After #MeToo hysteria, men just saying No to mentoring women
Gee. I wonder why.
LeanIn is pushing an initiative called #MentorHer after their survey found men, particularly men in managerial or executive positions, are uncomfortable or hesitant to mentor or spend time alone with female colleagues or employees.
Their study found the following:
Riddle me this, how in the world are women seriously baffled that men are terrified of doing anything that might later be misconstrued as some form of sexual impropriety?
And yet, here we are.
3x as many male managers are now uncomfortable mentoring women in the wake of #MeToo. This is a huge step in the wrong direction. We need more men to #MentorHer. https://t.co/RyPo0PBz7N
— Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff) February 6, 2018
The #MeToo movement may have unmasked serial sexual offenders and exposed predators who’ve until recently benefited from communal immunity. It’s also ensnared many others who engaged in what they believed were consensual acts, only later to be accused of sexual misconduct.
Feminists created a world where words no longer have meaning, where men are required to be free from any sexual desire, where men’s rights, thoughts, and feelings are stripped in order to make room for those of women, and worse — where women are free and even encouraged to out men years after a sexual soiree.
Remorse for sexual boundaries crossed is now frequently confused with sexual assault and even rape. Accidental butt grazes are prosecuted in the court of public opinion, and they wonder why men won’t sacrifice their careers, character, and livelihood in order to mentor a woman?
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and they mocked Mike Pence for this behavior (although for him, I would call it a Standard) last year. Now it is becoming more common.
Sorry (I was going to say “Ladies”, but I do not think it applies) girls – you cannot have it both ways.
What will be really fun is when there is a female that screws her way to a promotion and some way better qualified male sues and wins.
A MAN winning a civil rights discrimination suit against a WOMAN? Not in this country.
It happens literally all the time. As usual you display your own pig-ignorance.
Such an ugly spectacle would strike you as “fun”? Comments like this are one of the big reasons why I hesitate to refer friends to this website, even though I agree strongly with many of the contributors’ views.
This problem plays right into the hands of the Democrats who always want more victims. Watch them exploit this while ensuring it never gets solved. The MSM will lead the way. And, women pay.
Democrats always need to replenish their “victim” base and the MSM will be happy to help.
With the box PDT put the Dems in with the Dreamers, they may lose a segment of “victims” that will shill and vote for Democrats.
#MentorHer…#ForgetIt
Arianna Huffington is clueless. As are all the leftists who claim to be #feminists but are in actual fact #fascists – as Rush says, “Femi-nazis.”
I like “Uterofacists” better.
The point of no return was probably passed when bad taste in jokes would torpedo some poor bastard just as thoroughly as sticky octopus hands or serial rape as a hobby. “Hostile work environmet” et al.
Is the problem women, or American courts? It probably doesn’t matter. Men understand cause and effect. Women are essentially unhireable, in the sense that far too often the costs (risks) outweigh the benefits. Too bad, but there it is.
Pence doesn’t seem so strange anymore, does he?
Smart guy.
Very smart.
And Pence’s stance wasn’t even from the point of what others might say so much as he views it as the proper thing to do in regards to other women and his own wife.
So it goes when the freaks decided to weaponize gender. I would never hire a graduate from any liberal colleges, they will never even get an interview.
Cartman has the right idea, “missy, get your bitchass in the kitchen and make me some pie!”
I think the bottom line as to why men are afraid to mentor women is that at any time a woman can make a statement of harassment by a man and that is all that is required to ruin him. How many cases have you heard of where the man proves the woman a liar or at least consented at the time and was cleared of any wrongdoing? It usually takes time to get to the end of a hearing and we all know what happens during that time. The man spends his savings on a lawyer and hopes to just get back to where he was before he started mentoring a woman. The woman? She still gets to say she was harassed and most likely gets to keep her job. Blacks can say they were called the “N” word without any witnesses. Women can say they were harassed by a man with no witnesses. Muslims can say they were called names or disparaging notes left in there homes without a witness. What do we white men get to claim without a witness and get any form of sympathy?
That they were drunk and now choose to live as openly gay…
The Kevin Spacey defense.
Just remember, guys, these #MeToo women don’t speak for all women. I wish they would just shut up.
True. However, they are the ones who have an obliging media at their beck and call.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to determine which ones are like that, or which ones will experience “Sudden Instant Feminist Syndrome”.
Pretty much like dealing with jihadis.
True, but 1) those who are not “like that” will not speak up and want to reserve the power to advance their career by ruining a man for themselves too. 2) There is no way to know who is going to try to “affirmative action” her way to the top.
No they don’t speak for all women. (Thank God!) They are just ruining is for all the other women and men around them. 🙁
The #MeToo BS was nothing more than a vehicle for women to increase their power by hijacking the long overdue reckoning with Harvey Wienstein. Women crawled out of the woodwork to “share” their stories of how they were sexually harassed by Harvey and how they bravely kept their silence, while conveniently forgetting to mention how much money they had made in Weinstein productions over the years. As the liberal media gushed over their trauma [some of which was counted in the millions of dollars] other women immediately saw a way to advance themselves. Simply make a claim of being a victim of unwanted sexual advances and you were suddenly Meryl Streep, a victim who everyone felt sorry for. Never mind that your former boss loses his job, his savings, his wife and is destroyed, over an unproven allegation which is 3 decades old. After all, he is just a man.
The free love movement tried to convince everyone that sex was FREE, that everyone wanted it and was entitled to it and that there were no strings attached. Feminism tried to convince women that they did not need men to survive. At the same time it tried to convince men that they could not survive without a woman to tell them what to do. Did anyone really wonder why Maude’s husband drank like a fish? Men need women and women need men. But, they have to treat each other with respect and observe cultural m ores. Those mores have been being actively eroded since the 1960s. And, this is the result. Well, let’s see if women really can survive without men. It might be interesting.
It might be interesting.
I doubt it will be interesting. It won’t even be surprising.
It will be Europe. Japan too. Demographic decline and death, and far faster than anyone predicts.
Any man who has a close enough relationship to mentor a woman is perfectly set up to be victimized by a woman seeking to advance her own career by ruining his. Mentoring involves a sense that the parties involved are working on the same side. That can no longer EVER be assumed when dealing with a female employee.
Men simply don’t trust women. Too often they are ruled by emotion, are irrational, and randomly so.
It’s not sexism. You can be The Rock leading your patrol to hell and back for 4 years straight. But JUST ONE random descent into emotional hysteria and no man will trust you again. Back in the rear with you guarding the livestock. No one trusts your anymore, not when their lives are in the balance.
You think civilian men are going to trust their careers and freedom to any group of people that, without warning, go batshit crazy? Or don’t know what they really want from moment to moment?
Last night she wanted to be overwhelmed, thrown across the hood of the car and treated like a slut. But this morning she “feels” ashamed and abandoned and YOU DIDN’T GET CONSENT YOU BASTARD!
Heh. Nope. No fricken way any male with sense is going to spin that cylinder.
Men don’t trust women by default. Too illogical, too inconsistent, too unpredictable. And now that women have to power to damn men, without any rights for the accused, they are doing the Atlas Shrug.
Logically, simply not worth the risk to put yourself in that situation.
I should correct that. While it’s not sexist to mistrust people prone to unpredictable actions as a result of emotion trumping reason, it is sexist to stereotype all women of that.
Although, if I need two strong people to lift the steel beam so I can rescue the baby, I’m going to discriminate against the weaker men and all the women.
Thank you, I do agree with that. I have always thought that there are places we don’t belong. Some men don’t belong in those situations, also. I think it’s a case by case decision. Can you do the job?
I did my job, pulled my own weight, never asked for special treatment because I was female. Worked my way up the ladder, raised my two girls, my brother’s two kids, backpacked the High Sierra, did herding trials with my dogs, carted my nephew to endless soccer tournaments, and had fun during it all. I had a couple of run ins with “handsy” male co-workers. I put an end to it all by myself. Men aren’t all angels, either!
Official policy for my company now: Men are NEVER be alone in a room with a woman. Period. Always have to have a third person, just to chaperone (not their term for it, but that’s what they are there for).
That’s been my own policy for years.
Shorter Arrianna Huffington:
“Hey, why have men stopped running through this minefield we made for them?”
“It’s also ensnared many others who engaged in what they believed were consensual acts, only later to be accused of sexual misconduct.”
According to the Christian doctrine, any extra-marital sexual relations are “sexual misconduct”. How strange that in a website that’s motivated so strongly by traditional values, we never mention that, and instead take a “boys will be boys” posture, and boo-hoo over the consequences suffered by men who decided that that doctrine was far too passé to apply to them.
This is not a Christian web site.
I’m not in a long with you until I noticed you left out one of the key players in these affairs. Hint: rhymes with woman.
…nodding along…. damn phone.
And who says “traditional values” must be tied to “christian doctrine”? You don’t have the be religious to have “traditional values”.
Seriously, from what I’ve seen, not having numbers or anything, most of these men getting caught up in #MeToo are virtue-signalling liberals and indeed participated in writing these absurd sexual harassment rules that they find themselves caught up in.
In the case of sexual malfeseance between a man and a woman, if the man was drunk at the time, that works against him, but if the woman was drunk, it serves to exonerate her. Off-color jokes taken as evidence of sexism. I heard of a case at the Philadelphia inquirer where an employee was called to HR for displaying a small picture of his daughter, and just her face. She was deemed ‘too attractive’ which created a ‘hostile work environment.’
So now, I’m supposed to care that these feminized men are getting caught up in these absurd rules and having their lives ruined? Please. I call it justice.
Notice who’s expected to fix the problem?
Men.
Anita-Hill vs. Clarence Thomas launched a thousand corporate “training” sessions as companies tried desperately to find a Safe Harbor from potentially costly lawsuits.
And this likely will launch thousands more. The reality is, there are no safe harbors (but perhaps some safer harbors). Mandatory (if meaningless) “training” can’t buy corporate immunity, but its lack can magnify risks.
The predictable result will be growth of the “training” business, more jobs for all those “studies” majors, and (mostly hidden) resentment at having to put up with this often-bullying training in order to keep one’s job.
Americans used to jeer upon learning that all Soviet enterprises were required to have political officers who were responsible for maintaining political orthodoxy throughout the Soviet empire: what fools they must be, to put up with this nonsense! Yet now it seems we have our own zampolits practically everywhere, in the corporate world and in academia.
Uber Pay Gap: “we find that there is a roughly 7% gender earnings gap amongst drivers.” And female drivers are earning less.
https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf
No, it’s not (overt) discrimination. But surely some sharp legal mind could find some “disparate impact” nugget hiding in there, somewhere? “The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours.”
The conclusion: “gender-based preferences (especially the value of time not spent at paid work and, for drivers, preferences for driving speed) can open gender earnings gaps. The preference differences that contribute to pay differences in professional markets for lawyers and MBA’s also lead to earnings gaps for drivers on Uber, suggesting they are pervasive across the skill distribution and whether in the traditional or gig workplace.”
Irrelevent, perhaps, but maybe not so much when demands for Proportional Representation seem to be everywhere, and “women earn xx cents for every dollar a man earns” claims never cease.
Can an organization still treat and evaluate employees as individuals, and not as “representatives” of some larger group? Probably not without incurring some substantial risk.
Uber Pay Gap: “we find that there is a roughly 7% gender earnings gap amongst drivers.” And female drivers are earning less.
https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf
No, it’s not (overt) discrimination. But surely some sharp legal mind could find some “disparate impact” nugget hiding in there, somewhere? “The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours.”
The conclusion: “gender-based preferences (especially the value of time not spent at paid work and, for drivers, preferences for driving speed) can open gender earnings gaps. The preference differences that contribute to pay differences in professional markets for lawyers and MBA’s also lead to earnings gaps for drivers on Uber, suggesting they are pervasive across the skill distribution and whether in the traditional or gig workplace.”
Irrelevent, perhaps, but maybe not so much when demands for Proportional Representation seem to be everywhere, and “women earn xx cents for every dollar a man earns” claims never cease.
Can an organization still treat and evaluate employees as individuals, and not as “representatives” of some larger group? Probably not without incurring some substantial risk.
What, me hire a woman? And then start preparing for trouble now, tomorrow, or sometime in the future because of what I did or didn’t do. No thanks. It’s just to much of a risk. I’ll go with the male and work with males. The women can go and form their own partnerships; I don’t want to be in their partnership and I don’t want them in mine. Too bad, cause sometimes the woman is actually the best candidate. But the baggage has been too much for a long time and it’s becoming clearer and clearer every day. And my opinion is becoming more and more underground everyday.
Interesting and pertinent to the conversation.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/mediocritytoo-15705.html
To perilous to even open a door for a women or get in an elevator with a women these days.
This is a legal blog so there are plenty of lawyers out there and if you’re well trained (and even if you aren’t) you can see the obvious risks and the utter lack of clarity. And the fact is that the topic has been weaponized. When you consider that (a) virtually anything can now pass for “harassment, (b) women “must be believed”, and (c) some women are openly calling for heads regardless off guilt (they are “okay with” false or incorrect accusations and ruined careers, it isn’t hard to see how toxic gender relations at work have become.
We advise our clients about risk. This risk is real and has an unreasonable level of probability so it cannot be ignored. Men who interact with women bear this risk and it is clearly heightened.
When vaccine makers were being sued relentlessly in the 70s and 80s, they started to exit the business en masse. The gov was faced with a public health crisis and passed the Nat Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. When women find the pullback is real, perhaps they will police their own and promulgate some bright line rules. But until they do, keeping your distance from women, avoiding them, clamming up when a women enters the room, and shutting them it socially is easy, legal and effective. You can’t be convicted of a crime when you were never at the scene.
Tonight I had a date. I’m pretty sure she’s interested in me and one way I knew it was that she brought up Metoo and said how much she disagrees with it. She may feel that way but I took it as her trying to put me at ease.
That’s where we are today. As we say at the end of our letters, be guided accordingly.
My perspective includes a cost-benefit analysis. I think, how many planes going down does it take for some people to avoid that airline for a while? Or, if one were to notice that a plane crashes once every few months somewhere in the world, might some people start avoiding flying all together? Women want men to take sexual harassment in the work place seriously and I have no problem with that, because I don’t consider work to be a social club or a dating service–I am being paid to be productive, not hang around and socialize. As with the plane crash, until women take just as seriously the massive effects of even one man losing his career, livelihood, family, and future for something that he either simply did not do, or for displaying some bad judgment–and all one has to do is look at the MANY instances of this in recent years–then wise men at work will simply avoid any interactions with women because NO such interactions are immune to an allegation that might end a career. Despite many women’s claims that all men have to do is to ‘follow common sense guidelines at work and nothing will happen’, the fact is that in today’s work place, virtually anything you do or say, as a man interacting with a woman, in a one-on-one situation, can get you fired. From a man’s perspective, it is not the likelihood of this occurring that is the point, it is that it can occur at all. That a man can be fired on the word of one aggrieved women, who may even be ‘recalling’ an incident 15 years prior, with no due process whatsoever, is unconscionable. After #metoo, what senior male executive in his right mind would continue to engage in mentoring younger female executives? The fact is, her future success is not his responsibility; what is his responsibility is to make sure his own future is protected. Until legal Due Process becomes mandatory in ALL organizations, then men should just ‘lean out’ at work and take care of themselves. In any case, men owe women at work absolutely NOTHING, and any guidance that men do give women in the work place should be met by a chorus of ‘thank yous’, but when was the last time anyone noticed a woman expressing such gratitude? It is simply not worth it to help women at work–let them grow up and help themselves. Can we all graduate from Middle School already?!