Contributing to the Global #MeToo Movement

• Jurisdiction: United States

Contributing to the Global #MeToo Movement

Ann M. Noel¹

In 2006, Tarana Burke, an African American activist working with victims of sexual harassment and assault, coined the phrase "MeToo" on social media to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in society.² In October 2017, after the New York Times³ and The New Yorker⁴ broke their stories about multiple accusations of sexual assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, the actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women on Twitter to say "#MeToo"⁵ if they too had experienced sexual harassment or assault.⁶

If the phrase in 2006 had limited reach beyond Burke's 500 social media followers,⁷ by 2017, with the widespread coverage of the Weinstein scandal, and widespread usage of social media worldwide, the hashtag went viral with 12 million posts, both in the United States and internationally.⁸

In many instances, the movement was producing remarkable changes in how accusations of sexual harassment were perceived and handled by employers, the news media, and society. For the first time, powerful men—producers, directors, news anchors, coaches, and employers—were losing their jobs because of their harassment of persons (usually, but not always, women) over whom they had wielded power.⁹ As Catharine MacKinnon pointed out, "#MeToo was accomplishing changes that the law so far had not. Sexually assaulted women were being believed and valued who had been disbelieved and denigrated."¹⁰

The Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law ("Center") Proposes a Book on the Global #MeToo Movement

In October 2017, I was working with my co-editor, Berkeley Law Professor David Oppenheimer, on projects with the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, which David had founded in 2011. We were discussing what topics to feature at a conference for the next spring and we were both mesmerized, and more than a little obsessed, with the developments around sexual harassment. David started his career prosecuting, among other workplace misconduct, sexual harassment cases for California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing. I started mine at the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission working with legislators to write good state laws to hold to account sexual harassers and their employers, writing regulations to interpret those laws, and adjudicating as an administrative law judge sexual harassment cases that lawyers like David prosecuted before me.

Work with the Center gave us a unique international vantage point to examine the problem of sexual harassment. The Center brings together legal scholars, activists, NGO workers, government anti-discrimination agency lawyers and officials, and legal practitioners from six continents to address the problems of systemic inequality and discrimination. Our principal mission is to expand our understanding of inequality and discrimination through the tools of comparative legal studies and to transfer that knowledge from those who study inequality to those who enforce anti-discrimination law (and vice versa).

Although we are a scholarly center, our objective is not simply to study the problem of inequality and discrimination, but to help activists/advocates use the work being done by scholars to bring positive change globally. And the #MeToo movement presented a challenge, a rebuke, and an opportunity for us to acknowledge how current laws had helped but also hindered sexual harassment victims, and to join with activists worldwide to advocate for necessary changes in the law to support victims and to promote gender equality.

Inspired by #MeToo, we formed our Sexual Harassment/Violence Working Group in the fall of 2017 to examine how the global #MeToo movement was affecting the legal and social movements against sexual harassment and violence. I co-direct this Working Group along with California practitioner Amy Oppenheimer,¹¹ who has pioneered professional standards for workplace investigations of harassment allegations. I had served as the former general counsel of California's Fair Employment and Housing Commission. Priding itself as the national leader in development of progressive laws on sexual harassment, the Commission worked with the California legislature to pass innovative laws over the past 30 years, to hold employers and sexual harassers accountable for harassment, and to support harassment victims. Yet with the revelations exploding about widespread sexual harassment affecting women worldwide, including California, it was clear that a complete rethinking about the problem was in order.

Responding to the MeToo movement, the Center held two conferences, in May 2018 and 2019, with thought leaders from universities, industry, NGOs, and government, and with participants from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. Our discussions focused on how the worldwide #MeToo movement was changing the public discussion of sexual harassment on every continent. After a series of fascinating reports about the progress the movement has driven, as well as the backlash against women reporting sexual harassment and violence, we decided to write this book on the global impact of the movement, utilizing many of our conference participants and Center members as our authors.

Assessing This Moment

For the 48 authors of this book—equality scholars, legal practitioners, and activists—the #MeToo movement was a moment of great reckoning. Many of the authors had written books, law review articles, and their PhD theses on the subject, had worked with their legislative bodies to pass...