I want to burn the frat house of America to the ground.
.. I was riveted by the hearings, and Professor Hill’s testimony about how her old boss, the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, behaved — the references to pornographic movies, to his own sexual prowess, the way he would ask her out, again and again, and not take no for an answer... It’s one thing to say #MeToo, but if I find out it’s them, too, I can picture myself hunting down the man who hurt them and dismembering him with my fingernails and burning the whole world down... When Clarence Thomas won his seat, I felt like someone had taken an eraser to the core of my being, and had rubbed a bit of me away. I felt diminished, a little less real, and, certainly, a lot less likely to be believed if I had anything to say about male colleagues... Bill Cosby was found guilty. Harvey Weinstein is going to trial. Les Moonves lost his job as chief executive of CBS, even if a CBS board member, Arnold Kopelson, said, “I don’t care if 30 more women come forward and allege this kind of stuff.”.. One by one, like bad dreams, the #MeToo men have come back from the allegations against them, having suffered — if that’s even the right word — the equivalent of a misbehaving child’s timeout... Matt Lauer is swanning around Upper East Side steakhouses, reportedly assuring fans that soon he’ll be “back on TV.” Louis C.K. returned to the stage. John Hockenberry is telling his story in Harper’s Magazine, and Jian Ghomeshi is telling his in The New York Review of Books.
.. Women aren’t supposed to want revenge any more than we’re supposed to be angry. It’s not socially approved, not attractive, not ladylike. We swallow our pain and keep our own behavior exemplary while excusing the bad behavior of others, knowing, from examples like Professor Hill’s, what could happen if we speak up, and what we stand to lose.
.. There are famous novels, canonical plays, entire genres of movies centered around men seeking revenge (the “Iliad,” “Hamlet,” every western ever). There aren’t many stories about men righting their wrongs; even fewer about women making men sorry.
The Real Cost of Keeping Les Moonves
Leslie Moonves is a rainmaker and a kingmaker. As the chief executive of CBS, he transformed the television network from last place to most watched. He’s made careers, and he has made a fortune, for himself and for his employer. And that’s probably why the CBS board decided to let him keep his job despite allegations ..
.. When employers receive sexual harassment complaints, they most often try to keep them quiet or retaliate against the victim. They’re afraid that losing their stars will dim the company’s prospects.
.. But corporate boards and managers need to wake up to the reality that sexual harassers, no matter how important they seem, do incredible harm to their companies. They desiccate a culture, draining employees’ motivation. They push qualified employees to leave. And they make their companies vulnerable to a backlash when the problems eventually come to light. It’s stupid, financially, to keep those men around.
.. A study from Harvard Business School looked at the impact of “toxic workers” — those whose behavior harms employees and companies — using data on more than 58,000 employees, from 11 different companies. It found that keeping such a worker, even one who is so productive that a company would have to hire more people to make up for letting him go, was an unwise wager. One toxic worker costs a company about $12,500 in employee turnover alone, yet on average added only about $5,300 to the business. And that doesn’t account for productivity losses or litigation fees.
.. The price for victims of harassment is clear. In a study by three sociologists of survey and interview data of employed women in Minnesota, 80 percent of those who reported experiencing harassment said they had changed jobs two years later, and many also reported “greater financial stress.”
.. That turnover costs companies, too. It’s expensive to recruit and train new employees: Replacing someone costs, on average, nearly $7,000 at an American company, according to research by Deloitte.
.. for those directly affected and for their co-workers. A 2007 review of research by two psychologists and a business school professor found that the most common reaction to experiencing harassment is to withdraw from work, neglecting tasks or simply calling in sick. An employer shoulders that burden, too. The reduction in productivity has been found to cost $22,500, on average, for each person affected by sexual harassment.
.. CBS appears to be a case study in how behavior at the top of a company can trickle down... The biggest predictor of harassment in the workplace, according to a landmark report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, is a toxic culture.. Travis Kalanick resigned as chief executive of Uber last June after a series of scandals involving accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination, but he has bought a controlling stake in another company and again assumed the position of chief executive.