Wall Street Rule for the #MeToo Era: Avoid Women at All Cost

This sort of fear-based hypercorrection, a misguided but not necessarily ineffective form of risk avoidance, happens in many walks of life. The same calculus is at the root of non-lower-class whites (as well as nearly everyone of high status) in the US avoiding neighborhoods with blacks and latinos. To them, the visible race serves as a proxy to all sorts of unpleasantness they wish to avoid, purely on correlation, and even as racism has moved more and more towards being publicly unacceptable, the habits of racist behavior remain because, unfortunately, of their perceived utility by those who apply them.

The utility function here is similar. The men in these situations have a lot to lose because they're in positions of power, yet live in relative obscurity without the social support system afforded to well-known public figures. They may or may not engage in behavior that's actually sexist, and they may or may not engage in behavior that's sexual harassment. False accusations of sexual assault, by all indications, are rare, and any accusation is reputationally costly to accusers in many ways. Data about false accusations of sexual harassment is harder to come by, as it's rarely treated as a criminal matter. But the statistics don't matter when the drastic outcome is so dire: if any of these men were to be accused, the current political climate ensures their careers and reputations will meet a swift end. To many, this is an unacceptable risk that requires mitigation.

The judicial “beyond reasonable doubt” process is far from perfect, it has many shortcomings and is only suitable for the justice system because we’ve decided that it’s much better for someone guilty to walk free than for someone innocent to be incorrectly punished. This doesn’t work in smaller environments, like an office, because if the guilty walks free then the innocent person — the victim — suffers directly by their continued and unavoidable presence in their life.

I have served on a jury in a sexual assault trial and after what I’ve seen of the process first hand I would rather work for a company that doesn’t roleplay as the judicial system and instead believes the victim and uses the preponderance of evidence approach for determining guilt.

Most people guilty of sexual assault (in the literal sense not the legal sense) will never face any legal consequences because of how the judicial system works: I would never want to work in an office where the same was true.

Cowardice, defined here as the lack of personal integrity in the face of occupational hazards, can sometimes be rational and sometimes be emotional.

Some of the men are demonstrating a rational argument (albeit based on flawed statistics), but they're using it to justify running away from the problem rather than addressing it.

Isn't the topic at hand how businesses should handle the balance between keeping harassment out of the workplace, but not, in the name of that cause, overzealously punishing people who are implicated as having harassed somebody? Surely you're not suggesting that 100% of such cases fall into either: A. Crimes the victims of which should go to the police with. or B. So harmless that no business should ever take any action on it.

I would probably agree with an argument, if you were to make it, that the punishments in some of these cases that are driven by the reaction of larger social groups are too quick and too harsh. However, it sounds to me like you're making a much more extreme case that I have to disagree with.

> Colleges, businesses, and online communities almost always simply believe the victim, and even if a trial should occur and the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion

If you flip this statement, you find yourself in a similarly bad situation: if you always assume the perpetrator is innocent, the victim is now in a world of hurt until / if they can get a conviction. Unfortunately a lot of times for various reasons (many to do with the psychology of being a _person_, e.g. shame / no report, shock / slow to report) it devolves into "he said she said" because there's no physical evidence anymore The result is that women live in a state of _perpetual fear of men_. And that's current state.

^ That's not even to mention that women are disproportionately likely to be assaulted / hurt by men than the other way around.

I'm not saying _presuming guilt_ is good. But that's not what happens, and your statement is a bit misleading. When you mention "firing/expelling/crucifying" you must remember these are usually done with pretty thorough investigation / good reason to believe the victim; there are far and away more cases of offenders getting away with their misdeeds.