No more dinners with female colleagues. Don’t sit next to them on flights. Book hotel rooms on different floors. Avoid one-on-one meetings.
In fact, as a wealth adviser put it, just hiring a woman these days is “an unknown risk.” What if she took something he said the wrong way?
Across Wall Street, men are adopting controversial strategies for the #MeToo era and, in the process, making life even harder for women.
Call it the Pence Effect, after U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he avoids dining alone with any woman other than his wife. In finance, the overarching impact can be, in essence, gender segregation.
Interviews with more than 30 senior executives suggest many are spooked by #MeToo and struggling to cope. “It’s creating a sense of walking on eggshells,” said David Bahnsen, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley who’s now an independent adviser overseeing more than $1.5 billion.
This is hardly a single-industry phenomenon, as men across the country check their behavior at work, to protect themselves in the face of what they consider unreasonable political correctness -- or to simply do the right thing. The upshot is forceful on Wall Street, where women are scarce in the upper ranks. The industry has also long nurtured a culture that keeps harassment complaints out of the courts and public eye, and has so far avoided a mega-scandal like the one that has engulfed Harvey Weinstein.
Source.
Because nobody totally didn't see this coming at all. It's interesting how the calls for caution from some influential women and even some feminists (and the fact that I am quoting Vox is even more surprising) were ignored by the zealous misandrists who just wanted to watch
So one would think that women would be looking for ways and means to allay men's fears about false accusations and other kinds of issues brought up in #MeToo in response to the increasingly reduced opportunities and containment of women in the workplace? According to the Bloomberg article I used for the source, it appears they've opted to double down on claims of misogyny:
“If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment,” he said, “those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint.”
So, who is to blame for all of this? Men, of course. Men are the ones to blame, because men always are. We're responsible for whatever women do. And the apparent solution to this rests, yet again, on the shoulders of men. We have to "step up" and "not be assholes". Because society making women responsible for their actions is clearly sexism.
However, I am heartened that more and more men are using caution when dealing with women in the workplace and not caving in to this renewed social pressure. My only sincere hope is that this spreads, and that the effects of this backlash against women in the workplace grow. This is a lesson that those who support #MeToo need to learn, so that they do not feel compelled to make the same mistakes again.
So what do we think, NSG? Is this backlash against women in the workplace justified? Is this yet more sexism from men?
