It's been nearly two years since the #MeToo movement gained widespread momentum, and some big questions remain: What has changed? Do we know if reports of sexual harassment in organisations have decreased? What has happened to the women who have spoken up?
It helps to look at data. In 2016, before #MeToo first took off, we surveyed 250 working women in the United States, asking them about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in their workplaces and how it affected them at work; we also interviewed 31 women about their individual experiences. We conducted a second survey after the #MeToo phenomenon had begun, in September 2018, of 263 women, and we reconnected with some of the women we had previously interviewed to see whether they had seen changes or have changed their views. The survey was meant to gather quantitative evidence about the changes since #MeToo, and the interviews were meant to provide insight into why and how the those changes had occurred.
We measured sexual harassment along three dimensions: gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. Gender harassment involves negative treatment of women that is not necessarily sexual, but that may include things like a supervisor or co-worker making sexist remarks, telling inappropriate stories or displaying sexist material. Unwanted sexual attention includes co-worker or supervisor behaviours such as staring, leering, ogling or unwanted touching. Sexual coercion includes bribing or pressuring women to engage in sexual behavior. We also measured participants' self-esteem and self-doubt, to see how these correlated with their experiences.
What did we find? In terms of what has changed, we saw that fewer women in our sample reported sexual coercion and unwanted sexual attention following the inception of the #MeToo movement. In 2016, 25 per cent of women reported being sexually coerced, and in 2018 that number had declined to 16 per cent. Unwanted sexual attention declined from 66 per cent of women to 25 per cent. In contrast, we noticed an increase in reports of gender harassment, from 76 per cent of women in 2016 to 92 per cent in 2018. This suggests that while blatant sexual harassment — experiences that drive many women out of their careers — might be declining, workplaces may be seeing a "backlash effect," or an increase in hostility toward women.
When we examined women's feelings of self-esteem and self-doubt, we found an increase in self-esteem and a decrease in self-doubt since 2016. More important, the relationship between unwanted sexual attention and both of these outcomes (lower self-esteem, higher self-doubt) was weaker in 2018. Likewise, the relationship between gender harassment and the outcomes decreased. We believe that knowledge of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment has tempered its deleterious effects on self-doubt and self-esteem.
