In the news…
Judge greenlights federal discrimination case
On Jan 20, 2022, after 2 and a half years, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled on the initial motions in our federal court case against the Mount Sinai Health System.
The Judge found that several of the plaintiffs had pleaded "sufficient claims" in their complaints of sex, age and race discrimination - this means that the case against Mount Sinai will proceed.
Read this press release for more info.
Voices in Medicine - Podcast
Listen to Anu Anandaraja and Stella Safo on the Voices in Medicine Podcast where they discuss the Sinai case and practical tips to protect yourself from gender discrimination within the workplace. - Listen Here
Yahoo Finance - A Very Well-Kept Secret
Yahoo Finance spoke to several women in the medical field about their own experiences with gender discrimination, including Dr. Stella Safo and her experiences at Mount Sinai. - Read Here
NYC Council Legislation Coverage
With the support of Councilmember Helen Rosenthal's Office, EquityNow successfully advocated for the passage of Bill 2064-2020 which will protect the rights of women and racial/ethnic minorities.
The Gritty Nurse Podcast
Listen to Amie and Sara of The Gritty Nurse Podcast have a roundtable discussion withHolly Atkinson, Stella Safo, and Natasha Anu Anandaraja about the lawsuit, the pervasiveness of misogynistic culture in medicine & healthcare, gender discrimination and inequity, as well as useful tips on how to deal with harassment in the workplace. We can no longer stay silent. Our time to speak out is now. - Listen Here
Standing for Women - Press Event
On Wednesday Sept 30th we stood with Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams, City Council Member Helen Rosenthal, and representatives of Congressman Adriano Espaillat’s office and East Harlem Preservation.Together we called for Mount Sinai to “DO BETTER” for women in healthcare, and celebrated CM Rosenthal’s introduction of a bill to create a Gender Advisory Board for NYC - More Here
Leaving Mount Sinai
On October 14, 2020, Dr. Anu Anandaraja resigned from the Mount Sinai Health System after 18 years of service there. Her powerful Letter of Resignation lays out the race and gender dynamics that drover her out, and that continue to harm women and BIPOC employees and students at Mount Sinai every day. Read More
Forbes
“ What’s worse than experiencing harassment and discrimination? How about experiencing harassment and discrimination with nowhere to turn for help?
“What’s worse than having nowhere to turn for help? How about turning to people for help and then later realizing that they are aligned with the perpetrators of the harassment and discrimination in the first place?…
Learning of such experiences prompted [City Council Member Helen] Rosenthal, who is also the Chair of the NYC Committee on Women and Gender Equity, to introduce legislation that, if passed, would establish a Gender Equity Advisory Board for NYC's hospitals. The Advisory Board would advise the Mayor and City Council on how to keep women healthcare workers in NYC safe at their workplaces”.- Read More
STAT
“Gender harassment happens every day in health care organizations, academic medicine, research labs, and other corners of the science, technology, engineering, and math worlds. It’s largely hidden — except to those experiencing it — unlike its more egregious counterpart, sexual harassment, which often makes headlines….
“We believed that our hard work and years of service to the institution would protect us and allow us to be measured on our merits. Instead we struck the ‘iceberg of sexual harassment,’ and it sank our careers- Read More
New York Magazine
“In a statement, the hospital says, “We are so sorry that Ms. Newman was the victim of this horrible criminal act.” But for more than three years, it has been fighting her in court, where she has brought a damages suit. It has cut ties with David Newman and deployed what might be called a “bad apple” defense — despite a finding by the U.S. Department of Health that members on staff had failed, at least twice, to report his activities up the chain of command, thus placing “all patients at risk.” - Read More
Becker’s Hospital Review
“The lawsuit alleges that under Dr. Singh's leadership, other officials exhibited similar behavior toward women. Mr. Berman "was known for violent screaming at women at AIGH," according to the complaint. Mr. Silva allegedly addressed women, including fellow employees and donors, with sexist slurs.” Read More
Sinai graduation speech
“Hazel Lever, with the recent announcement of a lawsuit detailing how leading women at Mount Sinai’s Institute for Global Health were systematically denigrated and intimidated, you have rallied our voices to say that misogyny and discrimination are never acceptable. And so to Mount Sinai, an institution that outwardly claims that a commitment to equity and social justice, we say: Time’s up. Show us that you care.” Watch the speech
Student Activism
“Misogyny, discrimination, and bullying are never acceptable in interpersonal and professional settings. As students at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, we are deeply disturbed by the allegations of such behavior at our own institution, specifically at the Arnhold Institute of Global Health. We believe that Mount Sinai’s leadership must immediately take steps to investigate these allegations, prevent further perpetuation of an abusive culture that enables these types of behaviors to occur, and empower those who seek justice.” Read More
Twitter thread of Sinai alums
“Now before I go any further, I want to say that I have been sitting with this news for 2 days. Struggling with it. Emotionally digesting it. Because I know these people. Defendants, plaintiffs, others mentioned. I've worked with some of them. I'm friends with some of them…Writing this is, frankly, VERY uncomfortable. It'd be easier to just share the article privately with a few people. But here's the thing. I read the 174 page suit. Every page of it. And I am absolutely appalled. This need our time and attention and thought and struggle.” Twitter thread
India West
“Singh declared that he wanted to work only with young people. He promptly set about denigrating and humiliating the institute’s existing employees who had been responsible for its success, most of them older women,’ alleged the lawsuit.
‘He was abusive, dismissive and hostile. He denounced what he termed the female ‘legacy staff’ for multiple, unpredictable reasons. He would accuse them of failing to accomplish tasks he had not asked them to do, and when they did what he asked, he would deride them for not doing something else,’ stated plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Read More
Crain’s New York
More than 150 students at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have signed a letter calling on the health system to further investigate allegations of gender and age discrimination at one of its research institutes.
"Misogyny, discrimination and bullying are never acceptable in interpersonal and professional settings," read the letter, which was posted Monday on Medium. "...We are deeply disturbed by the allegations of such behavior at our own institution." Read More
New York Post
The plaintiffs accuse Singh of turning the institute into an ‘unhappy and tumultuous workplace’ for women so they would voluntarily quit — ‘or be set up to fail.’
By the end of 2018, 13 women had left, according to the suit.
‘He was a brilliant ‘gaslighter,’ skilled at convincing people that abrupt shifts in his directives were nothing of the kind, or were their fault,” the complaint alleged. “Employees began taking notes during every conversation to reassure themselves they were not crazy when Singh tried to blame them later.” Read More
Forbes
“A medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine, who asked not to be identified out of fear of reprisal, indicated that classmates had witnessed behaviors towards the plaintiffs mentioned in the lawsuit document. The medical student emphasized that those among the plaintiffs were well-known for their mentoring of medical students and that many students were frustrated by the ‘unsatisfactory seemingly formulaic general statements’ that the school's leadership has issued to the students about the lawsuit that ‘did not seem to address the students' questions and concerns.” Read More
Substack
“Like I said, take the complaint how you will; there may be many valid objections to it, including that what it describes is not extraordinary at that level of business — which is rather the point: There’s something super-familiar about the described behaviors — the splashy, push-in entree; the “visionary” shtick; the quick, dismissive deck-clearing and load-in of His Kind of People that is supposed to create the stage for great things which aren’t actually ready, and then lying to cover up for it.” Read More
Medpage Today
“Rather than grow the global health program, Anandaraja said, Singh cut it by 60%, and cancelled activities with international partners in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Central America and Asia. Instead, Singh wanted to focus on ‘practice transformation’ to help clinicians streamline their patient flow and become more efficient, which saves money and produces better patient outcomes. ‘I don't know if that promise was ever fulfilled, but the global health education and care we were giving to underserved communities was destroyed in that process.’
Likewise, Holly Atkinson, MD, now age 66, who was director of the institute's Human Rights Program, said she, too, was forced out after Singh ‘systematically degraded her for many months’ and cut her pay 40%, incorrectly saying that her program lacked financial support. She believes that she was targeted because of her age. ‘A number of younger men were brought in as senior management,’ she said.” Read More
Jezebel
“When the dean of Mount Sinai’s medical school, Dennis Charney, was searching for a director for the hospital’s newly announced global health institute, a search committee recommended Steffanie Strathdee, a much-lauded epidemiologist who is now an associate dean at the University of California, San Diego.
Charney, however, went in a different direction. Namely, the then-32-year-old Prabhjot Singh, who at that time, still hadn’t completed his residency program at Mount Sinai. Now, a lawsuit aimed at Charney and the Arnhold Institute for Global Health (AIGH) describes a toxic work culture that the plaintiffs say manifested under Singh, and alleges that the dean cast aside many of the older women employees who had worked to make AIGH successful.” Read More
Patch
“Singh abandoned the institute's hiring policies in favor of bringing on his personal friends and contacts, all of whom were young men, a lawsuit filed in federal court claims. Other executives of Mt Sinai including Dennis Charney, dean of the renowned Icahn School of Medicine, are named as defendants in the lawsuit. The lawsuit claims that Charney sees Singh as a protege and hired him to run the Arnhold Institute despite the recommendation of a more qualified female candidate, the lawsuit claims. Singh had not yet finished his residency at Mount Sinai when he was hired, according to the lawsuit.” Read More
Crain’s New York
“An academic leader at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai said he is stepping down from his leadership role following a lawsuit alleging age and sex discrimination. But he will remain on the faculty in a new role. Dr. Prabhjot Singh, director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health and chairman of the department of health system design and global health, said the decision to leave those positions was his own.” Read More
Science
The director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health, who is facing allegations of age and gender discrimination, is leaving that position, the dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai announced in an email today. Prabhjot Singh “has chosen to step down” as chair of the Department of Health System Design and Global Health, and as director of the institute, wrote Dean Dennis Charney…On 16 May, hundreds of faculty and staff at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the affiliated Mount Sinai Health System wrote to the organization’s board of trustees, demanding an external investigation of the lawsuit’s allegations. As of today, 369 faculty and staff have signed the letter, which calls the lawsuit’s allegations “profoundly disturbing” and urges the board to implement a policy of “zero tolerance” for harassment. Read More
Crain’s New York
Dr. Natasha Anushri Anandaraja, director of the medical school's Office of Well-Being and Resilience and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said she was pleased that the Arhold Institute for Global Health would be getting new leadership but disappointed Singh would remain at the school. ‘I think this is a good day for global health at Mount Sinai,’ Anandaraja said. ‘We're disappointed that it took a lawsuit for this change in leadership to occur. We wish it wouldn't have gone this far.’
Anandaraja, who still works at the medical school in an office overseen by Charney, described a work environment in which Singh denigrated the work of his female colleagues. She doesn't believe the school should have allowed Singh to stay on. ‘It's unacceptable,’ she said. ‘Do I think justice has been done or this problem has been addressed adequately? No.” Read More