#MeToo Bites Women

It’s an old story, occasionally reported in this blog. And elsewhere. Now that the elites gathered at Davos have raised the issue, it has found its way into the New York Times. Thus, the woke generation has a new reason to torment itself.

The story is simple. Thanks to the #MeToo movement senior executive men are avoiding almost all forms of direct personal contact with young female subordinates. They call it the law of unintended consequences, but it seems equally apt to be the consequence of acting without even considering the consequences. I suspect that not one of the great leaders who filled the airways with gales of outrage imagined that their cries for justice, mixed with hostility toward men, might produce an unwanted outcome. Or that it might all be bad for women.

The Times reports from Davos:

“I now think twice about spending one-on-one time with a young female colleague,” said one American finance executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issue is “just too sensitive.”

“Me, too,” said another man in the conversation.

The #MeToo movement, which burst into the spotlight in the fall of 2017, bringing down powerful figures in Hollywood, the media, politics, sports and more, continues to reverberate 15 months later. It has empowered women to speak up about harassment in the workplace and forced companies to take the issue more seriously. More than 200 prominent men have lost their jobs, and nearly half of them were succeeded by women.

Companies sensitive to their public image are promoting more women to the jobs that men had vacated. Do you believe that these new women executives will command enough respect to do the jobs or will they be treated as place holders, put there to mute the public outrage?

The result of #MeToo… companies are minimizing contact between young females and older males:

But in one unintended consequence, executives and analysts say, companies seeking to minimize the risk of sexual harassment or misconduct appear to be simply minimizing contact between female employees and senior male executives, effectively depriving the women of valuable mentorship and exposure.

“Basically, #MeToo has become a risk-management issue for men,” said Laura Liswood, secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders, an organization for former and current female political leaders.

It’s a problem many have acknowledged. Last February, two online surveys by Lean In and SurveyMonkey on the effects of #MeToo in the workplace found that almost half of male managers were uncomfortable engaging in one or more common work activities with women, such as working one on one or socializing. One in six male managers was uncomfortable mentoring a female colleague, according to the studies, which together surveyed nearly 9,000 adults employed in the United States.

Why should a senior male executive take the risk of mentoring a comely young lady? How many wives of said male executives would ever allow their husbands to take such a risk? I mention the latter point because it is so often ignored. Wives have something to say about this, and we should ask how many of them have told their senior executive husbands that young women were radioactive, and thus best avoided.

Naturally, the #MeToo movement is undermining the push for gender equality, though, curiously not one of the interviewees in this story says a word about corporate profitability. They seem to believe that equality is a goal, all by itself. They express no sense whatever of women’s conflicting responsibilities. They do not seem to recognize that women who are bringing up small children might put in fewer hours at work or take on less responsibility. Or be less willing to pick up and move to other countries. Again, the ideologues who are pushing for more women executives have no concern whatever for the bottom line. They are too obsessed with bottoms.

Beyond the mentorship issue, some indicators of gender equality are slipping, though it is hard to establish any link with #MeToo.

In its December report examining educational opportunities, life expectancy, pay equity and other factors, the World Economic Forum predicted that it would take 202 years for gender parity to be reached in the workplace. That is significantly more than the estimate of 170 years in 2016.

So, the world has been backsliding on gender parity. Is it all about bigotry or are there simply too few competent female executives around? In a world where Great Britain is being led by a female bumbler and where Germany is being led by a women who has sacrificed her country to out-of-control migration… we might consider the point.