Research evaluates whether #MeToo was bad for women

As a child, I loved listening to the radio. I still do. All sorts: sports radio, talk, interview programs, NPR. And it was on NPR that I listened to an interview by emerging scholar Marina Gertsberg on her new research, “The Unintended Consequences of #MeToo—Evidence from Research Collaborations,” which she presented at a meeting of the American Economic Association in 2024 in San Antonio. You can find her PowerPoint with a quick Internet search.

How do you succeed as an academic?

A large part of academic success is how much research you publish. And getting published as a junior faculty member (mostly women) is often dependent on a senior professor’s (mostly men) decision to bring you onto a project.

So Gertsberg posed the following question: Did #MeToo, on net, increase or decrease the amount of research collaboration between women and men? She found it decreased by a lot. (The stats and her methodology are in the PowerPoint.)

Why? According to Gertsberg, the #MeToo movement: