The #MeToo Moment: What’s Next?

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As the sexual misconduct scandals continue to unfold, our gender team is providing updates and analysis on the coverage and conversation in a new newsletter. Sign up here to receive future installments and tell us what you think at nytgender@nytimes.com.

Shortly after I became gender editor of The New York Times two months ago, the equally-new editor of the website Jezebel, Koa Beck, and I have had a series of conversations on WNYC’s The Takeaway. Earlier this week, we recorded a segment about our hopes and worries for the #MeToo Moment in 2018.

WNYC, of course — along with The Times — has faced its own reckoning in these roiling months over the alleged misconduct of employees, as well as a swath of debate about the manner in which each of those cases was handled. But that was not the focus of The Takeaway conversation. Rather, it was what comes next for a movement that upeneded the news cycle, captured the public zeitgeist, and hardly fatigued.

Were we worried about a backlash? (And what exactly was the backlash we were worried about?)

Would we see a kind of Mike Pence-ification of working relationships, where men would quite literally wall themselves off from women for fear of crossing a line that seemed to be in motion?

What would happen to after-work social events — or, more importantly, to male-female mentor relationships, something women already struggle to establish?

And at what point would the stories about individual cases turn into larger systemic action?

“The takeaway from this shouldn’t be, men and women can’t work together,” said Ms. Beck.

Since we left the studio, I’ve jotted down some notes about what I hope for the year ahead. Among them:

* I hope we can shift public focus away from celebrities like Ashley Judd who were abused by celebrities like Harvey Weinstein to women like Suzette Wright, who suffered in silence for years at Ford Motor Co., and the thousands of women who face sexual harassment daily but may not have the means or access to pursue legal cases or media articles. That seems at least part of the goal of “Time’s Up,” a new campaign put together by a group of powerful Hollywood actors, which includes a $14 million legal defense fund to help working class women. (Read the group’s vision statement here and our coverage of the campaign here.)

* I hope we begin to see men and women step up as bystanders, one of the few ways proven effective at combatting workplace harassment and discrimination (and in fact very easy to do!).

* I hope we talk about culture as much as we talk about individuals, and recognize that while the Weinsteins of the world are extreme, the messages we learn about sex, and power, and courtship, and consent, are deeply ingrained and start young — and will take far more than a workplace sexual harassment training to unlearn.

* I hope we can have meaningful, nuanced discussions about due process and women’s agency. What can someone accused of sexual misconduct reasonably expect, what is fair, and what range of punishments should be considered beyond the abrupt torching of someone’s career? As Daphne Merkin put it in a Opinion column this week, “In our current climate, to be accused is to be convicted. Due process is nowhere to be found.” How can we talk about the damaging nature of sexual assault as a whole without conflating the Harvey Weinsteins with the Al Frankens?

(Listen to this episode of NPR’s “All Things Considered” for a conversation with constitutional law professor Elizabeth Price Foley on the subject; read Ms. Merkin’s piece, “Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings,” here.)

* I hope we will start seeing what happens when women take over the reins at major institutions, filling in the gaps left by the fallen men who have long shaped our cultural narratives. (At the Today Show, Hoda Kotb is the latest, replacing Matt Lauer as co-host.) We know from research (ahem: I’ll plug my own book here, because I spent a year looking at academic studies on the subject) that organizations with more women are more successful, more collaborative, more profitable, and more inclusive. What effect might those women’s leadership have on media and culture at large?

* Finally, I hope we’ll see a change, or at least a bit of internal scrutiny, in the way we as journalists do our jobs. The Times, for example, has revamped its approach to covering the red carpet for the Golden Globes this weekend — assigning a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, known for his political work, to photograph the event. (Read what Choire Sicha, the editor of The Times’ Style section has to say about our plans, and tune in on Sunday to see how it plays out.)

In the meantime, I asked a few smart people — a law professor, a former NFL player, a television writer and more — about what they hope for the year ahead. Read what they had to say below, and check out previous installments of The #MeTooMoment here. As always, tell us whatyou think at nytgender@nytimes.com.

What Do You Hope for #MeToo in 2018?

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Nell Scovell, comedy writer and author of “Just the Funny Parts…and Some Hard Truths about Sneaking into the Hollywood Boys’ Club”: “Instead of those who were sexually harassed living in fear for 10, 20, 30 years before speaking up, my hope is that victims start calling out harassers in real time. I want #MeToo to become #YouCant.”

Jaclyn Friedman, activist and author of “Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All”: “We’ve got to stop treating each case that comes to light like a self-contained soap opera that ends when the villain is defeated, and start addressing the systems that have enabled workplace sexual abuse for so long.”

Wade Davis, former NFL player and public speaker: “Men should start or continue to go deep within to do the emotional labor needed to determine what specific actions we can take to join the movement.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon, sexual harassment legal scholar and author of Butterfly Politics: “Sexually violated and disrespected women standing up together is shifting the tectonic plates of gender hierarchy. As the disbelief and dehumanization of sexual abuse victims falls away, their treatment as lying scum, fueling retaliation and deterring complaints, erodes, so that the civil right not to be sexually abused in order to earn a living can become real.”

Kathryn Minshew, founder and CEO of The Muse, who has spoken about her experience in Silicon Valley: “It’s now time to use our collective strength and outrage to turn awareness into substantive action.”

Bob Lamm, writer and literature instructor at New York University: “For 2018, I hope that the courage of the women in #metoo will inspire more men to support those women and challenge all that’s wrong in our culture. I have great admiration for any man who intervenes when a woman or girl is in a perilous situation or might be. We surely need more men ready to do that. But I also view the ‘bystander’ concept as too limited when it comes to any form of injustice. We need men not just to be reactive in the best ways but to be proactive as well: to speak out strongly against other men’s sexism.”