Some months ago, Lean In published the results of a survey by Sandberg and Pritchard showing a dramatic increase in the share of male managers who fear close interaction with female coworkers. Specifically:
60% of managers who are men are uncomfortable participating in a common work activity with a woman, such as mentoring, working alone, or socializing together. That’s a 32% jump from a year ago.
The survey’s creators were dismayed:
This is disastrous. The vast majority of managers and senior leaders are men. They have a huge role to play in supporting women’s advancement at work—or hindering it…
There’s not a company in the world that can afford to leave talent on the sidelines because that talent is female. But that’s what will keep happening unless all of us—especially men—commit to doing better.
Most commentators found male managers’ reluctance to mentor women especially reprehensible and irrational. Male managers aren’t just undermining gender equality; they’re paranoid. How so? Because innocent men have nothing to fear except false accusations – and these hardly ever happen. Thus, Prudy Gourguechon remarks:
The implication of the surveys is that men are afraid of being falsely accused. But false accusations of sexual impropriety are actually very rare.
Mia Brett tells us:
Despite the framing of this story, male managers refusing to mentor women started long before #MeToo. Furthermore, fears of false accusation aren’t supported by statistics.
[D]ealing with men’s unrealistic fears around false accusations will require unfamiliar amounts of self-reflection on the part of the men in question.
Some men also like to claim that women are fabricating claims. Those fears are largely unfounded, Thomas said. She points out that the same myth surrounds sexual assault. False accusations make up a very low percentage of reported rapes, according to several studies — in line with other types of crime.
While it’s dauntingly hard to credibly estimate the rate of false accusation, I suspect all the preceding authors are correct. Human beings rarely invent bald harmful lies about others.
On reflection, however, this hardly implies that male managers are paranoid or otherwise “irrational.” For three reasons:
1. You have to multiply the probability of a false accusation by the harm of a false accusation. Since the harm is high, even a seemingly negligible probability may be worth worrying about. Consider this passage in Fiouzi’s analysis:
But according to Richard J. Reddick, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin, there is, practically speaking, no evidence to justify the Pence Rule [not dining alone with women other than your wife]. “You often hear about men being falsely accused of sexual harassment,” he says. “[But] the University of California, San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health conducted a study recently that revealed that two percent of men and one percent of women had been falsely accused of sexual harassment or assault, so in fact, accusations, and particularly false ones, are exceptionally rare.”
Taking these estimates at face value, it’s hard to see the paranoia: A 2% chance of severe career damage is a serious risk, especially given the low personal benefits of mentoring. Furthermore, managers are far more tempting targets for false accusation than ordinary co-workers, so their probability of being falsely accused plausibly rises to 4%, 6%, or even 10%.
2. In any case, a low rate of false accusation multiplied by a long mentoring career could still readily lead to multiple false accusations. So it’s hardly imprudent for many male managers to respond with great caution. Remember: The chance you’ll die in a car crash today if you don’t wear a seat belt is a rounding error. The chance you’ll eventually die in a car crash if you habitually don’t wear a seat belt, however, is nothing to scoff at.
3. As I’ve explained before, truly malevolent actions – such as falsely accusing others – are far less common than misunderstandings. Misunderstandings are a ubiquitous unpleasant feature of human life. One common way to avoid this unpleasantness is to avoid social situations likely to lead to misunderstandings. This strategy is especially tempting if, in the event of misunderstanding, others will presume you’re in the wrong. So again, it’s hardly surprising that many male managers would respond to changing norms (#BelieveWomen) by playing defense.
What then should be done? The emotionally appealing response, sadly, is to fight fear with an extra helping of fear: “You’re too scared to mentor? Interesting. Now let me show you what we do to those who shirk their mentoring responsibilities.” If this seems like a caricature, carefully listen to what the authors of the original survey have to say:
Ugly behavior that once was indulged or ignored is finally being called out and condemned. Now we must go further. Avoiding and isolating women at work—whether out of an overabundance of caution, a misguided sense of decorum, irritation at having to check your words or actions, or any other reason—must be unacceptable too.
The problem, of course, is that mentoring is too informal to easily monitor. Unless someone loudly announces, “I refuse to mentor women,” there’s not much you can do to him. Mentoring quotas are likely to flop for the same reason.
The alternative is obvious, but unpalatable for activists: Put the frightened people whose assistance you need at ease. Be friendly and calm, gracious and grateful. Take the ubiquity of misunderstandings seriously. Don’t zealously advocate for yourself, and don’t rush to take sides. Instead, strive to deescalate conflict whenever a misunderstanding arises. This would obviously work best as a coordinated cultural shift toward good manners, but you don’t have to wait for the world to come to its senses. You can start building your personal reputation for collegiality today – so why wait to get potential mentors on your side?
If you’re tempted to respond, “Why should I have to put them at ease?,” the honest answer is: Because you’re the one asking for help.
If that’s the way you talk to others, though, don’t expect them to give you honest answers. Intimidation is the father of silence and the mother of lies. If you have to use threats to exhort help, you’ll probably just get a bunch of empty promises.
READER COMMENTS
Daniel Klein
Feb 5 2020 at 9:47am
Great post.
“Be friendly and calm, gracious and grateful.”
Those virtues are of course exactly what k-12 and college today instill in young men and women.
zeke5123
Feb 5 2020 at 2:08pm
I am less convinced the commentators are correct on false reports, largely based on at least one commentator analogizing to the false report on sexual assault.
However, the numbers bandied about for false sexual assault claims treat all unproven (i.e., could be false, could be true) claims as true. Let me re-word that — the numerator in the false report percentage is proven false claims; the denominator is everything else. This almost certainly understates the number of false reports, which ex ante I would expect to exceed other false crime reports.
This doesn’t even account for reports that may not be lies by the alleged victims, but are factually inaccurate (i.e., misunderstandings, misremembering).
Based on this, I would guess the magnitude of false sexual harassment claims to be significant (but still well below 50%). However, there is another important point: the observer effect.
Given the transformed corporate world post #metoo, sexual harassment claims are now a superweapon. If the narrative re #metoo is correct (i.e., historically, these claims were not given the light of day), then a low false claims percentage makes sense. But if the claim can now benefit strongly the accuser AND the accuser does not need to produce significant information, then I would expect the rate of false claims to increase.
Therefore, the historic data (which I am guessing is already understated, but cannot be certain) is not useful guidance for executives today. It isn’t surprising that IYI’s don’t get that, but that executives do.
Finally, I would like to add one additional point: there is a principal agent problem here. The principal wants senior agents to mentor the most capable employees (women or men). However, the agent derives little benefit from this and there is a potential cost (the size is debatable). One way to change the calculus is to reduce the cost, but clearly the IYI’s pointing this problem out don’t wish to reduce penalties. So, it seems the other option is to provide large benefits for mentoring. This may fall into the same “informal” problem Prof. Caplan mentions, but might be a way to square the circle if someone is clever enough.
RPLong
Feb 5 2020 at 2:33pm
I emphatically agree with Caplan’s proposed solutions to this problem, and I find this post to be excellent overall.
I think there is also another possible solution here: Reduce the importance of mentorships with improved meritocracy. When promotion and advancement rely on strong social ties to power-brokers, they are more easily corrupted. When promotion and advancement rely on empirical measures of success, there is nothing to argue about; we simply take a look at performance data and promote employees according to their accomplishments.
Of course, many will resist meritocracy because what people really want is to gain a promotion based on their own self-image: “I might not be the best computer programmer on the team, but I have better soft skills!” That sounds perfectly reasonable until you realize that the way we measure “soft skills” is by asking the power-brokers which employee they subjectively like better.
HR departments are supposed to put things in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but we all know what a farce that is. “Rate yourself from 1 to 5, and remember: no one ever gets a 5.” Okay, I rate myself 4. “Sorry, your manager is responsible for your final score. You get a 3.” Then why did you have me self-assess? “Please sign here, confirming that you agree with your self-assessment.” So everyone gets 3’s, and Phil gets promoted ahead of Susan. No one can say this is sexism or favoritism, though, because HR has a paper trail.
Maybe Phil can try the mentoring program.
Christophe Biocca
Feb 5 2020 at 4:33pm
I’m sympathetic to the sentiment, but Goodhart’s law will wreck your attempts at doing this in many cases. Once the employees know what the criteria are (and they will figure it out over time even if you don’t spell it out for them), they will optimize for those even when this decreases their overall performance. The classic cases of measuring programmer productivity by lines of code, or by # of tasks closed, are examples of how this can go wrong.
Mark Z
Feb 7 2020 at 3:28pm
I think you’re taking Goodhart’s Law too far here. Yes, a metric loses some of its value once it becomes a target, but unless it’s trivial to improve one’s measure, it’ll probably retain some correlation with actual quality. Using SAT scores for college admissions may lead to teaching to the test or tutoring undermining the test score’s value somewhat, but they are still highly correlated with intelligence. So using empirical metrics are still probably significantly better than nothing (and the ‘mentoring/social networking’ model of career advancement may be pretty close to nothing).
Michael Stack
Feb 6 2020 at 7:29pm
Wow, your assessment of the corporate review process is dead on.
Philo
Feb 5 2020 at 5:28pm
Another great sentence from Bryan Caplan: “Intimidation is the father of silence and the mother of lies.”
OriginalSeeing
Feb 6 2020 at 2:06pm
If we assume that 60% of men are now unwilling to mentor women and that number just increased by 32% (i.e. was 28% before), then the odds for a specific male mentor to be targeted by someone with bad intentions just doubled.
It’s also worth noting that there’s a fairly small set of actions you can take at work that will harm your whole career. “Don’t take any of the actions that could badly harm your entire career” is a persuasive argument.
Finally, if you notice that all of your friends are giving each other nervous glances and jumping ship, then it’s usually time to go check where the rowboats are stored.
Mark Z
Feb 7 2020 at 3:12pm
Zeke makes a great point above that statistics purporting to show that false accusations are rare don’t actually show that because they use the wrong denominator, and assume all accusations not demonstrably false must be true. I’d add just how counterintuitive this assumption is: if true, it basically means every man accused of sexual assault and charged or brought to trial must be guilty, even if he’s acquitted. Unless the police rule the claim unsubstantiated (which I think usually occurs before charges are pressed and almost always before trial). Iow, unless you believe that we could safely dispense with the whole process of the criminal justice system for sexual assault, then you should not take these statistics as accurate.
With harassment, this problem is even more acute since there’s almost never forensic evidence, just the testimonies of the accuser and the accused (and occasionally maybe a witness). So the logic behind the claim that false accusations are vanishingly rare is circular: given that we assume all claims not obviously false must be true, we conclude that almost no accusers lie. Not really convincing.
Lastly, it’s not just false but also frivolous accusations that are a concern (perhaps even more so). Pretty much any remotely sex-related joke, pun, or comment made in the workplace could, especially once taken out of context, meet the definition of harassment. Given that many normal people (including women) sometimes make such jokes or remarks, and it’s hard for many people to repress parts of their personality in an informal conversational setting, it’s easy to understand why many men would be guarded about fraternizing with women in the workplace. Maybe accusations are fairly uncommon, but part of that may be precisely because men adjust their behavior to reduce the likelihood of being accused of wrongdoing. Ordinarily, I would’ve thought, feminists would applaud such adjustments, they often come with some collateral damage.
Felix
Feb 7 2020 at 9:09pm
I was targeted by a frivolous accusation around 1995. I had a copy of a copy … of a copy of a cartoon of the Batman signal against a night sky, except the bottom curve of each wing had a small bump and it was labeled the Batwoman signal. It had been up for several years, no memory of where it came from, and you could only see it from inside the cubicle. Some HR drone saw it one day, dropping off some memo, and lodged a formal complaint. I narrowly escaped the re-education camps, I think partly because I complained of the unfairness of HR adjudicating a complaint by someone in HR.
What galled me the most was that if the HR drone had asked me, in person, to remove it, I probably would have. It had been on the cubicle wall too long to even notice it any more, or remember who had given it to me. I had zero attachment to it until the HR drone tried to weaponize it.
Abe
Feb 10 2020 at 9:28am
I’d like a clearer citation on the claim that 2% of men are falsely accused of sexual harassment. That is an extraordinarily high figure. As a sanity check, if this figure is true, you almost certainly know multiple men who have been falsely accused of sexual harassment. Not to mention, if 1% of women are falsely accused of sexual harassment, you almost certainly know a woman who has been falsely accused as well.
Fred_in_PA
Feb 13 2020 at 10:56pm
This thread is old enough that I may be able to get away with some foolish openness.
I am amazed at the commenters’ attempts to walk on eggs here.
If asked to mentor a junior woman within the firm, I would not be so much afraid of a false accusation as I would be of a true one!
Consider: We are animals (as much as that may offend some of our more aspirational wishes.) Basic needs such as to eat, to sleep, and to reproduce are foundational, and were already part of our evolutionary heritage hundreds of thousands of years before we were even human. These are not the fashions of an afternoon, easily set aside.
Think too, about human love. I suspect Alice Thomas Ellis nailed it a hundred years ago when she quipped, “There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don’t love anybody. It is quite hopeless.” And take that in the context of “love” defined as “a greater concern for the happiness and welfare of the beloved than of one’s own.” The young man who, if necessary, will lay down his life to protect his young wife’s. The mother who will run into the burning building to rescue her child. And note the flow of resources here: the man will give everything he has to the woman; who will, in turn, give all her resources to the child. Clearly advantageous to the survival of the offspring. (Ellis was right about the lack of reciprocity, too. The woman’s first priority is not her husband’s welfare; her first priority is her child’s. The husband’s welfare is at best instrumental to her in achieving the child’s.)
The mentoring situation, as framed, takes an older and more powerful man and asks him to work alone with a younger woman who needs his help, guidance and (sometimes) protection. Meanwhile, his dowager wife at home is well downstream in her reproductive cycle and likely regards him more as a partner & friend than as a lover & mate. (I’m assuming a good marriage.) Meanwhile, we are counseling the young woman to be “gracious and grateful”. (It will be no surprise that I’m not sure that’s wise.) If this man doesn’t fall in love there’s probably something wrong with him!
These guys aren’t paranoid; It’s just that they’re not suicidal, either.
Jens
Feb 21 2020 at 5:37am
Yes and therefore as an employer or company – if you are dependent on the help of young women or simply don’t want to do without them, because their work and skill can be useful – you should also ensure that their fear remains unfounded, that the small risks of sexual assault when working with different men does not add up to one or more real assaults during a long and productive work life. If you do so, then you don’t have to deal with such unpleasant questions as whether the fear of false suspicion should somehow outweigh the fear of actual rape or vice versa at all.
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