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5 years after Harvey Weinstein, this is where we are with #MeToo

The founder of Emtrain says we’ve moved beyond the blatant harassment that prompted the #MeToo movement and into a new era of harassment that requires a different approach.

5 years after Harvey Weinstein, this is where we are with #MeToo

[Photo:
Ryan Klaus
/Unsplash]

BY Lydia Dishman6 minute read

Five years ago, in the fall of 2017, women around the world found strength in sharing their stories and mobilizing to bring public scrutiny and accountability to powerful men who had abused their power at the expense of their less powerful women coworkers. The #MeToo movement started a cascade of men being removed from power and multiple state laws mandating sexual harassment education and enhanced employee protections. 

Women have been speaking out against sexual harassment in the workplace for decades, of course. And the term itself was coined back in 2006 by Tarana Burke as a way to give power back to women and girls of color who had survived sexual violence. 

But the cries for change seemed to gain unprecedented momentum after The New Yorker and the New York Times exposed the Harvey Weinstein scandal that sparked social media-driven #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns.

Yet, on the fifth anniversary of the first scandal that sparked this newest uproar, many are wondering where we are today. Did the public reckoning with corporate America sparked by the Harvey Weinstein scandal actually make a lasting mark? Or has the pendulum in public sentiment actually started to swing back?  

The answer is: It’s complicated. For example, a recent Pew survey showed that 70% of respondents believe people who commit sexual misconduct in the workplace are more likely to be held accountable now than compared to five years ago.

But there is still a lot of room for improvement. My company, Emtrain, has been providing harassment training and collecting data on employee sentiment for 17 years. We recently released new data from more than 300,000 employees at hundreds of Fortune 1000 US companies and found that 46% of workers said their managers would not take a harassment complaint seriously. This represents an increase since 2020, when 41% of workers believed their managers would not take a harassment complaint seriously. This seemingly contradictory data highlights the nuanced complexity of taking a pulse on #MeToo in 2022. 

Another metric to consider is the number of harassment complaints filed with the federal government (the EEOC). While the EEOC saw a significant spike in complaints in 2018 and 2019, these complaints dropped to pre-MeToo numbers during the pandemic and remote work years to follow in 2020 and 2021. See the EEOC image below.

The EEOC sexual harassment charges are just one subset of charges because most people file state sexual harassment charges. For example, in 2020, the State of California received 23,898 complaints (See DFEH 2020 Annual Report), and every U.S. state receives its own share of sexual harassment complaints. So, it’s not as if the #MeToo movement eliminated sexual harassment complaints or sexual harassment situations.  

So if claims are holding relatively steady year after year, what, if anything, has changed post #MeToo? Perhaps it’s less about outright change and more about evolution. We’ve evolved and now have much higher expectations of conduct than we did five years ago, consistent with other workplace topics like diversity and inclusion, pay equity, and other corporate values.

It doesn’t mean that issues with harassment have gone away. According to Deloitte’s 2022 Report on Women at Work, harassment and microaggressions are actually on the rise. The majority of women (59%) have experienced harassment and/or microaggressions over the past year at work, a number that has increased since Deloitte’s 2021 report (52%).  But it does mean the nature of the actions that people are complaining about are often more nuanced and conveyed in coded language.

Our expectations for what “respectful” looks like have changed, just like our expectations for everything else work-related. So while women had to deal with roaming hands and bosses using their power for their personal benefit in the past, today’s women are more concerned with behavior that’s more difficult to explain why it feels harassing and disrespectful. The actions or situation requires context and understanding the perception of the less empowered person to understand it as harassment. It doesn’t present as harassment at the surface level.

David Lowe, a partner at Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe, a California law firm representing employees to redress harassment, bias, and other violations of employee rights, agreed and said that harassment claims have evolved and can be just as damaging, but more easily denied. Lowe said that the surge of virtual communication means that harassment is migrating online. “In fact, the very tools of online communication contribute to this problem,” he said. “Managers send heart or champagne glasses emojis, or eyes watching, etc., which can be predictably understood by an employee as romantic interest, but denied by the manager as nothing more than normal workplace expressions of support or appreciation,” Lowe explained.

“It’s more nuanced language, but absolutely can be harassing, especially when directed at people from underrepresented groups and even more so when combined with employment practices that result in blocking underrepresented people from advancement,” said Lowe, “This type of coded language requires more organizational skill to identify and stop and more visibility and accountability for peoples’ actions.”

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Management-side employment lawyers are seeing similar dynamics in the types of complaints they’re receiving. Simone Francis, a shareholder at the global employment law firm Ogletree Deakins, shared her perspective:

“We are seeing more nuanced concerns not only in the sexual harassment arena but also more generally with respect to the types of internally raised workplace complaints that our clients are receiving.”

For example, in Bellue v. E. Baton Rouge Sheriff, an employee brought a claim for sexual harassment based on a situation where she asked a coworker to give her a call back, and the coworker sent a winking smiley emoji with a message saying “she could never be a bother.” In a second situation, the same coworker commented on how nice the employee looked. While the Court in Bellue did not feel those situations amounted to harassment, those types of situations are quickly reflecting the majority of harassment complaints that employers receive.

The more nuanced situations are also difficult because people in power are not always aware that their language makes underrepresented (or disempowered) people in the organization feel disrespected.  

Many of today’s harassment situations occur when there’s not enough empathy, inclusion, and belonging in a workplace culture and when some people don’t understand how certain comments and actions make others feel. 

When people in an organization fail to develop their inclusion skills, disrespect is right around the corner. For example, playfully teasing a direct report in digital communication with an emoji like ????or  ????and then combining that action with interrupting and talking over that same person in a group meeting, is likely to make that person feel disrespected or potentially harassed.

Managers who develop empathy and allyship are more likely to understand a direct report’s awkwardness with the emojis and the need to facilitate meetings so all voices are heard, which eliminates the disrespectful situation.

As a society, we’ve moved beyond expecting basic decent behavior as “respectful” and we’ve moved into expecting proactive thoughtfulness and empathy in order to be perceived as “respectful” and not “harassing.”

Our evolving notions of respect are further complicated by our different life experiences, different racial, generational, and cultural backgrounds that influence how we perceive actions.

Just as talented managers have learned to adjust their management technique to reflect different people and their needs, we’re learning in real time to adjust how we show up as “respectful” to different people with different sensitivities. We have moved beyond the blatant harassment that prompted the #MeToo movement five years ago and we’ve moved into a new era of harassment that requires more understanding, empathy and skill to ensure everyone feels respected.


Janine Yancey is the CEO & founder of Emtrain.


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lydia Dishman is the senior editor for Growth & Engagement for fastcompany.com. She has written for CBS Moneywatch, Fortune, The Guardian, Popular Science, and the New York Times, among others More


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