Where’s the Outrage Pledge?

Where’s the Outrage Pledge?
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I had originally thought about opening this piece with the line: “The barbarians are not at the gate, they are among us.” But I realized that’s not entirely true. Past tense perhaps because the world is shifting around us…rapidly.

As part of my renewed commitment to see the positive in all things, I am reading the recent round news about sexual harassment in the workplace as progress. It’s easy to either be bowed by all these horrific stories or to simply become numb to it all. But instead, I think it’s even better to view this as the turning of the tide. The public ridiculing and outing of people like Justin Caldeck, Chris Sacca, and Dave McClure is a beginning that was not possible even a year ago.

I liken it to when your skin naturally pushes a splinter out on its own or having white blood cells attack a virus. So too is society finally and naturally pushing the barbarians away from the city. Using the power of social media and instant storytelling, brave women are banding together and sharing their experiences so that men can better understand and ultimately change.

For me, what is most heartening is the voice of the many men that are rising up in support of women. I’m ignoring those accused of offenses that have begged forgiveness and pledged to change, in favor of people like Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and his Decency Pledge. It’s important that these allies help pick up the torch and carry the fight alongside women.

But how do we sustain this momentum and cement this change. Is a Decency Pledge really our best weapon? In thinking about how we help men truly understand the pain and harm that seemingly benign actions – much less overt harassment – can have on women in the workplace, I thought back to a recent interaction with my parents.

Soon after the tape of Donald Trump and Billy Bush discussing how then businessman Trump would accost women surfaced, my mother and I both expressed our horror to my father. I was shocked by his response (paraphrasing here): “What’s the big deal, it is not like he sexually assaulted them?”

I did not become a take-charge businessperson on my own. This is a man who has always supported my ambitions since I was a little girl, and even once brought a successful female colleague home for dinner to provide a role model for me. So his reaction took me by surprise. Why was he not troubled by this admission by a man running for the most powerful office in the country?

My mother and I replied by asking him: “What if he had done this to one of us?”

And then it became personal. He expressed anger and a desire to take action. An answer I would expect anyone to supply if their wife, daughter, sister, granddaughter, or female friend would have experienced this type of attack.

So maybe we don’t need a Decency Pledge to root out harassment in technology. We don’t need men to feel gracious. We need them to be angry. Enraged that some other guy is going to harass, demean or take economic advantage of their wife, daughter, mother, or friend.

And then we can turn up the heat in other areas of our culture. Yes, sexual harassment is a problem in every other industry too – politics, entertainment, healthcare…the list goes on. If men across the country took the Outrage Pledge would the world be a better place for everybody’s wife, daughter, or mother?

I think so. The collective pause and reflection would lead to a “Hell No” moment that might actually lock in this change. And then once the emotion has run its course, we can expand upon that momentum by making all the logical arguments: an equal workplace would encourage more women to join and remain in the workforce to fill projected shortages, and more women in the workforce will lead to companies better attuned to the women who will control 67% of consumer wealth in the US in the next decade.

But we must begin with emotion. And that’s not by appealing to a sense of decency, but leveraging a sense of outrage. Make the men around you take the Outrage Pledge, and then challenge them to deliver the change you demand.

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