How #MeToo hurts women at work
Some employers are less willing to hire attractive women, and some are likely to avoid those on staff.
In the fall of 2017, when The New York Times and other media began reporting on widespread sexual harassment and assault by powerful male entertainment figures, many people were heartened. The conventional wisdom was that bringing the issue to light and punishing those responsible would have a deterrent effect.
Leanne Atwater, a management professor at the University of Houston, had a different response. “Most of the reaction to #MeToo was celebratory; it assumed women were really going to benefit,” she says. But she and her colleagues were sceptical. “We said, ‘We aren’t sure this is going to go as positively as people think — there may be some fallout.’” In early 2018 the group began a study to determine whether their fears were founded. They created two surveys — one for men and one for women — and distributed them to workers in a wide range of industries, collecting data from 152 men and 303 women in all.
First the researchers sought to understand whether men and women held different views about what constitutes sexual harassment. They took this tack because men accused of the behaviour frequently claimed they didn’t understand how their actions were being perceived, while women who report it are sometimes deemed overly sensitive. The surveys described 19 behaviours — for instance, continuing to ask a female subordinate out after she has said no, emailing sexual jokes to a female subordinate and commenting on a female subordinate’s looks — and asked whether they amounted to harassment.
Hear more from #UHBauer Professor Leanne Atwater on her recent research on potential #MeToo backlash in a new #BauerBusinessMinds video: https://t.co/mEVGnWFdNP pic.twitter.com/meJ396N9oF
— UHBauerCollege (@UHBauerCollege) September 19, 2018
For the most part, the genders agreed. For the three items on which they differed, men were more likely to label the actions harassment. “Most men know what sexual harassment is, and most women know what it is,” Atwater says. “The idea that men don’t know their behaviour is bad and that women are making a mountain out of a molehill is largely untrue. If anything, women are more lenient in defining harassment.”
Next the researchers explored the incidence of harassment in the workplace. Sixty-three per cent of women reported having been harassed, with 33 per cent experiencing it more than once. A woman’s age, the supervisor’s gender, whether the woman filled a blue-collar or a white-collar role, and whether she was married had no bearing on the likelihood that she had been harassed. Just 20 per cent of women who had been harassed reported the episode; among those who didn’t, the chief deterrents were fear of negative consequences and apprehension that they would be labelled troublemakers. Five per cent of men admitted to having harassed a colleague, and a further 20 per cent said that “maybe” they had done so.
A study out of @UHouston shows that the #MeToo backlash is real, with one in four men now avoiding one-on-one meetings with women in the workplace. Dr Leanne Atwater has conducted research into the subject and found it is costing women opportunities in the workplace. She's next. pic.twitter.com/Eoc28giBnc
— Sunday Morning (@RNZSunday) September 7, 2019
The study’s biggest surprise has to do with backlash. Respondents said they expected to see some positive effects of the #MeToo movement. For instance, 74 per cent of women said they thought they would be more willing to speak out against harassment, and 77 per cent of men anticipated being more careful about potentially inappropriate behaviour. But more than 10 per cent of men and women said they thought they would be less willing than previously to hire attractive women. Twenty-two per cent of men and 44 per cent of women predicted that men would be more apt to exclude women from social interactions, such as after-work drinks; and nearly one in three men thought they would be reluctant to meet one-on-one with a woman. Fifty-six per cent of women expected that men would continue to harass but would take more precautions against getting caught, and 58 per cent of men predicted that men in general would have greater fears of being unfairly accused.
Because the data was collected soon after the #MeToo movement gained momentum, and because much of it focused on expectations, the researchers conducted a follow-up survey (with different people) in early 2019. This revealed a bigger backlash than respondents had anticipated. For instance, 19 per cent of men said they were reluctant to hire attractive women,
21 per cent said they were reluctant to hire women for jobs involving close interpersonal interactions with men (jobs involving travel, say) and 27 per cent said they avoided one-on-one meetings with female colleagues; only one of those numbers was lower in 2019 than the numbers projected the year before.
What's the fallout from the #MeToo movement? Leanne Atwater of @UHBauerCollege and her colleagues took a... https://t.co/OuDGOrJ77d
— UH Media Relations (@UH_News) August 20, 2019
The researchers say some of the behaviours are manifestations of the “Mike Pence rule” — a reference to the US Vice-President’s refusal to dine with female colleagues unless his wife is present. “I’m not sure we were surprised by the numbers, but we were disappointed,” says Rachel Sturm, a professor at Wright State University who worked on the project. “When men say, ‘I’m not going to hire you, I’m not going to send you traveling, I’m going to exclude you from outings’ — those are steps backward.”
The researchers have several recommendations for organisations looking to reduce harassment, a number of which involve prevention training. Their study shows traditional sexual harassment training has little effect, perhaps because much of it focuses on helping employees understand what constitutes harassment, and the data shows they already do. Instead, the researchers say, companies should implement training that educates employees about sexism and character.
Their data shows that employees who display high levels of sexism are more likely to engage in negative behaviours, and they believe training can reduce those levels. Their data also shows that people of high character — those who display virtues such as courage — are less likely to harass and more likely to intervene when others do. “Though character building in organisations is on the cutting edge and consultants are just learning how to do this, there are training resources available,” the researchers write.
About the Research: “Looking Ahead: How what we know about sexual harassment now informs us of the future”, by Leanne E. Atwater, Allison M. Tringale, Rachel E. Sturm, Scott N. Taylor and Phillip W. Braddy (Organizational Dynamics, forthcoming)