The Consequences of #MeToo for Women: 'Gender Segregation'; Men Now "Walking on eggshells"

On Wall Street, many men have adopted Vice President Mike Pence's sage advice: avoid having dinner alone with any woman not your wife. There are other changes in behavior with female co-workers as well: don't sit next to them on flights, book hotel rooms on separate floors, and avoid one-on-one meetings.

And never close your office door when meeting with a female.

It's not just Wall Street, of course. The changes are affecting businesses nationwide in every industry.

Bloomberg:

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.

"Walking on eggshells" should be the phrase of the decade. On college campuses, white males are forced to be extremely -- even pathologically -- sensitive about what they say about race, gender, sex, gays, and any other subject the anti-free speech crowd sees fit to target them for. You can't write or talk about race anywhere in America unless you first accept your white privilege, and then proceed to embrace the assumptions of race of activists as a starting point. Not doing so automatically brands you as a "racist."

There are consequences to "walking on eggshells," the most prominent being a stifling conformity of thought, a deadening of intellectual curiosity, and fear.

The #MeToo movement, now a year old, is having a dramatic effect on women in the workplace. They may have drastically reduced sexual harassment -- a good thing in and of itself -- but at what cost?

Now, more than a year into the #MeToo movement -- with its devastating revelations of harassment and abuse in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and beyond -- Wall Street risks becoming more of a boy’s club, rather than less of one.

“Women are grasping for ideas on how to deal with it, because it is affecting our careers,” said Karen Elinski, president of the Financial Women’s Association and a senior vice president at Wells Fargo & Co. “It’s a real loss.”

The practical, down-to-earth, real-world effect of #MeToo has been tragically ironic:

The changes can be subtle but insidious, with a woman, say, excluded from casual after-work drinks, leaving male colleagues to bond, or having what should be a private meeting with a boss with the door left wide open.

In this charged environment, the question is how the response to #MeToo might actually end up hurting women’s progress. Given the male dominance in Wall Street’s top jobs, one of the most pressing consequences for women is the loss of male mentors who can help them climb the ladder.

“There aren’t enough women in senior positions to bring along the next generation all by themselves,” said Lisa Kaufman, chief executive officer of LaSalle Securities. “Advancement typically requires that someone at a senior level knows your work, gives you opportunities and is willing to champion you within the firm. It’s hard for a relationship like that to develop if the senior person is unwilling to spend one-on-one time with a more junior person.”

Men have to step up, she said, and “not let fear be a barrier.”

So is this a good strategy for men? Give women the cold shoulder and run away if they smile at you? An employment attorney on Wall Street says, “If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment, those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint.”

Those with the naive belief that treating women with respect and dignity in the workplace will be an ironclad shield against harassment or sexual assault claims are dreaming. While you should treat all women in and out of the workplace respectfully, #MeToo is not about that, or about protecting women. The movement is about the raw exercise of the power to shame, to destroy lives and careers, and to change the fundamental dynamic in male-female interpersonal relations in and out of the workplace.

In some ways, this is a good and necessary thing. But the potential for misunderstandings and false claims of harassment or assault where companies have a hair-trigger to pull against male workers makes the #MeToo movement problematic, at best, for women in the workplace.

I predicted this would happen (anyone with a functioning brain could have projected forward a little and seen it coming) so I'll predict the next move. Here's the sequence:

Women complain about rampant harassment
Women start going public in social media trashing companies over harassment
Some really bad cases are rolled out, more bad press about the issue. Everyone is accused of being part of the problem.
HR gets scared of getting bad PR so company begins ruthlessly enforcing anti-harassment rules and gets rid of any ability to defend against claims.
Men see colleages go down over nothing, women high five each other for their bravery.
Men get scared and avoid working closely with women
Women complain that they are being denied mentoring and opportunity, it's discrimination.
Articles are published and HR gets scared
Men are told they must treat women the same as men or else their career is over. If they mentor men, they must mentor women. If they have meetings in their offices with men, they must with women too.
Men start avoiding collaboration with male colleagues to avoid being forced to interact with females in a non-public way. The only people left talking to each other are women, who mostly complain about the men.

Toxic workplace achieved, business closes within a year.

“Just who are they trying to impress...other women?”

YES!!

It’s a pecking order. The most attractive wield the most power over men. The least attractive yield the least.

That power translates over other women, because self-esteem for women is such a delicate butterfly. So easy to disrupt.

They are NOT dressing to impress men, they are dressing to CONTROL men, and by transitivity, other women.

In the end, they’re idiots. Pretty much all of them. There are the few that ruin it for the many, and the many who don’t actively hammer the $hit out of the few who do.

My ex, in a moment of candor, told me, “The whole department is female. The estrogen poisoning is real. I’d give anything to have just one guy join the department to partially balance this out. Hate managing women!”

Stupid, short-sighted, narcissistic, under-qualified, and largely bereft of real leadership skills, AS A GROUP.

There are pockets of them who are amazing, unbelievable, courageous, smart, and tough as nails while losing nothing that makes them inherently and inimitably female. I’ve been lucky enough to work for a few.

Saying that, men have spit the bit. Women have created an impossible position - avoid any opportunity to flush your entire career and livelihood down the toilet by ensuring every interaction with women is as emotionally sterile as possible, or back yourself into a sex discrimination suit?

There isn’t even one square foot of tenable middle ground for a guy to camp on there.

This is going to get way, way worse until women everywhere have pounded the loud, crazy, social justice warriors into a paste and lit them on fire.

ONLY WOMEN CAN SOLVE THIS PROBLEM. I guess we’ll see what kind of leaders they are. So far, aside from the exceptions that prove the rule, women have proved to be as corruptible, unprincipled, and as greedy as men ever were. They told us all if they were in charge it would be different.

It’s not the most apt metaphor.

They don’t need to promise a man anything to control them. Hormones in men do that for them. Women get pretty skilled at subtle manipulation in order to get what they want.

There’s a great scene in The Departed:

Matt Damon’s character walks out of Captain Queenan’s office after Queenan greets him, as is his custom with all the new State Troopers. Leonard Dicaprio’s character is waiting in the office outside to be seen.

The secretary folds her arms under her breasts and leans completely forward as Damon is walking into the outer office to give Damon a shot at her cleavage, which isn’t even ample. She says, “Congratulations!”, to which he replies, “Thanks hon.” He gets what she’s doing and plays it off while acknowledging it.

As soon as he leaves, she straightens up, and without looking at Dicaprio says, “You can go in there now.”

It is a CLASSIC scene. Many don’t even pick it up, but it is precisely what we’re talking about here.

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