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The survey found that at Penn, 25.9% of female students and 7.3% of male undergraduates experienced unwanted sexual contact since entering college.

Credit: Chase Sutton

The 2019 Association of American Universities survey results show little change from 2015 in the number of students who say they experienced unwanted sexual contact on Penn's campus.

Despite University efforts to combat a culture of sexual assault, including its creation of the Task Force on a Safe and Responsible Campus Community in 2016, changes in almost every category took place within a margin of 2 percentage points.

President Amy Gutmann announced the results of the 2019 nationwide college sexual assault survey, called the Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct, to the Penn community Tuesday. 

At Penn, in 2019, 25.9% of undergraduate women reported having experienced unwanted sexual contact since entering college, a decline from 27.2% in 2015. Among undergraduate men, 7.3% reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact since entering college, an increase from 5.5% in 2015. Undergraduate students who are transgender, genderqueer, and nonbinary experienced unwanted sexual contact since entering college at a rate of 21.5%, an increase from 19%.

Graduate women experienced unwanted sexual contact since entering college at a rate of 7.5%, an increase from 6.5% in 2015. Graduate men experienced unwanted sexual contact since entering college at a rate of 2.7%, an increase from 2.1% in 2015.

The response rate in 2019 was significantly higher than it was in 2015. Gutmann wrote that 10,306 of Penn's undergraduate, graduate, and professional students took part in the survey, representing 42.8% of the total student population. In 2015, the response rate was 26.9%.

For each category, the report indicated that there was no "statistically significant change" from the numbers reported four years ago.

The survey was sponsored by the AAU and was administered to 33 universities in the spring of 2019 in an effort to gather data on sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct.