Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

In a post #MeToo workplace, harassment remains pervasive, and harassment law still fails to provide protection for the harms experienced by many workers, particularly those in the most vulnerable jobs. Even when reform efforts are introduced through legislation, courts, and agency guidance, it often does not provide greater power, autonomy, and dignity to women in ways that would more meaningfully protect them from workplace abuse. We are the first to create a database of state legislation, including over 3,000 bills, which allows us to empirically analyze the extent to which lawmakers comprehensively address harassment following the rise of the #MeToo movement. We assess comprehensiveness by examining how responsive legislation is to existing gaps in legal protection during the five years following the 2017 tweet that took #MeToo activism global, relative to the 2016 baseline period. We found that states introduced a wide breadth of reforms to combat harassment and gender inequality, including some changes that address longstanding gaps in legal protection. Gaps persist, however, and in some cases worsened post #MeToo. Going forward, reform efforts by state legislatures – and all legal stakeholders – will prove most effective if they move away from narrow conceptions of sexual harassment and follow the voice of workers, pursuing a broad, multi-layered agenda around gender equity that is responsive to the realities of our evolving workplace and society.

Publication Citation

Southern California Law Review, Forthcoming.

Download

Share

COinS