The Unintended Consequences of MeToo

The MeToo movement began in October 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein were reported in the New York Times. On October 15th, actress Alyssa Milano wrote on Twitter: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”

By the middle of October the following year, the movement had – in the words of the New York Times – “brought down” no less than 201 powerful men. That is to say, 201 men in prominent positions (e.g., politicians, CEOs, actors) had lost their jobs due to allegations of sexual harassment that were prompted by MeToo.

It would be fair to say that some of the men “brought down” by MeToo deserved their comeuppance, whereas others were treated very unfairly, such as Aziz Ansari. While the overall merits of the movement can be debated, one effect it had was to make men in prominent more wary about being accused of sexual harassment.

This must be a good thing, right? While false accusations of sexual harassment are clearly bad, it’s surely good that powerful men are more sensitive of the need to avoid inappropriate behaviour towards? Not necessarily.

In a recent preprint, the economist Marina Gertsberg highlights one unintended consequence of the MeToo movement: senior male academics became more reluctant to collaborate with junior female colleagues, thereby potentially harming the latter’s career prospects. (There is a good summary of the paper at Cremieux Recueil‘s Substack.)

Gertsberg obtained data on collaborations involving female academic economists who had a tenure-track position when the MeToo movement began. (In an academic context, a collaboration is just when two or more academics write a paper together.) For control purposes, she also obtained data for male academic economists in the same circumstances.

What did Gertsberg find? Compared to the pre-MeToo era (2015–2017), the women in her sample had fewer total collaborations in the post-MeToo era (2018–2020), and this fall was largely explained by few collaborations with male colleagues – especially senior male colleagues at the same university.

Interestingly, the men in her sample did not have fewer total collaborations in the post-MeToo era: although they did have fewer collaborations with female colleagues, they made up for this by having more collaborations with male colleagues. So the “MeToo effect” that Gertsberg observed may have harmed young women’s career prospects without harming young men’s.

She also found that the decline in women’s collaborations was greater at universities with ambiguous sexual harassment policies, which supports her interpretation that senior male academics became more reluctant to have one-on-one collaborations with junior female colleagues.

The study was restricted to one relatively narrow domain: academic economics. But it’s likely that similar dynamics have played out in other contexts where men and women have to cooperate. While preventing sexual harassment is obviously important, movements that go too far – such as by encouraging a presumption of guilt – can end up having harmful intended consequences.