The breadth of this social movement is overwhelming and heartbreaking. The number of people filling my social media timelines with #MeToo has, in one week’s time, changed my perspective completely. And honestly, as a man, there’s a part of me that is defensive about the entire issue, wanting to scream from the mountaintops (or the top of the cubicle jungle), “This isn’t me! I’m not part of this! All men aren’t harassers/predators/creeps!”
That is, after all, the easy response. Simply claim I’m not part of the problem, extend my condolences to the victims and excuse myself from the discussion. But reality is so much more complex than that. Because while I have never made unwanted sexual advances in the office, I should have seen clues about others.
Upon reflection, I’ve been an enabler. For example, in the very recent past, I heard a sexist joke from a male co-worker, knowing he was in the safe company of a group of men at the office. And instead of saying something, I smiled politely a moved on with my day. In another instance, I took no action when I saw a male staff member gawk at a young female employee when she wasn’t looking. And while these tales pale in comparison to many of the stories I’ve read over the last few days, they are a sign of a culture that I – and many other “innocent” male bystanders – am allowing to exist.
Let me be honest about my built in advantages in the workplace: I’m male, I’m white and I’m old enough to not be the new kid on the block, but young enough to not be old news. So that being said, my perspective sucks. But that’s the point. It’s up to every male in the workplace to collectively change our perspective.
A lesson in perspective hit me hard when my fun-loving, funny and brutally honest (in a good way) colleague Kate and I were working on a project for a Fortune 500 company. During lunch she made an offhand remark to me about the challenge that females have when dealing with ‘mansplaining’. I laughed and noted that I had never really encountered that. Not more than twenty minutes later, we needed technical help and a male support staff came over show our group – three males and Kate – how to fix our problem. When he walked away Kate said to me, “Did you see that? He never looked at me once.”
Sadly, I did not notice, but a few minutes later we had another issue that required the same staff member, so I looked for it. Lo and behold, he didn’t look at Kate one time. And I thought, “Holy sh*t! What else am I not seeing?”
We all have our own lens and, as much as we might like to think otherwise, there is no way to account for all the lenses in the world. We all have blind spots and they are often much bigger than we think. Some research done by people much smarter than me, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, proves the point. In a study, they showed subjects a video of people in white and black shirts passing basketballs and told participants to count how many times the people in the white shirts passed the ball to each other. In the middle of this short one minute video, a man in a gorilla suit came out and beat his chest. After watching the video, only 50% of the participants noticed the gorilla. And I’m telling you, it’s super obvious, if you’d like to look at the video for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
So if that many people can miss a gorilla right in their faces, we can definitely miss the signs of workplace sexual misconduct. And sometimes is takes a revolution like the #MeToo movement to allow us to see the gorilla in the room.
So this is a call to all men who are not sexual harassers (and the good news is, there are a lot of us): Our easy response of ‘I’m not part of the problem’ is actually a big part of the problem. And it’s going to take all of us not-so-innocent bystanders to, well, not be bystanders.
This problem is huge but we don’t have move the mountain on our own. It’s more about each of us moving our own mole hill and if we do that, collectively the mountain will start to move. It’s chiming in to tell your co-worker that his sexist joke isn’t appropriate. It’s pulling your gawking co-worker aside and letting him know that you saw what he did. It’s telling that guy who for some reason doesn’t include women in the conversation that Kate is part of the group as well. These are things we can do without threats, without contacting authorities or involving HR. These are simple statements that men can make that disarm this sort of behavior simply by allowing the offending party to know that they are not in our blind spot.
Will this change everything? No, any social media timeline will tell you that this is a huge issue. But a big number of small things can make a big difference in changing a culture that needs a major overhaul.