#MeToo. A trend or a genuine sea change?What happens next depends on all of us.
How do we harness viral outrage to upend deep cultural and corporate dysfunction?
The following article was originally published in “What I Learned This Week” on November 9, 2017. To learn more about 13D’s investment research, please visit our website.
In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein accusations, women all over the world are coming together in stunning numbers to name the men that have hurt or humiliated them for so long. Unlike high profile sexual harassment cases in the past — Anita Hill or Paula Jones come to mind — something feels different this time. Public outrage is deeper and more sustained. No doubt many powerful men across the professional spectrum are not sleeping well. As The New York Times wrote over the weekend: “Several experts likened it to a dam breaking, the cumulative effect of harassment claims over decades and especially the last few years…Maybe it’s reflective of a specific period in American history, in which working women of a new generation — those who had grown up with working mothers — decided that enough was enough.”
That is the hope, but skepticism is understandable. Given the plethora of challenges we face globally, how do we sustain the necessary intensity to effect the sort of systemic cultural change so overdue for all women in the workplace, not just Hollywood’s elite? How do we harness viral outrage to upend deep cultural and corporate dysfunction?
A recurring theme has emerged in the past few weeks: the willingness of companies’ supposed overseers to ignore credible allegations because, the thinking goes, losing the star would be too costly. The pattern is so well established that last year a task force at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) gave it a name, “superstar harassers”.
While the coddling is mostly covert and unspoken, consider the boom in employee practices liability insurance (EPLI). These policies, which are used to protect against the risk of sexual harassment, have become a multi- billion dollar industry. Last year, companies collectively paid out over $2 billion in EPLI premiums. As a New Jersey-based lawyer recently told Business Insider: “Claims are so common now that it’s more or less part of the cost of doing business.” (Current tax code in the U.S. allows companies to deduct sexual harassment settlement fees and associated legal costs as another ordinary business expense.)
In-house legal and human resources — the departments conceived to represent and protect all employees — are largely complicit. Consider Susan Fowler. Routinely dismissed by everybody, including the HR department, it was only when Fowler went viral with her complaints that Uber investors got serious and took action. Last month, Laurie Ruettimann, a 20-year veteran of HR, wrote a chilling indictment of the modern human resource department for Vox:
“It’s a sad state of affairs, but very few people are shocked to hear that sexism and harassment still happen in the modern work environment. Even fewer are shocked to hear that HR did nothing about it. Part of me is angry, and part of me feels sorry for my former colleagues who work in the trenches of HR. How do you help organizations attract and retain great talent while also doing your job and protecting the company from lawsuits when something goes horribly wrong? The answer is that you can’t.”
As we have often discussed in these pages, one of the most corrosive elements of the Darwinian Economy is its ruthless and myopic pursuit of profitability. When HR teams ignore charges of harassment in an effort to insulate superstar harassers, they may think they are preserving the company’s brand, but they are unknowingly denting its bottom line. As The New York Times wrote this week:
“A 2015 study found that the benefit to an employer of retaining a “toxic” employee, such as a sexual harasser, who was in the top 1 percent of productivity, was outweighed by the cost of keeping that employee — by a ratio of more than two to one, and probably by far more than that…A crucial reason, the study concluded, was that toxic workers tended to drive out other employees. [When Ms. Fowler started working at Uber in November 2015, women made up more than one-quarter of her department. Within 13 months, that share had fallen below 6%, largely because of sexism.]”
McKinsey Global Institute has tallied that sexual assaults on women cost the U.S. about $4.9 billion every year, including medical expenses, lost productivity, and lost earning potential. But how can we begin to quantify the losses from sexual harassment, double standards and gender stereotyping? How many women’s careers have been stalled? How many of their contributions have been dismissed?
Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, the female version of David, who ultimately brought down Goliath, Fox News creator and CEO Roger Ailes, maintains that every woman has her story. [This author’s? I’ve been grabbed, groped, and fondled more times than I can count by employers, professors, “friends”, and strangers.] Ask the women around you. They all have their stories. Sexual harassment in the workplace is a plague.
Not surprisingly, polite society is expressing a certain amount of skepticism: Aren’t we all over-reacting here? Can this really be true? Sadly, yes it can. It is precisely this underlying cognitive dissonance that has perpetuated sexual harassment for decades. Nobody knew, but at the same time, everyone knew. Speaking out was too painful — the risk of retribution too great — so everyone looked away. This is exactly the type of “not knowing” that allows powerful predators like Weinstein to get away with hurting anyone whose humanity seems to matter less than theirs. As Laurie Penny, author of Unspeakable Things:
“Sex, Lies and Revolution, observed recently in an article for Time, “cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug”. She continues:
“On the scale of convenient self-delusion, ‘We didn’t know that every industry on earth was riddled with sexual violence’ falls somewhere between, ‘That guy will never make it to the White House’ and, ‘It’s just a rash.’ I’m sure that a lot of us, on some level, didn’t really know.”
Women constitute half the world’s population and a growing share of its wealth. (Women’s wealth will grow 8% faster than men’s over the next 5 years leaving women with $18 trillion of wealth by 2021, according to The Financial Times.) Successful women mean successful families and societies. It follows that any word or action that undermines their ability to conduct life without sex-based exploitation or fear of retribution should be considered a far graver national emergency than the opioid crisis.
Whether President Trump — the man who sparked the Women’s March last January — acknowledges it as such remains to be seen. Perhaps by not recognizing it, he will further disrupt the “not knowing” that has nurtured a world of harassment and predation, and empower more women who have been taught to squelch and ignore their anger to bring it to the surface. (Megan Garber has written a brilliant article on the mobilization and normalization of women’s anger for The Atlantic.)
While viral outrage is disruptive, it cannot transform a culture. For that to happen, people must put down their devices and have a serious conversation. Efforts to “diversify” corporate America should be called out for what they are — superficial quota systems that bolster CEOs posturing as “in-touch” and “empathetic”.
Genuine respect and awareness will require sustained heavy lifting. Women are being honest. Men now owe it to their wives, daughters and sisters to acknowledge their role in this tragedy. Ending harassment and truly leveling the proverbial playing field will require a deep dive into the more than 100 biological differences between the male and female brain. The communities, corporations and countries that figure this out will have an unprecedented advantage. (Indeed, the empowerment of women was one of the key pillars we identified when we began tracking economic growth in emerging countries in the early 2000s.)
As Rebecca Shambaugh, the founder of Women in Leadership and Learning, observes:
“Both women and men have important skill areas in which they naturally excel. Relying primarily on the strength of just one gender as leaders can result in an imbalance of perspectives and ideas. On the other hand, when women and men work side by side on the leadership team and in the boardroom, this diversity of perspectives can lead to more innovative thinking. This better balance, in turn, can result in greater productivity, improved engagement, higher profits, and a sustainable competitive advantage.”
This article was originally published in “What I Learned This Week” on November 9, 2017. To subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit 13D.com or find us on Twitter @WhatILearnedTW.
