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The MeToo Backlash

28 pointsby nwrkover 5 years ago

2 comments

colechristensenover 5 years ago
Two points. First studies that consist of surveys aren&#x27;t really very useful because they don&#x27;t measure how people act or think, they measure how people answer surveys. It is extraordinarily easy to change how people answer by wording things in different ways. People lie on surveys and surveys ask bad questions.<p>Second, if you want to make a difference you have to train people to have the confidence to report and train leadership to actively reinforce that confidence.<p>I have involved myself in a few situations where someone would tell me about an incident and how it was reported which made it abundantly obvious that even though an incident had been reported, the manner in which it was reported was soft-balled in a wishy washy forgiving way to management instead of directly reporting what happened and how it made the victim feel. Really good managers will see through the wobbly report and drive to discover the truth but good intentioned managers often take soft reports at face value and maybe respond with a warning for an action that warranted immediate dismissal.<p>The most vulnerable people often have the most self doubt and even when those people have the courage to report something, that doubt plays a big role in the reports and translates into weak responses.
Trasterover 5 years ago
I think this article touches on two really interesting points: The first is whether people are able to correctly identify sexual harassment, and the second more elided point is the MeToo movements address of power structures.<p>On the first point, I think it&#x27;s really interesting that even relatively respected people often come out with incredibly disingenuous arguments about how women&#x27;s rights and the Metoo movement has made it simply <i>impossible</i> to know how they should behave[1]. I do say this is disingenuous, because people do know right from wrong, and people claiming they don&#x27;t seem to think that admitting to a deep lack of moral judgement somehow shifts blame onto society.<p>Now, obviously, if you take the comments less literally - &quot;I don&#x27;t know how to behave&quot; and more seriously &quot;I don&#x27;t like how society has changed to favour my group less&quot; - you get to another troubling point. A more general attack on MeToo and women&#x27;s rights that really comes from a place of giving very little value on women in society and very little value on having a meritocratic society when it actually impacts rich white men. Personally I find that troubling, those are not the sort of people I&#x27;d choose to work with. As much as you want to identify and stop instances of sexual harassment, we do need to tackle the wider problem of enabling.<p>The second issue I think is that MeToo essentially called out individual men for their behaviour. But what it highlighted, and basically failed to tackle, was that the men doing these things were almost always enabled by power structures that literally sided with the powerful man over the woman.<p>You would&#x27;ve thought this is what an HR department is designed to stop, but time after time, that doesn&#x27;t happen. Take the example reported just this week where Google&#x27;s response to a manager sleeping with a subordinate was to damage the subordinate&#x27;s career and let the manager carry on. When Dave McClure was accused of inappropriate behaviour, he paid a price, but what people haven&#x27;t really come to terms with is that Christine Tsai, his colleague at 500 startups was aware of the accusations, she knew what was happening, and whilst trying to cover for Dave publicly, didn&#x27;t take the accusations seriously didn&#x27;t challenge the behaviour and continually backed him. So what happened to Dave&#x27;s colleagues that enabled his behaviour? She&#x27;s now CEO of 500 start ups[2]. Do you think 500 Startups has more men like Dave at it? Well we don&#x27;t know, but what we do know, is that if there were, the CEO of the company certainly isn&#x27;t going to address that behaviour.<p>So actually, yes, it&#x27;s justified for women to feel less confident because of MeToo- because MeToo identified these things happened, and did nothing to change the power structures and the people in these institutions that enable it.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1165348114904911872?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1165348114904911872?s=20</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;8&#x2F;2&#x2F;16086036&#x2F;transcript-erica-baker-sarah-kunst-sexual-harassment-diversity-women-recode-decode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;8&#x2F;2&#x2F;16086036&#x2F;transcript-erica-baker...</a>
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