• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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#Metoo’s legacy

#Metoo’s legacy

LESSONS FROM THE MOVEMENT, AND WHAT WOMEN WANT NEXT.

It has been two long years since The New York Times and New Yorker exposés into allegations of sexual abuse by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein ignited a global reckoning over the scourge of workplace harassment. In what has become known as the #Metoo movement, millions of women have shared their stories, hundreds of men have stepped down or lost their jobs and several states have passed legislation to protect more workers (including independent contractors and domestic workers) from mistreatment.

But the road to progress is a bumpy one. As soon as #Metoo got going, so did concerns that it was going too far. Critics worried about false accusations, lack of due process, punishments that exceed offenses, a thinning line between professional and personal conduct and an ever-expanding gray area of what constitutes inappropriate behavior. Researchers have attempted to quantify the backlash, and some of the data is troubling. A 2019 survey by the University of Houston found an increase over the previous year in the number of men who reported being reluctant to hire attractive women or meet with them one-on-one. A University of Colorado Boulder survey found that while overt sexual harassment is on the decline, sexism is on the rise.

So where are we on that road to progress? New books and a film offer insight into how the movement went mainstream, what it has achieved so far and what we, as employers and colleagues, must do to carry it forward. Two prominent look-backs — “She Said,” by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, and “Catch and Kill,” by New Yorker contributor Ronan Farrow — present engrossing accounts of their investigations into Weinstein and, in Farrow’s case, further allegations

Iagainst NBC’S Matt Lauer. The biopic about Fox News’s Roger Ailes, “Bombshell,” and the memoir “Whistleblower,” in which former Uber engineer Susan Fowler exposes its sexist “bro” culture, also reveal the forces that allow sexual harassment to persist in firms and enable perpetrators to evade accountability.

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Kantor and Twohey describe a “cottage industry” for settlements that enriched lawyers and silenced victims. They call out corporate leaders (in their book, at Miramax) who turned a blind eye to internal reports of abuse as “deeply complicit.” In too many cases, women’s only option in seeking redress was to go public, risking their careers, reputations and privacy, which seemed “inherently unfair,” the journalists write. “Why was it their burden to publicly tell uncomfortable stories when they had never done anything wrong?”

Society has a poor track record of believing accusers (at least when they point a finger at white men). In the introduction to their collection of essays, “Believe Me, ” Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman argue that “we are close to a tipping point on trusting women” but are not there yet. In one of my favorite pieces, “He’s Unmarked, She’s Marked,” writer and activist Julia Serano explores the concept of markedness, a linguistics term for diverging from the norm. Women, she writes, are already marked relative to men in our culture. That means their “bodies and behaviors garner more attention” and their perspectives and experiences are relegated to subcategories (women’s issues, women’s studies). Markedness is also why, when accounts of sexual harassment are probed, questions such as “What was she wearing?” and “Had she been drinking?” are considered legitimate, whereas what he wore and drank doesn’t matter.

Serano notes that false allegations are rare — from 2% to 8% of cases — and that men are more likely to be victims of sexual assault than they are to be wrongly accused of it. She adds that those most likely to have their accounts deemed questionable are the most marked in our society, among them trans women, or women of color, or people with disabilities.

In “#Metoo in the Corporate World,” economist and consultant Sylvia Ann

Hewlett suggests that the “movement has not had a big enough tent.” She surveyed more than 3,000 professionals in 2018 and found that the well-publicized accounts of “older white guys hitting on younger white women” don’t tell the whole story: Latinas, gay women and men, and black men are the most likely to be sexually harassed at work.

Hewlett explains how sexual misconduct harms companies as well as people. “Ongoing legal expenses, the loss of key rainmakers, and a crashing share price are just the beginning.” Her book lays out some prescriptions, from legal remedies to corporate policy changes to individual actions. I fumed at the advice not to “dress provocatively or otherwise signal sexual availability.” (Aren’t we past that by now?) But most of her recommendations — update core values, establish zero tolerance and make the CEO an advocate — are sound. She cites Michael Roth, CEO of ad giant IPG, who not only emailed all 50,000 employees about zero tolerance for harassment but also installed a female CEO at one troubled affiliate. She also points to Abigail Johnson, Fidelity chairman and CEO, who, after the dismissal of two top portfolio managers following allegations of sexual misconduct, moved her office to the floor where fund managers and analysts sit.

Another “Believe Me” essay, “Taking the Employer High Road to Address Sexual Harassment,” by lawyer Mónica Ramírez, shows how companies in high-risk industries like hospitality can do a better job of protecting vulnerable workers when existing laws fall short. For example, California restaurant Homeroom developed a color-coded warning system as a way for servers to alert managers to bad behavior without angering customers and risking tips.

“The Fix,” by Michelle King, Netflix’s director of inclusion, hammers home the point that employers are responsible for creating safe workplaces for women and for protecting them from not just harassment but also other forms of discrimination and threats to advancement. “We accept the inequality women experience at work as the way things are and then hold women accountable for fixing it,” she writes. She outlines the many other barriers women face and concludes that women aren’t the problem: Antiquated organizations are.

Like King, I think it’s time we stop trying to “fix” women (or any other marginalized group) and start listening to what they have to say. We are beginning to believe them when they report sexual harassment — but do we believe them when they say they’re penalized for being confident and assertive, held to higher standards or underpaid relative to their white male peers? In “She Said,” Kantor and Twohey assert that #Metoo “is an example of social change in our time but is also a test of it.” Believing women is the first step toward meaningful change, and it doesn’t mean taking them at their word — it means taking their word seriously.