How To Resist The Backlash Against #MeToo

This is for my fellow CEOs, managers, supervisors and everyone else out there with hiring and firing power at companies large and small.

I didn’t think it was possible for any single story to prove powerful and enduring enough to distract from the mess in Washington, but the harassment and predation reckoning unfolding throughout politics and media has done exactly that. It’s been so dominant a narrative since the Weinstein story went from being an open secret to a full-blown movement that TIME Magazine named “The Silence Breakers” as its 2017 Person of the Year. While it’s certainly been painful for victims of abuse to endure the constant airing of so much trauma, there’s another dimension to this that hasn’t faced nearly enough scrutiny.

The backlash.

In the resulting discourse, we’re already seeing men asking questions along the lines of, “Now I’m afraid to even talk to women. Does this mean no more office parties? No more friendly compliments? With so much hassle, wouldn’t it just be easier to not hire women at all?” It’s frustrating how quickly the discussion turned from a frank assessment of the daily harassment and assault women are subject to – immortalized in SNL’s “Welcome to Hell” song – into a question of whether women belong in the workplace period. Our openness about harassment and mistreatment has been weaponized against us; rather than honestly look at their conduct, many men would rather simply remove women from positions where professional respect and courtesy are required.

In short, the question is whether the glass ceiling should be lowered and thickened with another few panes, all because women dared to speak out and call for a workplace free from sexual harassment.

But bosses of the world, I promise you there is another solution. As Sheryl Sandberg put it, “So much good is happening to fix workplaces right now. Let’s make sure it does not have the unintended consequence of holding women back.” There can be no justification for using this as an excuse to keep women out of the workplace.

So let’s talk.

Remember that the problem isn’t women complaining.

It takes a special kind of myopia to hear the horrific tales of abuse and harassment that have been leveled at people like Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, and Louis CK over the past few months and come away from it thinking “well, then I don’t know how to work with women at all! Maybe I’m harassing them and don’t even know it! It’d probably just be better to avoid them entirely.” But that strategy – isolating women “for their own good” – has the secondary effect of cutting them off from valuable leadership training, mentorship benefits, and other opportunities to perform and excel. It’s also an absurd reaction to a simple request to treat women like you would any other human being you work with.

But that’s what happens when you act as if the problem isn’t the harassment but the complaints, and this entire discussion is predicated on that assumption; not that there’s a cultural problem that needs fixing, but that women are themselves the cause in what may in fact be the most egregious example of systemic victim-blaming I’ve ever personally witnessed. Your job isn’t to reduce complaints; it’s to foster a healthier environment so your employees can feel safe and respected and focus on their work.

Protecting women doesn’t mean marginalizing them.

We are not, I assure you, fragile little porcelain dolls who need to be protected, safe and secure in the secretary pool. I need not remind you that, in decades past, that was exactly what happened; women were placed in their own roles under their own leadership, essentially abandoned and ignored. But doing so now “to protect their virtue” or some such isn’t only regressive, it’s a shirking of your responsibility to create a working environment that isn’t actively hostile to a massive part of your team. Remember that safe spaces are self-created and self-policed; shunting off the women at your company into their own departmental structure isn’t a safe space as much as it’s a ghetto. And as, historically, the work women do is undervalued, this kind of “protection” will do little more than institutionalize that disvalue, making it harder for women to advance in the company as a whole by diminishing and containing our presence within it.

This is a business opportunity, not a business problem.

Listen. I know it’s a headache trying to find ways to change the way you do business. I know it’s frustrating trying to figure out how to solve problems you were barely conscious of before the beginning of October. And it’s even easier to look at women making all this noise and fuss and see a potential lawsuit waiting to happen. And it’s the easiest of all to throw up your hands and say “well, that’s not a problem I want to deal with.”

But beyond being right, it’s worth it. Women as a demographic are highly educated and highly skilled; we are advancing in STEM fields, and businesses that take their female employees seriously and promote them to leadership outperform those that don’t. You have literally nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking their concerns seriously and doing the hard work of reform instead of looking for a quick and easy fix: a smarter, harder-working, more productive, and more innovative workforce that’s generating real value for you and your clients rather than a team that’s spending half their mental energy protecting themselves from abuse.

All in all, it really feels like a win-win.

So please, as we move forward into this brave new world, take the words of Abigail Adams seriously and “consider the ladies;” our contributions will do more for your company than our silence ever could.