People in our society who are driven by their desires and emotions tend to struggle to answer the question: what are the consequences for all the people who are affected by my actions? The feelings-oriented people tend to follow their hearts. Thinking too much about the consequences of their actions would slow them down. In today’s post, we’ll look at some of these unintended consequences.

Here’s the study, up at SSRN.

Abstract:

How did #MeToo alter the cost of collaboration between women and men? I study research collaborations involving junior female academic economists and show they start fewer new research projects after #MeToo. The decline is driven largely by fewer collaborations with new male co-authors at the same institution. I show that the drop in collaborations is concentrated in universities where the perceived risk of sexual harassment accusations for men is high – that is, when both sexual harassment policies are more ambiguous exposing men to a larger variety of claims and the number of public sexual harassment incidents is high. The results suggest that the social movement is associated with increased cost of collaboration that disadvantaged the career opportunities of women.

Honestly, to me it doesn’t matter whether the policies are more or less ambiguous. The risk of facing serious consequences – loss of job, loss of reputation, loss of income, loss of future job offers, exposure to anti-male courts – outweigh any benefits. What does a man have to gain by helping women, when there is a chance that she could destroy his whole life, up to and including imprisonment? The reward is not worth the risk.

The author of the study is very much a feminist, and enthusiastic about feminism. She tweeted about her paper in a long thread.

This tweet was interesting:

Women don’t make up for the loss in projects with men by collaborating more with other women or solo work. Junior men do make up for lost collaborations with women by collaborating more with men. So, men don’t have a loss in projects overall.

I keep seeing feminists insist that they can do everything that men can do, and they don’t need men. It sounds like when men decline to participate in the task of helping women, then the women themselves don’t step in and make up for the loss. Even though there is much less risk of false accusations between women.

The feminist movement can be described as a non-stop chain of demands by women, which were granted to women. And when got what they wanted, they complained that it wasn’t what they expected. Then they turn to the men who are now paying the costs of their behavior, and demand that those men fix it.

I think men need to take a step back and decline to participate. Men have enough trouble in this world taking care of ourselves. In the pre-feminist world, we were not discriminated against in school and at work. We had enough job security and money to look out for others. We knew that our protection, provision and leadership was seen as an asset. Well, that world is now gone. We have to decline to produce the same outputs in this new post-feminist world that we did in the world before feminism. We cannot take on unnecessary risks to help people who do not respect us.