#MeToo & the Politics of Storytelling in a Post-COVID World
When Christine Blasey Ford approached the witness stand during Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Senate confirmation hearings to share her experience of sexual assault, women around the world took note. With feverish coverage of the #MeToo movement across the media in the wake of Anita Hill’s landmark testimony against Clarence Thomas in 1991, and women stepping forward in increasing numbers to tell their stories of assault and harassment, it seemed that the cultural moment had finally arrived for women’s stories of sexual violence to be taken seriously. Yet the spark of the early movement has not brought the dramatic cultural change that so many expected. Instead, in recent years the conversation has morphed into something different--influenced by deeper changes in our working environment, cultural paradigm, and the technologies available to us. So what does this look like? Where is the #MeToo movement today and where is it heading?
~~~
The phrase "Me Too" was first used on social media in 2007 by Tarana Burke, a Black activist, community organizer and executive from the Bronx. As a teenager, Burke was passionate about social justice issues including economic inequality and racial discrimination. After college, she began to work with young women of color who had experienced sexual violence. Also a survivor, she identified with these women and hoped to inspire them toward healing and community-building. In 2007, Burke founded JustBe, Inc., a non-profit created to empower and encourage young Black girls by providing a safe space for them to share their stories. She started using the phrase “me too” to promote the idea of empowerment through empathy. Soon after, the #MeToo movement was born.
Centered on the act of breaking silence, the #MeToo movement empowers people to speak out about their experiences of sexual harassment -- especially in the workplace -- by amplifying the voices of survivors. In 2017, after widespread allegations of sexual assault against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, the movement went viral as a hashtag on social media when Alyssa Milano-- a well-known white actress with a global platform-- posted on Twitter, "If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me too' as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem." A flurry of tweets followed from A-list celebrities including Ashley Judd and Jennifer Lawrence.
Since it went viral, the #MeToo movement has contributed to a cultural “story” of sexual harassment that is less inclusive and more polarized than ever before. A 2018 report by Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Organization suggests that the movement has elevated collective levels of fear, tension and anxiety and widened the gender gap in the workplace. Male managers report that they are now less likely to hire attractive women; to take business trips with women; or to meet with women in one-on-one settings. These biases will directly translate to setbacks for women at work, especially since career growth and opportunities for advancement often depend on 1:1 exchanges with managers and executive leadership. There is also a disparity in how workers perceive the impact of #MeToo. In the tech sector, 69% of white male founders believe that the movement has had a positive impact, compared to only 24% of women of color founders. It is vital to ask what these developments mean for the movement going forward. Does technology hold new promise for an inclusive movement? And what opportunities, if any, does our new work environment offer for disrupting #MeToo’s divisive reality, and for aligning the movement with a broad, transformative agenda?
~~~
Technology--specifically social media and the act of “going viral”-- has both facilitated and limited the scope of the #MeToo movement. After it went viral, the #MeToo movement increasingly stumbled over the politics of narrative and inclusivity. To reflect on the past, present and future of #MeToo, it is crucial to ask whose voices have been amplified or erased within the movement, and how technology plays a role in those dynamics. As the legacy of #MeToo reminds us, not all women’s voices are equally valued in our culture or “authorized” to speak. Especially for women of color, trans women, sex workers, and folks whose stories of sexual violence generally don’t “fit” within broader cultural narratives of “respectability” and political correctness, intersectional politics often works to silence rather than to broadcast women’s voices. This is immediately apparent in how Milano, rather than Burke, is so often portrayed in the media as the founder and “face” of the #MeToo movement.
Because technology is part of the problem of inclusivity in the evolution of #MeToo, it is important to mindfully harness its potential to foster greater empathy and solidarity around the cultural stories that we tell. This challenge resonates as we collectively re-imagine experiences of, and tools to prevent, sexual harassment in the workplace -- especially since the language of law cannot provoke social change without collective action on myriad other fronts. There are many social, educational, and legal narratives to negotiate and revision as the #MeToo movement moves forward, including sex education in schools that emphasizes consent; longer statutes of limitations and filing deadlines for lawsuits; the eradication of legal non-disclosure agreements or NDAs that silence women’s voices on a daily basis; wider framing of sexual violence as a public health issue; and a more expansive legal definition of sexual harassment along with stronger federal laws to protect more workers. Technology -- more so than Hollywood or mainstream media -- increasingly drives and shapes our possibilities for storytelling in the digital era, as well as our experiences of work and violence in the wake of COVID-19. Amidst the global pandemic, new technologies have invaded every facet of our work experience. In many sectors of the economy, from the corporate world to healthcare to academia, employees now work in remote, fully networked, virtual environments. Our roles in this “brave new world” are often unclear and precarious. To an unprecedented degree, employees are vulnerable to unchecked regimes of abuse, microaggression, and surveillance in the workplace. Many are at risk of falling off the radar altogether.
Today’s remote work-scape especially threatens our ability to speak, prevent, and respond to sexual harassment. Most employees now work in largely unsupervised and unscripted digital spaces, with ongoing opportunities to ping colleagues during fluid and borderless “work days” that never truly end. Networked employees log onto a variety of digital communications platforms and collaborative work channels on a daily basis including email, cell phone, text, Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Slack. As new grey areas arise on these platforms, most employees approach them with no formal training in digital citizenship. As a result, they are often ill-equipped to effectively communicate and navigate this new web of virtual workspaces.
~~~
In response to the “‘Wild West” work environment introduced by COVID-19, employers are scrambling to offer mobile resources for employees who experience sexual harassment -- including anonymous, confidential, and social-media-based reporting apps like Callisto, STOPit, and TalkToSpot, which enlists a chatbot to interact with employees through a cognitive interview approach. Yet these options are not always accessible to distributed team members -- especially those based overseas -- whose experiences of harassment continue to evolve as we move online. When employees experience harassing behaviors in digital space, there are no opportunities for colleagues to intervene. Meanwhile, employees often face barriers to reporting while working from home, including a lack of privacy, unstable WiFi access, familial dynamics, and cultural norms that make it difficult to report sexual harassment.
As COVID-19 alters the landscape of sexual harassment in the workplace, our ability to creatively leverage technology may help to re-shape the politics of narrative and prevention. Training in digital citizenship, or the continuously developing norms of appropriate, responsible, and empowered technology use, is an important first step and tool that employers can provide their employees to promote inclusive communications practices and culture-building across newly distributed teams. Natural language processing, machine learning, augmented reality, data analytics, pattern recognition and other AI tools can also assist DEI teams to reset workplace cultures. In the near future, employers may enlist Slackbots to flag toxic behavior in virtual work environments and to trigger employee conversations about inclusive language and communications norms, community standards, and professional expectations in the remote workplace.
Among these technological tools, Virtual Reality (VR) may hold the greatest potential to change how we perceive and understand sexual harassment. VR is often celebrated for its unique capacity to foster empathy by immersing users in alternate realities. As it turns out, when we are soaked in unfamiliar ways of seeing, feeling and experiencing the world, our empathy grows. Museum designers are increasingly tapping into these potentials by embedding VR into exhibits -- especially those centered on traumatic experiences such as war, genocide or the plight of refugees -- to spark empathy and understanding among their audiences. Employers are also embracing it as an effective training tool. In Japan, a wearable “pregnancy simulator” has become a popular medium for husbands to build empathy around their wives’ experiences of pregnancy.
~~~
Like the #MeToo movement, technology is alive with bias -- built into the very algorithms, code and landscapes that fuel it. The tech sector faces an uphill battle when it comes to diversity and inclusivity, especially because of the pervasive “white bro culture” in Silicon Valley and beyond that not only excludes core voices from STEM tables, but actively drives them away. Tech company cultures can often serve as breeding grounds of harassment and discrimination, as spotlighted over the past several years in a wave of investigations of industry leaders including Google, Facebook, and Uber. In a March 2020 study, the nonprofit Women Who Tech found that 43% of all women in tech have experienced sexual harassment on the job. A 2019 report by Girls Who Code similarly found that even at the intern level, women face everything from inappropriate comments on their bodies to propositions during the interview process. Harassing behavior disproportionately targets women of color; Women Who Tech noted that 46% of founders who are women of color have been harassed by a potential investor compared to 36% of white women. As Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List, whose philanthropic organization partnered with Women Who Tech, replied in a statement following the study, “We need less ally theater and more people in positions of power to recognize that power, not abuse it.” Unfortunately, toxic work cultures erode trust in the ability of tech leadership to effectively address reports of sexual harassment. As a result, despite the overall impact of #MeToo to bring issues of accountability into large-scale public discussion, fewer women today are reporting sexual harassment. And that is just the beginning of the conversation; cycles of violence and underreporting have escalated in underrepresented and vulnerable communities, especially among people of color, LGBTQIA+ and non-binary folks, immigrants, and sex workers.
Technology alone cannot create human compassion or provoke meaningful and lasting cultural shifts, especially when its underlying infrastructure is both a mirror and a major contributor to social inequality. But technological interfaces can radically alter our experiences of reality and our exchanges with others, as the pandemic has shown. When mindfully engaged, technology may open the door to heightened levels of awareness that trigger cultural change and bring us one step closer to social justice. In a 2013 study by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, researchers found that after women wear sexualized avatars in a virtual reality setting, they are more likely to accept rape myths in the real world and to legitimize sexual violence based on women’s dress. As Heidegger reminds us, technology itself is neither “good” nor “bad”; moral outcomes depend on the uses to which we put it. If technology has the potential to normalize rape myths and to “re-wire” women’s perspectives on sexual violence and accountability, then if thoughtfully leveraged, it may also hold power to change the stories that we tell about sexual harassment and to infuse those stories with more nuanced and inclusive culture-building approaches and tools for prevention.
To counter the divisive narratives, politics and effects of the #MeToo movement, an important next step is to design work cultures that deepen our capacities for empathy, self-reflection, and understanding. Behavioral training that embraces diversity as a productive starting point and corporate asset; creatively engages employees; challenges cultural norms; and thoughtfully harnesses technological tools for empathy-building holds the most promise to revolutionize the stories we tell about sexual harassment -- especially in an increasingly virtual landscape that threatens to marginalize, erode trust and accountability, and selectively silence women’s voices through intersectional dynamics of structural inequality.