The Akron Legal News

Unintended consequences: MeToo may close doors previously open to women

KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: March 22, 2018

As the MeToo movement continues its global circuit, a backlash seethes.

Just last week, a Wharton executive-MBA candidate wrote for the Harvard Business Review that off-the-record discussions with male finance executives who have a say in the hiring process of their respective offices have no intention of hiring women for vacant posts or even managing them if they can avoid it.

"As someone who works in finance ... I've heard men say that they're less likely to hire or associate with women as a result of the intensity of MeToo," Katherine Tarbox wrote. "Whether consciously or not, I am not sure how any man in America isn't reassessing his hiring practices.

"I have heard directly from male executives at two prominent Wall Street firms that they are moving their female direct reports to report to female bosses."

Columbus defense attorney Brad Koffel said he's not surprised by the notion of a backlash.

"Presumptively innocent men are being banished from their careers overnight," he said of now-worldwide movement. "There's this simmering idea that men have been committed to this indefensible crime of just being male and what seems truly dangerous to me is ... this complete disregard for the presumption of innocence."

Tarbox's piece echoed the attorney's sentiment as she noted that to many, the movement appears not to be just about stopping harassment, but also about desexualizing the workplace.

"Chemistry between human beings can't be stopped, so what's the answer?" Tarbox mused. "To many men, that answer is protecting themselves by avoiding socializing with or hiring women.

"It may be illegal, but that won't stop it from happening - most cases would never get to court, and even if they did, they'd be really tough to prove."

Koffel recognized that environments in certain workplaces and in higher education, in general, were overdue for a reckoning.

"But this Twitter world where you're instantly slammed and your only recourse is to get out of the limelight by quitting is where I have a problem," he said.

His own experience as a defense attorney for men accused bears out the societal mindset.

"When we have men hire us and they're under investigation ..., there always is this presumption of guilt," he said. "And every client that I've ever met in my conference room, tells me, 'I am innocent but I feel guilty.'

"This presumption of innocence tends to exist in law books, but when you get in the real world due process and the presumption of innocence disappears."

A misfortune of the MeToo movement, according to Tarbox, herself a victim of sexual assault, is what she called the "telescoping effect" of the hashtag and media reports that has blurred important distinctions between rape, groping, and clumsy come-ons.

"While neither sexual harassment and assault should be tolerated under any circumstances, they are not the same thing," she said. "But the level of condemnation offered to each now seems to be the same.

"Watching the pendulum-swing of society's reaction to sexual assault has been whiplash-inducing, and to me, worrisome."

There has been a collapse in understanding where all things are now equal, Koffel said, from disgraced former U.S. Sen. Al Franken to the predatory movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Beyond that, the attorney said the movement has provided cover for some instances of vindictiveness in which personal vendettas and office politics are being criminalized.

There are aspects of the movement in which it has turned into bloodsport, he said.

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