It’s been 30 years since Anita Hill testified that she had been sexually harassed by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. 

Thomas went on to be confirmed anyway, while Hill faced death threats and insults that drove her to leave her tenured teaching position at the University of Oklahoma. But it also connected her with thousands of women who reached out to her because they, too, had been harassed and assaulted. Her testimony had struck a nerve, uncovering something pervasive in our culture that had been for too long swept under the rug. 

Hill, now 65, tells Katie in a new podcast episode of Next Question (the first one of the season!) that in the decades since, she’s become cautiously optimistic about the progress that’s been made in the fight against gender-based violence. 

“We have a long way to go,” she says. “Yet, I really am conceding that we have come far in 30 years.”

One example of both the advances we’ve made and the limitations that still exist was evident in 2018 when Christine Blasey-Ford testified that Judge Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her, Hill says. She had hoped that in the years since she had come forward, that a different system would have been in place, one where a thorough investigation would have been conducted and where Blasey-Ford would have had a safe place to file her complaint. But she also views the intense negative reaction to Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a “sign of progress,” she said. 

“There were so many similarities between 1991 and 2018, but the public response was quite different,” she said.

Hill, who teaches at Brandeis University, drills down on the issue of gender-based violence (a term that covers all people and includes a range of behaviors, from intimate partner violence to harassment) in her new book, Believing. She tells Katie that the problem is so large and insidious that confronting it feels like “boiling an ocean” and that it should be recognized as a “public crisis.”

“We have, over the course of our lives, been groomed to believe that it’s not such a big problem. We hear people tell girls that the behavior that makes them uncomfortable or find offensive isn’t really that bad, or that’s just what boys do,” Hill says. “So there are ways that we prepare not only girls to live with this problem and not complain, but also we’re preparing abusers to accept their own bad behavior and expect that other people will tolerate it.” 

One step we can take now is shoring up the Violence Against Women Act, which was gutted in 2000 when the Supreme Court ruled part of the law unconstitutional, Hill argues. Another thing Hill hopes for is that policymakers enlist survivors in crafting solutions to gender-based violence. 

“They can put us at the table when laws are being debated and policies are being debated,” she says. “Listen to what we have to say.”

Listen to this episode of Next Question with Katie Couric for more.