Equal Employment Opportunity

About 32 percent of 4,100 National Institutes of Health (NIH) employees surveyed by GAO reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment during the past year. Of these employees, 96 percent opted not to file an equal employment opportunity complaint or take some other personnel action, generally because they did not consider the incident to be serious enough, chose to handle the matter themselves, or decided to ignore the incident. Others, however, said that they did not file complaints because they believed that the situation would not be kept confidential, the harasser would go unpunished, filing a complaint would not be worth the time or cost, or they feared retaliation. NIH and the Department of Health and Human Service management have not met federal guidelines mandating a 180-day time frame for processing employee complaints. More than half of the 1999 formal sexual harassment and sex discrimination complaints filed by NIH employees between October 1990 and March 1994 remained unresolved at the end of April 1995. All complaints had been open for more than one year. NIH has tried to deal with employee concerns about sexual harassment and sex discrimination by increasing awareness about workplace relationships and improving agency-wide communication through training. However, NIH lacks minimum standards on course content and has not communicated its expectations on which employees should receive training and how often. Moreover, NIH has not monitored training to ensure that its expectations on such training are being met.

GAO found that: (1) 32 percent of NIH employees surveyed reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment in the past year, but 96 percent of these employees opted not to file an equal employment opportunity (EEO) complaint or take other personnel action; (2) NIH employees filed 32 informal and 20 formal sexual harassment complaints between October 1990 and May 1994, however no determinations of sexual harassment were made in response to these complaints; (3) about 13 percent of NIH employees believed they had experienced sex discrimination over the last 2 years, but 90 percent of these employees chose not to file grievances or EEO complaints; (4) NIH employees filed 209 informal and 111 formal sex discrimination complaints between October 1990 and May 1994, however no determinations of sex discriminations were made in response to the formal complaints; and (5) although NIH has recently acted to improve its EEO climate, more could be done in the areas of timeliness, information, and training.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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