In early 2018, Leanne Atwater — a business Professor at the University of Houston — constructed two surveys, one for men and one for women, to test the effect of the #MeToo movement on the American working environment. The results of the study showed that men and women mostly agree on what constitutes sexual harassment, demonstrating that the #MeToo movement may have proven beneficial in educating people about the nuances that lay behind the sexual harassment of women.

However, this better understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment seems to have hurt women in the workplace. The study found that 10% of men and women said “they expected to be less willing than before to hire attractive women.” Furthermore, 21 percent of men admitted that they would be reluctant to hire women for jobs that required close interactions with men, a six percent increase from the previous year.

These figures should sound extremely worrying for women planning to apply to any job in the U.S. In fact, because of the increased anxiety around hiring women, women will be rejected from one out of the five positions they apply for in the U.S. Even when women are able to get employed, they may go through an uncomfortable experience in the workplace. The same study shows that 27 percent of men now avoid one-on-one meetings with their female co-workers. This means that almost one third of men in the workplace are afraid of being alone in a room with a woman.

If our goal is equality, then it seems that with movements like #MeToo, we are only moving backwards. Most feminists and #MeToo supporters would converge to the statement that men hold more executive positions than women do—this constitutes a big part of their campaign efforts. The status quo is that people in elite positions are the ones choosing who they will work closely with, who they will go to business trips with and who they will have one-on-one meetings with. If men continue to exchange knowledge amongst themselves, then they will only get stronger and move up the ladder more quickly than the women who have been excluded. It is easy to antagonize men through such radical movements, but since everyone agrees that they are on the top tiers of corporations and governments, women will have fewer opportunities to develop in their careers.

It looks like the #MeToo movement, after justly having raised the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace, has taken a step too far and has actually caused a backlash against women in the workplace. The fact that this better understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment may have caused men to fear women in the workplace should not mean that men were better off ignoring what it meant. It simply means that the fear that men feel today has to be better transformed into responsible actions.

The #MeToo movement is just another way of taking action after the incidents have happened. We need to be proactive and introduce innovative prevention trainings. Most prevention trainings today, including NYU Abu Dhabi’s, focus on helping employees understand what constitutes sexual harassment. But the data collected by Atwater shows that 77 percent of men already think about this behaviour more often. Simply understanding what sexual harassment is may indeed reduce it, but it does so in a way that actually hurts women. It is therefore necessary that the training employed by businesses takes a step further and actually focuses on educating employees about character and sexism, two features that are neccessary and important in understanding why certain men engage in sexual harassment. According to Harvard Business Review, in her forthcoming 2019 follow up survey, Atwater demonstrates that employees displaying a high level of sexism are more likely to engage in sexual harassment, while those that display a high level of courage are not only less likely to harass, but also more likely to intervene when sexual harassment occurs. It is thus imperative for companies to re-focus their training programs in order to actually combat sexual harassment in a positive way that doesn’t instill fear in men and doesn’t create uncomfortable working enviornments for women.

These trainings on character should commence way before a man enters the workplace. We should open up discussion for these trainings to occur in other contexts. Maybe NYUAD could take a step forward and start this process.