The Perception and Prevalence of Sexual Harassment — #MeToo?
No-one who hasn’t had their eyelids sewn shut, or who hasn’t had their ears surgically removed could have missed the recent rash of stories of sexual harassment and sexual assualt that people have experienced flooding social media. I feel for those people, having been through it myself.
But it’s an emotional outpouring. And unfortunately, emotions are often untrustworthy. Consider it an empathy bomb — a way to make you, the reader, feel something and react.
Having always been a sensitive person, I had to learn defenses against empathy bombs — because without them, I’d have been bullied more. So while others have tissue paper, I have steel armor.
So let’s get our rational heads on, and start analyzing.
The Problem with #MeToo
Firstly, let’s look at what #MeToo states — I’ve been on the receiving end of sexual harassment or sexual assault.
There’s a problem here. For one, it conflates sexual harassment and sexual assault — which aren’t two things that are usually conflated. One problem is the severity of the claim — sexual assault is a serious crime. Sexual harassment is a serious problem too, but…
It’s hard to define. Not because one person’s harassment is another person’s flirting (which it is, usually separated by how much you find the person flirting attractive)… but because different people have different definitions of what sexual harassment is.
Is sexual harassment:
- Is it being cat-called on the street?
- Is it being asked for your number in a bar?
- A person in a position of power in a workplace making inappropriate suggestions, comments or actions towards someone of a sexual nature, with the implied or explicit threat being loss of employment if they fight back?
The answer is… it depends on who you ask, and how you frame the question. #MeToo had none of this. It was a mess with no boundaries or guidelines.
Next, let’s look at unintended consequences. I was, literally, triggered as hell by the whole event. It dredged up things from my past that I didn’t want to think about, because I’ve moved on from it — I’m not a victim, and I won’t let the actions of others define me (see also, bullying). I’m much more than my past history, and I always will be.
But a quick search through social media, or private conversations with people will reveal that many, many others were triggered much more.
So those people had their past — whether it’s sexual abuse from a family member, or gang rape from strangers on a night-out gone wrong — dragged right up into the forefront of their minds. And stuck there for a week.
I hope everyone who was catcalled felt so much better for dragging that up. I also hope that no suicides happened as a result, or increased therapy bills, because that’s incredibly likely.
I know several people who have been raped. All of them were bewildered why people would be bringing up all of this in this way, with no regard for what it dredges up with it. A few were angered by it.
Why?
Because they had moved on, and everyone joining in the #MeToo train temporarily removed them of the ability not to think about what they went through. Even worse, they had no idea of the severity people were talking about. That lack of data seemed like it was trivializing what they went through. And, of course, it brought back the nightmares.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Personal Subjective Experiences
Statistics are nearly useless in this arena. They’re close to garbage — unless you base your analysis on the actual data published by the government on the cases that have been brought to their attention — which are claimed to be under-reported.
We’re going to try anyway, but let’s look at a little psychology first.
Personal trauma affects how you interpret others’ actions. It’s subjective.
I once had a friend who lost their cat. Their cat had been a faithful companion for seven years, and it died.
Myself, having lost all my great-grandparents, one and a half sets of grandparents, and one parent, found it hard to empathize.
Why?
Because I’d been recalibrated. As humans, the worst we have experienced becomes the most exquisite terror that we have or ever will experience.
To them, losing a cat was on-par with the pain of my losing a parent — because they hadn’t been through it yet.
Both positions are valid. We’d both experienced the worst event in our lives… but without experiencing the same events, we had no basis for comparison.
This happens everywhere in life. Our brains are contrast machines. We amplify everything so that it’s black and white.
One person’s rape is another person’s groping in a nightclub. They’re objectively different, but subjectively, they’re similar for the individuals who’ve experienced them.
That doesn’t mean you shame the gropee for not having a sense of perspective — but it does mean that you need to apply a modicum of rational analysis to the problem. #MeToo didn’t allow that.
So now we have a reported epidemic. People just don’t report this stuff! They hide from it, and don’t think it’s important, or they do report it, and it never gets dealt with, so it’s no wonder that more people won’t report it in future.
… except… that position is so divorced from the data we have, that it’s highly suspect.
We are truly in the land of gossip, scandal, shaming and guilt — the most uniquely primate emotions there are. We have the same firmware. We’ve just not had an update yet (and we likely never will — medical science has seriously slowed down evolution by removing the pressure).
The Actual Prevalence of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace
Let’s look at the latest report from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Before I go on, let’s set some ground rules:
The following analysis is based on a single year of events — 2011. We’re using 2011, because it has the largest most complete data-set. There’s also data for 2016, but it’s a smaller set.
It does not take into account people who were harassed multiple times by different people. It does not take into account multiple people who were harassed by the same person — a repeat, serial offender — and this is a highly likely scenario… after all, it’s not like they pay any attention to social rules and mores.
It also doesn’t take into account other years (and I’d find it hard to imagine that the majority of people over the course of their careers from age 21–65–44 years — haven’t been harassed at least once). The data just isn’t there in that report to do the analysis.
In 2011, the EEOC and other agencies received 11,364 filings, ~16% by men. Of these, there were 12,571 resolutions. (Resolutions appear to be the individual charges, so it’s possible that there’s multiple charges per filing).
53% of them were seen as having no reasonable cause when examined — that is, they were not seen as sexual harassment due to either false reports, or the action reported wasn’t actually sexual harassment. 21% were abandoned by the claimant after filling. Assuming that those percentages hold across the general population, that means that 9,293 of those 12,571 were not actually valid — roughly 74%.
That leaves 3,278 cases for 2011.
The working population of the US in 2016 was ~112,560,000 (not seasonally adjusted).
The prevalence here is then 0.0029%, or 1 in every 34,338 people. That’s still terrible, and absolutely should be eliminated, but it’s not at epidemic levels.
For comparison, in 2015, 37,461 people died in car crashes in the United States. That’s a prevalence of 0.03% or 1 in 3,333 people. Over ten times as many.
Even if we assume that sexual harassment is reported 100x less than it occurs, that would mean that it happens to only 1 in 343 people per year. If it’s more than 100x more common than is reported, I would honestly be surprised — that’s a lot of generosity to apply to the numbers.
But let’s not use my figure for it. Let’s use the best data I can find on under-reporting.
The Huffington Post, reported that only 1 in 3 women report sexual harassment when they experience it… which is much higher (33x) than the 1 in 100 I used above.
A new survey found that one in three women between the ages of 18–34 has been sexually harassed at work.
Cosmopolitan surveyed 2,235 full-time and part-time female employees and found that one in three women has experienced sexual harassment at work at some point their lives.
…
Out of the women who said they’ve experienced workplace sexual harassment, 29 percent reported the issue while 71 percent did not.
Something’s wrong here. If 29% reported the issue, and 1 in 3 women have experienced it, that should be 9.57% lifetime. If it’s between the ages of 18–34, that means over 16 years, that’s 0.6% per year.
Let’s use the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, and see what we get:
That’s an estimated 24,575,500 workers. Or 147,453 reports. Assuming that only 29% report it, that’s 42,751 reports per year. Over four times higher than the 10,000 that the EEOC received — even ignoring if those reports were accurate.
Even The Guardian’s figure of only 60% of people reporting it implies that my 100x estimate is incredibly generous:
This week, the media is reporting that roughly 50% of women have been sexually harassed. What definition are they using? Because that should be ~600,000 reports a year, give or take, if it’s truly that prevalent. The reporting data we have is 114x smaller than that.
There’s something wrong with the data here. Either people are lying about whether they report it or not, people are lying about prevalence, people have a loose definition of what actually constitutes harassment — which doesn’t match reality, the polls are unscientific and skewed, or some combination of the above.
Let’s be generous, and assume that things are actually only 1/4 as bad as people are claiming, and lots of people are conflating per year and lifetime — because that’s an easy mistake to make.
While bad things do happen to good people all the time, prevalence matters. Humans are great at reacting to scandal. It’s baked into us at the primate level, and was historically a survival trait. It also means that we have a tendency to amplify the bad.
Even worse, we have a tendency to ascribe cause and effect poorly.
So let’s look at the next problem… which is that one person can cause a lot of damage, and it can be ascribed to entire populations of people — in this case, men.
One Bad Apple Spoils The Bunch
One bad actor — acting randomly and opportunistically — can make people think that problems are much worse than they are. Harassers tend to harass multiple people — look at Harvey Weinstein, for example. Why limit themselves at one? After all, it’s a power game for them.
As an example, let’s take Steve. Steve is a mild sociopath. He doesn’t understand human interaction all that well. In fact, he doesn’t really get that there are rules to interactions.
Steve has testicles though, brimming with testosterone and semen, and like most men, has an evolutionary imperative to further the species. Which, for him, means getting some.
So Steve goes out to a bar (every Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes Thursdays too), and he hits on four women — sloppily, offensively, and irritatingly. He strikes out. He has a few drinks. He moves on to the next bar to see if he has better luck there. He gropes a couple of women, makes inappropriate jokes, and tries to get someone’s number. He still strikes out.
He goes to another bar, and hits on another three or four women, before being drunk — and even more uninhibited — enough to hit the club.
Where he gropes four or five women, before finding one who is amenable to his tactics.
I’m not saying that all men are like this, or that all men are like Steve. So let’s talk about Paul.
Let’s pick another guy — Paul. He’s much more cautious, but he goes out to bars and talks to people. He’s well behaved. He maybe manages to pick up one woman every three months, and maybe approaches one woman every couple of weeks — politely and respectfully. He’s nice, well behaved, always calls back, takes them out to dinner, but ultimately he’s a bit of a pushover.
Paul is a good guy. No-one would ever claim he’s a harasser, even on his worst and drunkest night.
In the time that Paul has respectfully talked to 26 women, Steve has harassed 1,352 women (assuming that Thursdays are quiet for him).
Now, let’s assume that only 1 in 5 men are as bad as Steve. It’s probably way lower, but let’s be generous here.
So for every four Paul’s who approach 104 women on a night out at the bar, Steve harasses 1,352 women — or 13x as many.
Because each Steve harasses completely different women, each Paul approaches completely different women, and no-one approaches the same woman twice, it’d be easy to assume that there’s no difference between the Steve’s and the Paul’s. In fact, because Steve harasses so many women in an evening, more women run into him, and it’s more memorable (because they’re harassed by a jerk).
Quickly, word spreads, and it looks like there are many more Steves than Pauls. Even though the Pauls outnumber them.
No wonder all men are evil.
Or, in this case, one heroically maladjusted douche makes it look like there’s an epidemic in play. And that’s not even taking into account that a small segment of the population lie for personal gain, exaggerate to tell a better story, or like the extra lift that claiming victim status gives them. (Emotional vampire is a term that has fallen out of fashion. It might be a good idea to dig deep and remember what one of those is).
So What’s The Real Story?
It’s hard to say.
Once you put serial offenders into the mix, it’s certainly not clear-cut. Look at Harvey Weinstein — after all, with plenty of people coming out of the woodwork to say that he sexually harassed or assaulted them, it’s pretty clear that one bad person can do an incredibly large amount of damage.
However, we’re not undergoing an epidemic.
Most people will be sexually harassed at least once in their lifetime — lifetimes are long, and life is a contact sport. We don’t have courtship rituals any more. We have tinder, and bars, and grindr, OKCupid, alcohol (or other drugs!), and nightclubs. There are no rules. There’s no school for this. And there are sociopaths and other maladjusted people of all genders in society. So people are going to get burned. They’re going to get hurt.
It’s ridiculous to think that it’s possible to entirely prevent it. So now we’re dealing with matters of degree. How much can you accept as the cost of doing business for being a human on planet Earth?
Adversity builds character, and it’s how you react to it, and what you learn from it that’s important.
The only way forward is for people to report when they experience these problems. If everyone reported it, we might find that the reality isn’t as bad as it’s painted. Or we might find that it is, and the abusers would be brought to justice.
But posting about it on Facebook or Twitter? That isn’t going to change a thing. We were all aware of the problems before #MeToo came along. We’re not any more aware now than we were before. We’re scandalized, we’re gossiping, and some are shaming others into taking action.
That doesn’t change anything. All it does is cause the pendulum to swing harder — and the pendulum always swings back.
— Anna Liszt
