Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. — 2 Timothy 2:22-241
The principle in this quotation is the basis of what’s since become known as the “Modesto Manifesto”, the “Billy Graham Rule”, and most recently, the “Mike Pence Rule”. A pithy statement of it is Never dine alone with a woman. For Mike Pence, he won’t even consume alcohol without his wife present.
When Pence’s application of the rule came to light as part of the muckraking that followed his vice presidential nomination in 2016, it inspired a furor. Some claimed it was sexist, Kamala Harris denounced it as “outrageous”, and some commentators went so far as to question the legality of the practice. On the other hand, there were people claiming the rule is good or inevitable for public figures. In the opinion of Polish science fiction writer Jacek Dukaj, movements like #MeToo make Pence’s personal code of etiquette unavoidable because there are no other ways to avoid today’s “New Puritanism”. Quoting from the Atlantic,
Socially liberal or non-religious people may see Pence’s practice as misogynistic or bizarre. For a lot of conservative religious people, this set-up probably sounds normal, or even wise. The dust-up shows how radically notions of gender divide American culture.
With a description so apt, whatever you feel about the matter, Pence’s personal is now certainly political.
So what would happen if we had a society-wide experiment in forcing Pence’s rule on people? As it happens, #MeToo laid the grounds for such an experiment. A recent preprint2 showed that was exactly what happened in the domain of economic research.
What appears to have happened is that after #MeToo hit its stride, female economists started fewer new projects and roughly 60% of that was because male economists become warier of collaborating with female economists.
Accordingly, after #MeToo, the number of women in the sample was conserved, but women’s research productivity fell behind since men’s seemed to be unaffected.
I don’t think this is mysterious. The author of the preprint said “Women do not substitute for lost collaborations. Men do not experience the same decline in productivity post #MeToo, as they substitute the reduction in collaborations with women with new collaborations with men.” Since the field has more men and the men in economics are older and thus more likely to have lucrative grants and graduate students in their employ, it’s easier for men to find substitutes.
What else do we know? The estimates are a bit heterogeneous, but there are some clear findings that ring out.
The effect on women’s new projects was stronger when university policies on “impersonal harassment” were more ambiguous and when the number of past public sexual harassment cases at a university was greater.
Female economists did not become less likely to work with women alone or women and men together, but they were less likely to work with men alone. This extended to new projects and new papers.
Female economists did not become less likely to work with untenured colleagues, but they were less likely to collaborate with tenured professors. This effect seemed to be attributable to tenured professors working at higher-ranking universities that saw larger reductions in cross-sex collaboration.
Female economists became less likely to initiate new projects with new and existing coauthors, and this effect was due to reductions in the numbers of new projects with new coauthors inside the university and of new projects with new coauthors outside of the university. The same pattern was observed for coauthorship generally.
The paper argues that what happens after we start practicing what 2 Timothy 2:22 tells us to is that women take a professional hit. The author of the paper offered two stories to explain her results:
Men think “#MeToo means if I accidentally say the wrong thing, I’ll be cancelled/fired. I’d better stay away from women.” Clear policies show that “saying the wrong thing” doesn’t get you cancelled/fired, so clear policies reduce men’s (perceived) risk of #MeToo.
and
Women think “#MeToo means I don’t have to work with the predator men anymore, so I’ll avoid them.” If that’s the story, we should see the decrease in collaborations regardless of whether policies are clear or not.
To be fair, both of her stories may be true to different degrees. Policy ambiguity doesn’t explain the whole reduction in collaborations in her data. Because that is the case, unless her policy ambiguity measures weren’t good enough, her suggestion that “#MeToo plus clear policies could create awareness for sexual harassment without hurting women’s productivity” may be misguided. Sure, ambiguity reduction looks like it could curb these changes a bit, but if we trust her measurement we have to conclude that some amount of damage is inevitable.
#MeToo has made us all evangelicals, and women are the victims of that change.
The King James version of this quotation may seem more appropriate. It goes: “Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart.”
I recently had a friend tell a strange story about a guy at his office job at a Fortune 500. A few single women in the office complained to this guy’s boss that he doesn’t interact with them socially. He’s polite and professional in the office, and will go out for drinks with some of the guys, but won’t do the same with the women, even in mixed company. They said they are feeling discriminated against because they are women.
Apparently this guy was brought in for a talking to and he tried to understand what policy he was violating, but there is no policy requiring men at the firm to go out drinking with women. So his boss instead put some subtle pressure on him to ‘do the right thing’, the implication being the right thing was going out drinking with the single women.
Now this guy is in a position where no matter what he does he’s either risking annoying his boss or putting himself in a situation he doesn’t want to be in with work colleagues. Yet, still he refused to join the women for drinks.
These women didn’t give up. They went and complained again! Again this guy was brought in for a talking to. His boss knows full well why he’s not going out with the women but he has to pretend he has no idea and again tells him to do the right thing.
The poor guy resigned that afternoon.
So this whole story basically made no sense to me. Why were these women targeting this particular guy? Did he do something to them? Did they not like him? Trust me, when I tell you it’s all going to make sense.
The guy in question was previously a cover model for Men’s Fitness magazine. Drop dead handsome, super fit and smart as a whip, everything a single woman wants. These women wanted to get with this guy.
Our stupid society deserve an asteroid.
I'm very confused as to the objective of this post.
If it is trying to decry the effects of the Mike Pence rule in wider society, it falls flat since describing #MeToo as a 'society-wide experiment forcing Pence's rule on people' seems somewhere between tenuous and wrong. You need to back this up with more than one study with incredibly limited scope.
If it is trying to describe a negative effect of #MeToo, that of damaging working relationships between men and women, it absolutely fails to convince me that:
1. The major cause of the reduced collaboration in Econ academia is #MeToo, as opposed to any other of the myriad possible cultural changes in this time
2. This one paper is ridiculously insufficient evidence for anything beyond weak claims specifically about collaboration in Econ academia
3 (the big one). That this is a problem with #MeToo, rather than a problem with Academia. If academia cannot accommodate a culture where it is *ok and accepted to avoid predatory men* without damaging women's ability to operate productively, *that feels distinctly like academia needs to change, not #MeToo culture*
(Also the religious overtones make little sense if this is the goal).
Also, the final quote: '#MeToo has made us all evangelicals, and women are the victims of that change' left a bad taste in my mouth. It seems to imply that a culture where women feel able to call out *predatory behaviour by men* is not beneficial to them, or to society. That's a very strong point, and requires justification. This post makes little attempt to grapple with this, hence the final quote feels shoehorned.