HUFFPOST FOUNDER: USE NUANCE IN MAKING JUDGMENTS
just graduating from college had for toxic gender dynamics that had long been considered pretty normal; college students asked why women had tolerated sexual harassment for so long.
Most of all, many women are wrestling with how this reckoning will work in practice: Who is the judge, who is the jury and what evidence is admissible.
Sherry Turner, a women’s career counselor in Kansas City, said that she was thrilled by the movement but that there needed to be different punishments for different kinds of misconduct — from “somebody makes a bad joke versus someone being physical.” She said that nuance needed to be brought into the conversation. A career center she founded, ONEKC for Women, now plans to host a session in mid-december called “What Women Want From Men in the Workplace,” to push the conversation toward men’s taking responsibility. The program had to be capped at 300 people, something that had never happened in the organization’s eight-year history. There is now a waiting list.
Turner said she also worried about her clients being swept up in the national rage — confronting bosses and co-workers — without a safety net. “I have to counsel them the right way to ensure they’re not flying off the handle,” she said. “For many of the clients we work with, there’s also a reality of needing income.”
The debate over what to do after outing a harasser on social media is just beginning, said Gloria Allred, the longtime women’s rights lawyer, who has clients dealing with the ramifications of social media justice.
“In the court of public opinion, people can say whatever they want, and sometimes they don’t think and just hit the send button. And then they contact me and say, ‘What do I do?’” Allred said. “It’s all bets are off right now.”
Tiffany O’donnell, 48, the chief executive of a professional women’s network in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said the wave of scandals might be causing some men to be too careful around women and overly focused on little issues. One man, she said, recently apologized after calling her and a group of her friends “guys.”
“If that’s how this is going to go, if that’s the new line, we’re going to have a problem,” she said.
And Kristina Tsipouras, 32, an entrepreneur who leads a 12,500-member Boston businesswomen’s group, said she had heard that some women said they might no longer hire men, which was “probably not the right approach.”
For Arianna Huffington, the founder of Huffpost and the wellness business Thrive Global, the blurring of the lines around sexual harassment hit home last month. That was when a photo shoot from 2000 featuring her with Sen. Al Franken, who is resigning his office in the scandal, went viral as an example of his harassment, even though both parties agreed the images were meant to be funny.
Huffington said she celebrated the movement of speaking out, but also called for nuance in the judgments. “Failing to make distinctions between real instances of harassment and satirical playacting trivializes the pain and anguish of so many women who are actually being harassed,” she said.