Influence of The #metoo Movement on Sexism in The American Workplace

The original Me Too movement was started by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 as a community providing a safe space and resources to victims of sexual violence. However, the movement only went viral globally after actress Alyssa Milano started the #MeToo hashtag on Twitter in late 2017. Milano asked women to write “me too” as a reply to her tweet if they had experienced sexual assault or sexual harassment in the past, saying this might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. As the topic of sexism, sexual harassment and sexual violence had recently become a focus of media interest due to an interview with 13 women that had allegedly been harassed by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, Milano’s tweet fell on fertile ground, and the hashtag #MeToo was tweeted over 500,000 times overnight. Seeing that they were not alone with having experienced sexual harassment and sexual violence, women from all around the globe, including many celebrities, broke their silence and shared their own experiences online and with the media. As a direct consequence, several Hollywood men such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby found themselves confronted with allegations from women who had previously stayed silent about having been sexually assaulted by them; likely out of fear of their abusers’ power. Apart from these direct consequences, #MeToo has also led to an increased public awareness of sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse forcing companies to acknowledge and tackle these problems to ensure their female employees’ safety and comfort in the workplace. While many companies have been trying to provide a safer and fairer work environment for women and fight against gender-related inequality and sexism in the workplace since #MeToo first went viral, others have failed to establish clear anti-sexism policies and guidelines in their companies. Unfortunately, this has made it easy for men who are not in favor of a changing work environment and anti-harassment guidelines to indulge in victim-blaming, which has led to an increase of sexist behavior towards women in the American workplace as an indirect consequence of the #MeToo movement.

A survey on the consequences of the #MeToo movement released by Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg’s women’s self-empowerment organization LeanIn.org in May 2019 , which included a national sample of more than 5,000 adults found there had been a 14% rise in male managers saying they are uncomfortable doing everyday workplace activities with women since 2018. The survey furthermore revealed that the likelihood of senior-level managers to be more hesitant to take work trips with junior women than they were with junior men had almost doubled. .In addition, different studies on the effect of #MeToo on sexism in the workplace have all come to similar conclusions: There has been a significant rise in men saying they would not be comfortable being alone with women in the workplace; were reluctant to hire attractive women, particularly for jobs involving close interpersonal relations with men; and would be more likely to exclude women from social interactions, such as after-work drinks. Particularly the avoidance of men to be alone with women in the workplace will likely lead to a crisis for women in getting promoted. One-on-one interactions are vital when it comes to building trust and relationships in the workplace that lead to senior executives promoting employees. Therefore men being hesitant to build close relationships with women in the workplace is very likely to further diminish the percentage of women in higher positions in the future, possibly negating and definitely threatening recent progress regarding the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions.

The most common reason men name for avoiding being alone with women in the workplace and hiring women is a fear of false harassment allegations. However, what might seem like a reasonable sentiment at first was largely invalidated by a study carried out by the University of Houston in early 2018 that aimed at determining possible negative aspects of the #MeToo backlash. The study found that men are not confused about what constitutes harassment; both female and male participants largely agreed on what it entails, and where they did not agree, men were more likely to label an action harassment than women. Even though the study disproved the idea that men are likely to unknowingly harass women due to a difference in their definition of sexual harassment, it also found that two-thirds of men believed that they could find themselves facing false harassment allegations. This suggests that the problem behind men’s increased hesitance to work with women is not based on facts such as a higher likelihood of being faced with false accusations but on a far-spread belief that women are not trustworthy and likely to accuse men of having harassed them for selfish and malicious reasons, not because they actually felt harassed by them. Not only is mistrusting roughly half of the world’s population sexist in itself, but it is also not justifiable based on the assumed percentage of false allegations of sexual harassment and assault. A study published in April 2019 by nonprofit Stop Street Harassment, in partnership with UC San Diego’s Center on Gender Equity and Health, found that accusations in general, including false accusations, were extremely rare. In addition to that, the results showed that the overall prevalence of sexual harassment or assault throughout one’s lifetime had not changed, and there was no significant change in the percentage of women and men reporting recent sexual harassment or assault from 2018. Since this suggests that #MeToo did not have a significant influence on the incidence and reported prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, it further invalidates the fear of false accusations and convictions.

It would be easy to find lazy excuses for this significant rise in sexist behavior towards women following #MeToo. If we wanted to, we could assume that companies have not had enough time to address sexist behavior adequately. We could justify men’s behavior saying there had been instances in which false harassment allegations ruined a man’s life. However, that would only conceal the sad reality behind the recent increase in workplace sexism. What we are really witnessing is a male-dominated business world refusing to adapt to societal norms that call for equal treatment, not only equal rights, of men and women. What we are witnessing is men refusing to give up on one of the last safe spaces for toxic masculinity. What we are witnessing is victim-blaming par excellence justified by a non-justifiable fear and backed by an economic and political system that refuses to cut its ties with patriarchy for the sake of fairness.