Why women are worried about #MeToo

Men could be falsely accused of sexual harassment or assault. Women could lose out on opportunities at work because men will be afraid to work with them. The punishment for less severe forms of sexual misconduct could be the same as for more severe offenses.

These were among women’s top concerns about the #MeToo movement in a nationwide survey Vox conducted with the media firm Morning Consult in March. Each of these concerns was held by a majority of women we surveyed — 63 percent were very or somewhat concerned about false accusations, 60 percent were worried about lost professional opportunities, and 56 percent were worried about perpetrators getting the same punishment for different misdeeds.

A Pew report, released on Wednesday, identified some similar concerns, with 21 percent of women saying that the increased focus on sexual harassment would lead to decreased opportunities for women in the workplace, and 31 percent saying that women falsely claiming sexual harassment or assault is a major problem today.

In some workplaces now, “You have to tiptoe around people. You can’t even be yourself,” said one woman in a focus group Vox conducted with the polling firm PerryUndem. “That’s a problem I think a lot of men are facing.”

But those concerns don’t mean that women are ready to write off #MeToo. In our survey, a majority of women said they supported the movement. And in the four focus groups Vox and PerryUndem conducted, women of all ages talked about how necessary and overdue they believed it was — even as they voiced their fears about the movement’s consequences.

In the focus groups, several women expressed worry that men in their families — men they described as caring and respectful of women — would be falsely accused or otherwise harmed as a side effect of #MeToo.

One woman, 36, who asked that her name not be used, voiced concern about the current workplace climate and its effects on her father. Recently, she said, a woman at her father’s workplace asked for help moving a box. When he said, “Yes, dear, I’ll get that for you,” the woman told him never to call her “dear” again.

“He was so upset when he got home,” his daughter said in the focus group. “He was like, ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’”

Shar’Ron Maxx Mahaffey, 64, was concerned about men being wrongfully accused of harassment or assault. “I have a son, and I cannot imagine, with the level of respect he shows me and his sisters and my sisters, that he could ever do something like that. But what if someone just accused him of doing it?” she asked. “Am I just supposed to take her word for that, knowing who my son is?”

A 26-year-old woman, who asked to remain anonymous, also said she worried about false accusations, especially after a young woman’s account of a date with comedian Aziz Ansari, during which she said she felt pressured to have sex, went viral on the website Babe.net.

“It just makes me fearful for my brothers and people like that,” she said, “because her word was taken as fact immediately.”

The Ansari story was a point of contention for several women in the focus groups. “I feel like that area was really gray,” said a 33-year-old woman, who asked that her name not be used.

“I felt the woman going public about Aziz Ansari was painting an unfair picture of him,” she told me in a follow-up interview. “I feel like he was being lumped in with predators.”

“I’m not saying he’s perfect or that he acted like a saint,” she added, “but I think that it was unfair to paint him as a sexual assaulter and potentially, you know, bring down his career.”

In our focus groups, women who were worried about the potential ill effects of #MeToo generally supported the movement as a whole.

Both women who expressed concerns about the Ansari story also described their own personal, positive connections to #MeToo.

The 26-year-old woman said she had made a report to human resources at her previous job, on behalf of a co-worker who was harassed, but nothing was done. “I found out HR actually just got mad at her,” she said. What struck her about #MeToo, she said, was the universality of experiences of sexual harassment: “Regardless of political orientation or race, all women have experienced this stuff.”

The 33-year-old woman said her mother had recently told her that, as a journalist in the 1960s, she’d dealt with sexist assumptions about how she became successful: “People would say, ‘Who are you sleeping with?’”

Things have changed for women in the workplace since the ’60s, the woman told me, and #MeToo stands to change them even more. “The feeling of empowerment and confidence that it’s giving women,” she said, is “going to really help all the more women to rise at work and to become fully equal with men.”

Mahaffey, who was worried about her son being falsely accused, also described her own experiences with harassment and was optimistic about the effect of #MeToo on future generations of women: “It’s empowering for my daughters and granddaughters to know that they’ll be heard,” she said.

Vox also saw broad support for #MeToo in the nationwide survey. Though majorities of women had certain concerns about #MeToo, 69 percent of women said they strongly or somewhat supported the movement, and 54 percent said the movement represented their interests somewhat or very well.

Women were also optimistic that #MeToo would bring about positive change. Seventy-three percent said it was very or somewhat likely that the movement would make women feel more comfortable reporting sexual assault and harassment, and 66 percent believed it would make men more conscious of inappropriate behavior. Fifty-two percent of women said it was very or somewhat likely that women would experience lower rates of sexual assault and harassment as a result of #MeToo.

Women who supported #MeToo were actually more concerned than women as a whole about some potential ill effects of the movement. Sixty-eight percent of #MeToo supporters were very or somewhat concerned about false accusations, for instance, compared with 63 percent of all women. Likewise, 68 percent of supporters were concerned about women losing out on work opportunities, compared with 60 percent of women as a whole.

It’s not surprising that women who were supportive of #MeToo were also more likely than average to have certain concerns, said Sarah J. Jackson, a professor of communication studies at Northeastern University who studies racial and gender justice activism. People who support the movement “understand the stakes,” Jackson said.

In her recent interviews with feminist Twitter users, she said, she found a keen awareness of the ways feminist causes can be undermined — an awareness that false rape accusations, for instance, can be portrayed in ways that harm anti-rape activism as a whole.

“It makes sense that women who are invested in the movement — are invested in having greater conversations and greater solutions to things like sexual harassment and sexual assault — would be hyperaware of the potential political and cultural discourses that could interrupt that process,” she said.

The anti-#MeToo backlash that followed the first wave of public reports of sexual misconduct last year often seemed to place women in two opposing camps. On one side were supporters of #MeToo, who were extremists intent on destroying men, according to their critics.

“They believe they are fighting an insidious, ubiquitous evil — the patriarchy — just as the extreme anti-Communists in the 1950s believed that commies were everywhere and so foul they didn’t deserve a presumption of innocence, or simple human decency,” Andrew Sullivan wrote for New York magazine in January. “They demand public confessions of the guilty and public support for their cause … or they will cast suspicion on you as well.”

On the other side, in this view, were #MeToo opponents — or at least reasonable skeptics who disapproved of Harvey Weinstein but thought that the movement in general was engaged in dangerous overreach. In January, Daphne Merkin speculated in a New York Times op-ed that during the Golden Globes, “many of us, including many longstanding feminists, will be rolling our eyes, having had it with the reflexive and unnuanced sense of outrage that has accompanied this cause from its inception, turning a bona fide moment of moral accountability into a series of ad hoc and sometimes unproven accusations.”

But what we found in both our focus groups and our survey was that by and large, #MeToo supporters are also skeptics. They have considered — sometimes more than the average woman — the possible negative outcomes of the movement, and the ways the movement could be compromised or fail. And their thinking has led them not to calls for men to be summarily fired with no investigation or recourse, but to complex conversations about what a fair workplace would look like for men and women.

As the #MeToo movement matures, the conversations around sexual harassment are beginning to move from outrage at particular men — Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Mario Batali, Roy Moore — to questions about the best way to reform workplaces, industries, and society as a whole. These are complex questions with no easy answers.

When #MeToo backlash was at its height, some critics of the movement doubted women’s ability to consider complexity — to distinguish, for instance, between the allegations against Weinstein and those against Ansari. Our survey and focus groups offer a concrete rebuke to this idea — both individual examples and numerical evidence showing that women across America are thinking about #MeToo in a nuanced way.

The findings don’t prove that any specific concerns about #MeToo are valid — or that they’re not. What they do show is that women are more than capable of having the complicated discussions necessary to bring #MeToo into the future — indeed, they are already having these conversations, whether critics are listening or not.

For months, men have expressed concerns about what’s permissible in the #MeToo-era workplace. “Have we gotten to the point now where men can’t say, ‘That’s a nice dress’ or ‘Did you do something with your hair?’” a Los Angeles sales associate named Steve Wyard asked the Associated Press in December. Meanwhile, Real Time host Bill Maher and others have opined that young people are oversensitive when it comes to harassment.

In our focus groups, however, many women of all ages expressed complex, even conflicted, views on appropriate workplace behavior. One woman, a 61-year-old executive assistant, said that in a previous job, the CEO called her into his office for help with his computer. When she sat down, he put his arms around her from behind. She reported the incident to human resources, she said, but nothing happened. Their attitude, she said, was, “he’s CEO and he’s going to be protected at all costs. I’m just, you know, a worker.”

The woman also described a different incident that didn’t trouble her in the same way. She had recently lost 40 pounds, and a member of her company’s board said, “I just wanted to compliment you on how wonderful you look with the weight off.” She “felt fine” about this compliment, she said, and she didn’t necessarily want to see such comments made off limits as part of #MeToo.

Rashaun Armstrong, 31, who works in sports, expressed a similar sentiment. Sometimes, she said, in spring, a male co-worker will make a comment like, “Rashaun, you’re really wearing that dress.” She doesn’t mind. “I have nice legs or whatever and, in the winter, no one gets to see them,” she said, laughing. “It’s not so bad.”

Armstrong also said she had been sexually harassed at work in a way that singled her out for her race. On a conference call, a co-worker in another city suggested a bizarre role-playing scenario, in which he would play George Zimmerman and she would wear a hoodie like Trayvon Martin.

“I am the only black girl there,” Armstrong told me in a follow-up interview. “It was the worst sort of come-on comment I’ve ever gotten.” Still, she said, she was ultimately less troubled by this incident than by sexist assumptions that didn’t necessarily constitute harassment, but that limited her ability to move forward in her career.

“What bothers me is when people assume I don’t know something about sports, or people talk down to me, like I don’t know something,” she said in the focus group. “That, I feel, is what’s keeping me from advancing.”

“Sometimes I wish that this conversation was just broader in general,” she added.

Some criticisms of the #MeToo movement have implied that women can’t be trusted to have complex conversations or to make distinctions between different types of behavior. As Moira Donegan wrote at New York magazine’s the Cut, “The idea that women are skeptical, that we can think and judge and choose for ourselves what to believe and what not to,” is “still seen as radical.”

And yet the women in our focus groups repeatedly displayed skepticism, discernment, and the ability to balance their concern for multiple ideals at once. Their perspectives made the #MeToo movement feel like not just an opportunity to reckon with sexual harassment and assault, but an opening for, as Armstrong put it, broader conversations — conversations about what makes a fair workplace, a positive sexual experience, an equitable relationship.

Women have long been having such discussions in private, but in recent months, #MeToo has offered an opportunity to have them in a more sustained and public way, one that might lead to changes at workplaces, at schools, between partners, and in families.

Jackson recalled one such conversation, which took place at a panel on which she spoke. When the allegations against Aziz Ansari came up, one audience member — who said she supported #MeToo — argued that young women who wanted to be “sexually liberated” and go up to men’s apartments should expect sexual advances.

Other members of the audience, which was largely made up of young women, said that going to someone’s apartment shouldn’t invalidate a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, and the comment ultimately led to a larger discussion about women’s agency and safety.

“Even if people were made to feel uncomfortable,” Jackson said, “a roomful of young people got to observe how to have this conversation in public, how to disagree about this productively in public, what the different perspectives that study and think about this might have to say about this in public.” That kind of public debate, she said, is “useful in the long run.”

As a woman in one of our focus groups put it, “The conversations are happening now, finally.”

“We’re identifying the culprits,” she added, “but what comes next?”

It’s not an easy question. But it’s one that women, who are thinking deeply and carefully about #MeToo and its ramifications, are more than prepared to answer.