are reported. We show that victims are afraid of reporting or do not believe in the institutional channels of reporting proposed by the university. We then discuss which type of events are perceived as harassment and the frequency at which they happen with different genders. We finalize the paper with a discussion of our results and recommendations to improve this scenario.