#MeToo, Now What?

-I was sexually assaulted.

-I was afraid to speak up.

-He grabbed me at work.

-What about due process?

-When you're a star, they let you do it.

-I need to keep my job, so I can't say anything.

-I was afraid to speak up.

-She's a liar.

-All women deserve to be heard.

-Open your eyes.

-What am I supposed to say?

-This has been happening for decades.

-This is "#MeToo, Now What?"

-- a new series examining sexual harassment in America.

-This program is made possible in part I have spent my life amplifying the voices of women who have been silenced and unheard.

In this series, we've examined what is at the core of women's pain.

-Women are still being forced out of their careers, still getting paid less, still being abused.

-Have we co-created a culture of complicity that objectifies women?

-So, if you go into a game as a male character playing a male, every female you come in contact with is physically demonstrating signals that say, "Hey, I'm ready for sex right now."

-Do men have the courage to speak up?

-Now we have to stop being Billy Bush, where we have to withdraw our assent, our silence, when we see that.

-Can women and men find a path to truth and reconciliation?

-I wrote her an e-mail, and I said, "I've come to the point now where I'm ready -- I want to make amends to people I've hurt."

-I know from personal experience that a person who is full of shame and self-hatred is only going to hurt more people.

-With me, to answer the question, "Now What?"

Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United... Tony Porter, CEO, A Call To Men, a violence-prevention organization... and Joanne Lipman, former editor-in-chief, USA Today.

Are we now not into the bigger, structural discussion of the #MeToo movement?

And, to quote Steve Bannon, is it not about patriarchy?

So, here's what he had to say.

"The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo tens of thousands of years of recorded history.

You watch.

The time has come.

Women are going to take charge of society."

Is this the defining moment?

Is patriarchy on its way out?

-The #MeToo movement, right now, has been focusing on the extremes of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

And, unfortunately, there is a tendency for a lot of people to say, "Well, all we have to do is cut out the bad guys, and we're done."

But the true issue is, there's a real systemic problem.

And the reason there's been such outrage since the #MeToo movement began isn't because every woman has been sexually assaulted, but it is because every woman knows how it feels to be marginalized and disrespected.

-Well, when you look at socialization of men, we're taught to have less value in women.

We're taught to view women as a property of men.

We're taught to view women as objects, particularly, sexual objects, right?

Whenever you have oppression, you know, group oppression requires violence.

And so when we're looking at men, there's a minority of men who are violent.

But we, collectively, as men, we benefit from the violence.

And that's what he's talking about when he speaks about a patriarchy.

He's really speaking about how we benefit, you know, from a male-dominating society.

-It's interesting that you mention, actually, sort of the setting of patriarchy.

Because it's also a history to sexual violence against women that -- one we all tolerated, including women.

I recently hosted a panel with Joy-Ann Reid from MSNBC.

-The cultural condition is not equal across all the racial groups.

A lot of this is a discovery, you know, with all due respect, that white women are making, right?

So, you know, 50 years after emancipation, you have Sojourner Truth trying to fight for the right to vote for white women who wouldn't even march with her.

And so you had -- you had white women who have had the protection of men and who have, essentially, been placed on a pedestal by men, and who have, therefore, been valued mostly for their appearance, for their beauty, for sort of being on that pedestal.

And, you know, you talk about the fact that, you know, 1964, we get the Civil Rights Act, '65, we get the Voting Rights Act.

At that point, women still couldn't open up a bank account without a man.

So that you were able to even get racial rights, because as an African-American woman, we were just valued for our labor.

We were just valued for the sweat of our back, like, what we could contribute in terms of production.

But for white women, there's been this sort of discovery that that protection isn't real, right?

I mean, that you still have Fox News pay out tens of millions of dollars in settlements between Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly, but women still can't deliver the news on that network without a tight sweater and a short skirt on.

And so I think what we have here is sort of a disconnect between what women of color have experienced in this country, where you are just labor, you are just cattle, and women, quite frankly, of the majority, who have to choose between the pedestal and their rights.

And so I think what women of color are looking to see is, will women choose their rights?

-I personally found it profound, what she said, you know?

And my question is, beyond the history of race, where are our blind spots on class issues?

-Yeah.

Well, they're very interconnected.

And actually, speaking of emancipation, it was around the time of emancipation that, actually, tipping came to the United States from Europe.

It was an origination of feudal Europe.

When it came to the States, the restaurant industry demanded the right to hire newly freed slaves, most of them women, pay them nothing, and let them live on customer tips.

And that idea was codified into the first minimum-wage law that passed in 1938 as part of the New Deal.

80 years later, today, 2018, the wage is $2.13 an hour.

Even today, 70% of tipped workers -- these are mostly restaurant workers, servers, bartenders -- they're women, suffering from three times the poverty rate of the rest of the US workforce and the highest rates of sexual harassment, literally, of any industry in the United States, because when you're a woman getting practically nothing, literally a slave wage, your wage is so low, it's going entirely to taxes.

You're living completely off your tips, tips from a customer who must approve of you in order for you to get your tips, you will tolerate anything and everything to feed your family because that's where your income is coming from.

-I actually recently interviewed a waitress, and let's see what she has to say about that.

-I worked the overnight shifts, and there was this one cook who really took a liking to me.

And he started by asking me for dates repeatedly.

And I was young, and I didn't really know how to deal with it.

So I would sort of laugh it off.

I always thought that, if I allowed it to be harmless, it would just be harmless.

If that's how I treated it, then it would never go any further.

That's not true.

One night, he actually grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the back of the kitchen, demanding that I give him a kiss.

I said no the whole way.

And then eventually, you know, I swore at him and pulled away and went back out front and told my manager.

She didn't really do anything.

She didn't speak to him.

There was never any discipline.

So I learned very quickly that this is commonplace and this is what I can expect, and because no one was really outraged by it, you know, I sort of had to temper how I responded to it.

Because I didn't want to be overreacting.

You know, I didn't want to be seen as hysterical, or I didn't want to rock the boat.

And I was essentially told by, you know, my manager's lack of reaction that this is normal.

It's gonna happen to you somewhere in that restaurant.

Is it gonna be by a customer tonight?

Is it gonna be by the cooks?

Is it gonna be by, you know, your manager who decided that, you know, you didn't flirt back enough, and now they're gonna give you a terrible section or not seat you or give customers that are notoriously bad tippers?

It comes from all sides.

Like, there is a power dynamic that we're extremely vulnerable to, as tipped workers.

-When I'm listening to the waitress, there's a couple of things.

What happened to her was clearly a sexual assault.

And we, as a people, would clearly define, when he grabbed her by the arms and pulled her in the back and was holding her aggressively and demanding a kiss, that was a sexual assault.

But what he was doing in the beginning, by, you know, constantly asking her out, as a people, we don't immediately call that sexual harassment.

We've created -- And she's talking about how we've normalized things.

We've created this kind of thin line between what would be considered flirting and what would be considered sexual harassment.

Many of us don't even know where that line crosses over, right?

And that's where a lot of the education needs to come in.

It's working with boys, young men, and the education of our behavior as men.

Because what's really required, we believe, at the end of the day, is for men to have a transformative experience, right?

It's not an academic experience.

It's the hearts of men more than the heads.

But there's a long distance between the head and the heart, to get to the heart, right?

'Cause most men we talk to, they're up here.

We want them here.

-That's true.

-And we need to change the structure.

Marie is a young woman.

One in two young women start their work life in this industry, in high school, college, or graduate school.

This is the first job for most women in America.

And this is how they're introduced to the world of work.

This is how they're taught what is acceptable, tolerable, legal, ethical.

So we get comments all the time from senators, celebrities, organizers, and waitresses who say, "I've been sexually harassed recently in my current job.

I didn't do anything about it because it was never as bad as it was when I was a young waitress earning tips."

We affect the entire economy, and there's a clear policy solution.

In California, one of seven states that got rid of this legacy of slavery many decades ago and require that the restaurant industry pay the full minimum wage, we have half the rate of sexual harassment in California.

Why?

Because a woman gets a full wage from her boss.

So she doesn't have to put up with anything and everything from the customer in order to feed her family.

So, are class and race and sexual harassment connected?

Absolutely!

Absolutely.

If you give a woman an actual wage, she has more power.

So, fundamentally, what is the common thread?

Class, race, gender.

It's power.

It's power.

-And, you know, along those lines, there's a wage gap between women and men.

And whether you're talking about a CEO or whether you're talking about a waitress, you know, a janitor makes more than a woman who cleans your office.

The waiter makes more than a waitress.

In nursing, which is overwhelmingly a female field, the few male nurses earn more than female nurses.

So this is -- this is something that cuts a wide swath, and, to your point, it goes to power.

-Now, let's talk about corporate change, corporate culture change.

I recently spoke to Nancy Smith, who represented thousands of women in sexual-harassment cases, including Gretchen Carlson, who sued Fox News.

Let's see what she has to say.

So, every company said we have an HR department, and we have actually a policy against sexual harassment.

And yet, when women are going and reporting, they are either dismissed or shamed or made feel guilty for reporting.

-Well, for one thing, we don't value women.

We value men.

So when a woman goes to an HR department, she is looked at as the problem, and the man is valued more highly.

HR's job is to make their bosses happy, and their bosses are the men that run the company, and they get paid in order to do that.

Now, some people in HR try to do the right thing, and they end up in my office when they get fired.

So, HR is really the company; it's not your friend.

It's really important to understand that.

-So can we ever trust HR?

-No, I don't think we can trust HR.

I think every company needs an independent, investigative arm to investigate sexual harassment.

One, even the concept that most women lie about this is absurd.

Why would you lie about it?

You're gonna lose your career.

At least your job, maybe your career, because of blackballing in many industries.

But we do need to investigate.

So we need an independent entity to investigate.

-Let's talk about Fox News, for example.

They paid a tremendous amount of money for sexual-harassment cases.

But did they change their culture?

-The actual culture's being changed by shining the light of day on it, by -- Gretchen Carlson has been working with Congress, and there's a law that has been introduced to end forced arbitration, end secret corporate courts.

If you're sexually harassed, you don't get to go to court.

Your Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial has been taken away from you already.

You're gonna go to a secret corporate court.

Arbitration is completely confidential.

You can't talk about it.

You can't -- You don't have the rules of evidence.

You don't have the right to appeal if the law isn't applied.

All 50 state attorneys general, Republican and Democrat, wrote to Congress in support of the bill banning forced arbitration, which is quite extraordinary.

That will have a tremendous impact, because it's the light of day that is changing things.

It's not money.

Corporations have lots of money, and they choose to spend it to protect men 'cause men are more valuable to them.

They're more valued than women, period.

-First of all, HR represents the company.

So they are representing the interests of the company.

But even beyond that -- So, right now, what happens is, at most companies, the -- the CEO sort of outsources any sort of harassment training, you know, diversity training.

It is all outsourced to the HR department.

And they wipe their hands, and they're done with it.

That will never, ever work.

It must sit with the CEO -- it must be their responsibility -- and the CFO, the chief financial officer.

And the reason is that, in the corporate world, what we need to understand and internalize is diversity of all types -- of gender, of ethnicity, of sexuality, of socioeconomic status -- is essential to financial success.

The problem with traditional diversity training, which goes back about 30 years, is it was a response to lawsuits, and it was about legal compliance, and it didn't work.

There was a Harvard professor who actually studied 30 years of diversity training at more than 700 companies and found that, for women, as well as for African-American women and men, it actually made the situation worse.

One of the primary issues is simply that the men who were being trained were resentful, and it was largely white men.

And I spoke to a veteran diversity trainer, and he said, "Look, when we started this kind of training three decades ago, that's what we were doing.

We were basically bangin' white guys over the head with a 2x4 and trying to make them feel guilty."

And that absolutely not only didn't work, it was completely counterproductive.

-So how do we change that?

-Well, first of all, diversity training diverts us from the real problem.

Also, multiculturalism doesn't solve the issue, either.

You can have a whole bunch of black and brown people and women at the organization, but if they're not impacting on the power structure, if they're not in decision-making positions, well, you're gon-- Yeah, we're very diverse in numbers, but the power structures haven't been changed.

So that's part of what we have to do.

And, also, traditional sexual-harassment training, as you said, is about litigation.

It's about tickin' the boxes.

It's really about when we reach corporations that really want to infuse this culture change throughout the organization.

It's bigger than the training.

That's where the change is gonna really happen.

-Look, we have deep, deep racial inequality in this country that is ugly and severe.

And any progress we've made on race in this country has been a combination of, yes, some culture change and a lot of forcing people to change.

Segregation was made illegal.

Discrimination was made illegal.

And it requires an iterative process of law being passed, policy being passed, to force some people who will not change with mere culture or incentives and some amount of culture change to bring people along as law moves.

It's an iterative process.

Sometimes law pushes culture.

-That's true.

-Law changes culture.

-That's true.

-And so we need law and policy change that, yes, lifts wages, as I've talked about, but also requires equity and creates greater penalties for sexual harassment, creates greater penalties for severe discrimination and gender pay inequity.

So it's got to be a combination of everything we're talking about.

-And they are doing that in other countries, right?

-Yes.

-So in the UK, recently went into effect, you have to publicize your gender wage gap.

Iceland has passed a law where you must pay men and women equally.

It has a Gender Budgeting Office even to make sure that the government is allotting funds equally to men and women.

-And just to remind everyone, we're still talking, in America, 80 cents to a dollar.

80 cents.

A woman gets 80 cents for every dollar a man gets.

-But that's for women -- for women overall.

But for African-American women -- -And Latina women.

-Latina women are at the bottom.

It's 54 cents on the dollar for Latina women.

-So that's why -- And you're 100% correct.

We do have to have the policy change.

And the #MeToo movement can give energy to that, right?

-Yep.

That's the hope.

-Women are mobilizing in many, many ways that can give energy to that.

But at the end of the day, there needs to be an assurance that whatever gains we make, that it's equitable.

-That is a very, very important point.

We talked about policy.

Now we talked about equality.

We talked about culture.

Let's talk about what one good man, an ad executive, was talking about how he's processing the #MeToo movement.

-Because of the moment we're in, culturally, I feel uncomfortable.

I think a lot of us feel like maybe, right now, we should just shut up.

You know, maybe we need to listen.

What I feel is that there are a lot of people looking for ways to add positivity to the conversation and contribute and to at least show support and not necessarily knowing the right way to do it.

It makes me uncomfortable sometimes, too, because I don't like having uncomfortable conversations and having people be upset around me.

But too bad.

Like, that's what we have to do.

-Bob -- Bob is his name?

-Bob.

-Is uncomfortable.

That's a good thing that he's uncomfortable.

Because prior to that, he was probably like most of us, just on remote control, just kind of doing what we do on a day-to-day basis.

The problem is, we get uncomfortable -- and these are those of us in any privileged group.

We get uncomfortable, and then we practice the privilege of being quiet.

We need to be uncomfortable and move to action, not uncomfortable and then just resort to the privilege of silence.

-And I am frustrated with the good men, and not only because they are not stepping up and doing anything but because they keep saying, "This is a bad guy.

He's doing the bad things.

I'm not doing -- I treat women nicely.

I treat women equally."

But they're still not changing the system.

What do the good men need to do here?

-Well, two things.

One is, there's a real thin line between good men and "bad men" that I don't even like using "good men" or "bad men," all right?

-Tell me.

-Sometimes it's what's legal versus what's not.

Sometimes it is, have you gotten caught, or have you not gotten caught?

Oppression requires violence, right?

Oppression requires discrimination and bad practices and behaviors.

So this group called good men are benefiting every day by the behaviors of those we call bad men.

So I'm not too good with the good and bad.

-I like that.

-What I really liked about the "there is no good or bad" is not just that the good men are entirely good.

It's also that the bad men are not entirely bad.

Nobody -- In restorative justice circles, with criminal-justice reform, we talk about the fact that no human being can be defined by the worst thing they ever did, right?

And that's true, also, for men who engage in these horrible behaviors based on their power dynamics.

And the most beautiful restorative justice thing I can think of is that all men and all women work together to change the structures that we are all a part of.

-And that is actually -- that, for me, is the most important thing, that we need to look at it as a collective behavior.

And there is a price.

One of the men I interviewed talked about the price he is contemplating to pay.

-Sometimes I get hired to do a video, and it's not my concept, right?

So I'm just there as, like, a cameraperson, essentially, capturing what they want.

And, you know, the video is not something that I would ever put on my demo reel.

It objectifies women.

"I'm not showing this to anyone that I know."

And now, of course, I have a daughter, which makes everything I do more under a microscope, because, you know, she'll eventually look like, "What did my daddy do?"

You know?

I kind of now have to rethink all of that stuff, and it's a tricky road, because, again, you want to work.

And the minute you start saying no, people stop calling.

-He's reflecting and thinking, but he's in conflict, right?

About what he's doing, what he's not doing, and what's right and what's wrong, and I think those are all signs of progress.

-I think we need to get beyond reflection and get to awareness.

So many of the issues that we see are parts of unconscious bias.

These are things, you know, these biases that we have that we're not aware of.

And they happen a thousand times a day, you know, every day in your working life.

I mean, just as a one quick for-example, women are interrupted three times more frequently than men.

There was research done on the Supreme Court that found female Supreme Court Justices are interrupted three times more frequently than male Supreme Court Justices.

So, having that awareness is the first step, because then you can take actions to counteract it.

-I mean, I feel like we need to ask ourselves, each, as individuals and as companies and as collective, are we willing to pay the cost?

And what is the cost?

-So the cost is not actually we're all having to sacrifice.

The cost is overcoming our fear of change.

Fundamentally, that's what it is... -I like that.

-...in all sectors.

It's men overcoming the fear of change.

It's the nation overcoming our fear of change.

People are afraid of change, and what we need to do is give people, to overcome fear of change, it's about hope.

Hope is what overcomes fear of change, hope that, actually, the future is better for everybody.

It's more equitable.

We get along better.

Everybody succeeds, not just the women.

The men succeed.

Everybody does better.

-It's not a zero-sum approach.

-This is a moment in history right now.

We're in a moment in history where, whether it be the #MeToo movement or Time's Up or all the rest that's going on in this space over these last few years, that we, as men, have an opportunity right now to decide, which side of history are we gonna be on?

-And I would add, this is not about man-bashing.

This is actually about inviting men into the conversation and getting to the realization that we are no longer talking about a female issue.

What we're talking about is systemic change that we need to bring to our society, that we need to include men and women, both working together, to solve our issues.

-And we are all part of this change, all of us.

-All of us.

Right.

-And on this note, thank you so, so much.

To be continued.

Thank you.

-Thank you.

-However you feel about the #MeToo movement, this is an important moment in American history.

It has united women from across all class, religion, race, and from different generations.

-Right now I think is what the movement is kind of bringing out, like, "Hey, wait a minute.

What do I want?

What am I comfortable with?"

-Has to be a level of equality.

There just has to be.

We're not in this space anymore with the way that things have grown, the society we live in.

-For one, sharing is very important.

I think that women know that, hey, these things are out there and they can happen.

-How we choose to deal with this moment is up to each individual.

There will be a cost for all of us to pay.

The choice is ours.

We can choose to reflect on our own individual acts and behavior... -I did it, and I said what I had to say.

I-I-I owned it.

But she forgave me any-- accepted my amends anyway.

And she didn't have to, and I don't deserve it.

-...and change what we need to change.

-I realized that if I really wanted to stop acting from this place of rage, I had to figure out something different to do.

-After all, this could be America's moment of truth and reconciliation.

Or we can attack it, dismiss it, and deny its impact.

However you choose to go about it, this is not going to disappear.

There are generations of women who will not be silent and who will continue to march.

Tweet us at #MeTooOnPBS.

-To learn more about this program, please visit pbs.org/metoonowwhat.

This episode of "#MeToo, Now What?"

is available for download on iTunes.

Other episodes in the series are also available.