After days of building allegations of sexual abuse, U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell resigned from Congress earlier this week and suspended his California gubernatorial bid. Apart from reverberations across the political sphere, the headlines are shining attention on an employer issue that hasn’t seen much light in recent years: the #MeToo movement.
In an interview on Wednesday morning on CNN, political influencer Cheyenne Hunt, executive director of Gen Z for Change, told anchor Dana Bash that since amplifying the original allegations against Swalwell, she has been inundated with messages from other women containing allegations against sitting members of Congress and “other men in powerful positions across industries.”
“It’s become clear to me that this is a ‘#MeToo’ part 2,” Hunt said. “The volume of women reaching out with credible claims and receipts is truly shocking.”
The #MeToo movement spread in earnest about 10 years ago, as women around the globe gave voice to sexual assault survivors. The momentum drove significant shifts in how employers handle allegations of sexual misconduct, with a 2019 study by PwC finding that, for the first time, misconduct drove more executive departures than poor financial performance. Nearly 40% of the CEOs who left in 2018, PwC reported, did so because of misconduct allegations, sexual or otherwise.
Another study, from a crisis consulting firm, estimated more than 400 high-profile executives and employees were publicly named in the #MeToo movement between 2016 and 2018. At that time, about half of them were fired or had quit, and another 122 were under investigation or put on leave.
While global and workplace headlines were transformed by the start of the pandemic in 2020 and later the emergence of AI, the ensuing years have made this a prime moment for a resurgence of the #MeToo movement, Hunt and Bash said during their discussion this week.
In particular, Gen Z largely hadn’t entered the workforce a decade ago, and now make up about one-third of American employees. This is a population known for being outspoken about needs and expectations, including in the workplace, and particularly around social injustice.
The growing attention on #MeToo is “this generation putting our stake in the ground and saying that we’re not going to stand for it,” Hunt said, “not in any place, not in any place of power. This next generation of women is not going to take it.”
At the same time, the re-election of President Donald Trump has refocused societal attention on the treatment of women.
“We have someone in the White House who’s really comfortable speaking disparagingly about women, treating women differently—or violently, as some people have alleged,” Hunt said. “That has allowed this culture of misogyny to take hold and spread.”
While some corners of social media have exacerbated that problem, the significant uptick in social media reliance since the original #MeToo movement has also fueled an explosion in influencer culture, which, Hunt said, was integral to exposing the allegations against Swalwell.
From the time Hunt and other content creators first started circulating videos relating to the allegations against Swalwell, it took just 11 days for the accusations to go viral. Today, audiences have developed parasocial relationships with creators, driving a level of trust that is making more women come forward—and their stories gain traction much more quickly than a decade ago.
Hunt anticipates that the recent political bombshells are “just the very beginning of this fight” and that the current landscape points to the reality that “we need to have another reckoning.”
“I know there are other people on Capitol Hill who are sweating and there should be men in any position of power right now who are sweating,” she said, “because we’re not going away any time soon.”
Credit: Source link
