Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

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 three thousand bills, that 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. This is especially true in 2025 as the Trump administration redirects the EEOC’s resources towards attacking diversity, equity and inclusion measures.

Publication Citation

98 S. Cal. L. Rev. 881-943 (2025).

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