High-profile men — from Congress to morning television and corporate America — have begun to face a national reckoning for inappropriate sexual misconduct. Time magazine named the “silence breakers” who launched the #MeToo movement as its Person of the Year.

MORE FROM THE LAB: Subscribe to our weekly newsletter

Medicine is not immune to the problem. In 2016, Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., and colleagues published a paper in JAMA that found 30 percent of high-achieving female physician-scientists reported experiencing sexual harassment. At the time, she called it a “sobering reminder” of the lack of gender equity.

“My intuition is that the problem is at least as bad in medicine as elsewhere, especially if one adds harassment by patients to that by colleagues and superiors,” Jagsi, professor and deputy chair of radiation oncology at Michigan Medicine, writes in a new perspective piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “The profession must work together to correct it.”

Since the JAMA paper published, Jagsi continues to hear from women across the country — highly regarded, motivated, talented physicians — who share their stories of discrimination and harassment in the workplace.

“The details of their experiences are appalling,” Jagsi writes. “None of the women who’ve contacted me have reported their experiences. They speak of challenging institutional cultures, with workplaces dominated by men who openly engage in lewd ‘locker room conversation’ or exclude them from all-male social events, leaving them without allies in whom to confide after suffering an indignity or a crime.”

Jagsi discussed her NEJM perspective and the reaction to her work in the context of today’s #MeToo movement.