We're at a historic tipping point for women.
In October 2017,
the #MeToo
spread across the globe.
What began as a Hollywood sexual assault scandal
sparked a public reckoning around the world.
Thousands of women are using two words
on social media to identify themselves
as survivors of sexual harassment and assault.
A watershed moment in our--
New laws have been passed
and powerful men have been forced to step down.
We are sorry
for the damage that Oxfam has done.
Face arrest and conviction.
But now MeToo is igniting wider debates.
A new day is on the horizon.
About the ability of
legal systems to deliver justice.
The problem here is
our systems are not strong enough to back them.
About how men should behave around women.
We don't know what the rules are
and it turns out that there's way more
of them than you thought.
And about the battle for gender equality.
First you had MeToo
and now you have NowWhat.
Pretoria, South Africa.
Inspired by the global MeToo movement,
these women are protesting about the country's
high rates of rape and femicide,
the deliberate murder of women.
In South Africa, the number of women killed
by a partner or family member is five times
higher than the global average.
I would like to officially welcome
each and every woman here.
Avelafay is one of the organizers.
Like many of the protestors, Avela
has been personally affected by femicide.
At the age of 13 I lost my mother to femicide.
She was brutally murdered in her own home,
and the perpetrators are free,
they're roaming the streets.
So, not only was I failed by someone we knew as a family,
but we were failed by the justice system.
Here, even a recent president, Jacob Zuma,
has been accused of rape.
The charges were dropped in court in 2006.
But sexual and physical violence
have continued to afflict all levels of society.
No means no, no means no--
Today the protestors are marching
on the parliament and have demanded a hearing
with the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
But at the parliament buildings
it's soon clear the president will not be meeting them.
The president's no show is little surprise.
In this country the police reported a 7.4% increase
in all crimes against women in the last year alone.
But for the protestors, today has still
been an important step in raising public awareness.
In Johannesburg, GiGI White
runs the charity Get Up Women.
She helps victims of sexual violence
who's cases have been dropped by the police.
We're off to go and meet two ladies
who have allegedly been raped by their boss.
Nearly half of all rape cases reported
to South African police do not result in an arrest.
Okay so before we start--
These two women allege
their boss sexually assaulted them at work.
We have got everybody and everything
it's going to take to keep you guys safe.
Gigi has come with her colleagues
Sean and Dave to take statements from them.
So he just wants to ask a couple of questions.
We have to do this properly.
Sean's role is to pass evidence
to the police and pressure them
to investigate the case properly.
Scooch up, scooch up.
Come here my dear, come here.
When was this?
The women suspect their boss
bribed the police to drop the investigation.
He doesn't know enough people, trust me.
He's gonna need to know a lot more after this one.
And we will go through the whole entire thing with you.
Every case, every court appearance we will be there.
You will not do this alone.
I think this is gonna be a lot uglier
and a lot bigger than what we first thought.
As a third woman has now said
she was assaulted by the same boss,
Gigi hopes the police can be pushed
to re-open this case.
But things could hit a familiar brick wall.
One of the biggest issues that we have are the cops.
Everybody's prepared to take a bribe.
The number of women asking
Gigi for help has increased since MeToo.
Yet she's worried there will be no lasting impact
in South Africa unless there are more prosecutions.
We have this huge, big movement that started.
Woman are getting out, they're telling people
exactly what happened and how it happened.
And the problem here is our systems
are not strong enough to back them.
If we don't start getting the prosecution done
and getting these women justice
we're just gonna end up sliding backwards.
In America the MeToo movement
is starting to have an impact on the justice system.
A new day is on the horizon!
Following the Harvey Weinstein scandal
over 300 public figures have donated millions of dollars
to the Time's Up legal defense fund.
Women have united to claim that Time Is Up.
At these small unassuming
head quarters in Washington, DC,
giant steps are being taken.
We've got farm workers, retail, hotel workers,
nail salons, poultry workers--
American women can apply
to the fund for free legal support,
if they have been sexually harassed
or assaulted at work.
So far there have been over 3,500 applications.
Mainly from women in low wage industries.
Could I get your first and last--
It's up to interns like Noah
to field the rising number of calls.
These are the list of intakes that
we're gonna be sending attorneys to.
We have it listed as workplace sexual harassment
other workplace sex discrimination.
There is probably at least 30 or 40 here, just for today.
Some of the claims stretch back decades.
The most memorable case I had to deal
with was a woman in the military.
She was sexually harassed by her superiors,
by the people around her and it kind of destroyed her life.
She told me, "you're the first person I ever told this to".
Applications vetted here
in Washington, DC are passed through
a network of 700 lawyers working across 48 states.
The fund has already filed claims against McDonald's,
the U.S. postal service and Walmart.
They hope this will prompt other major organizations
to change their own rules about sexual harassment.
Employers have an opportunity to lead right now.
They don't actually need to wait for new laws to pass.
They can, right now, today decide
that they're gonna put this issue
at the center of their organization.
MeToo has prompted some companies in the west
to introduce new measures to deal with sexual harassment.
But it has also provoked an all to predicable backlash.
I've seen signs of kind of panic
around sexuality and particularly
a tendency to vilify all men.
People are not actually going through any court process--
We're risking a kind of social media lynching.
Some of the backlash is being fueled
by the anxieties of men forced
to think about their behavior
in ways they never had to before.
Well everyone always feels uncomfortable
when they don't know what the rules are.
And now we don't know what the rules are.
And it turns out that there's way more of them
than you thought and that the punishment
for transgressing against them is way higher
than you could have imagined.
Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson
is known for his controversial
and extremely devicive fuse on gender.
You agree that it's unfair?
If you're a woman-- Not necessarily.
He's one of the most
vocal critics of Me Too and its impact.
The whole purpose in some sense
of the MeToo movement is to make men
much more nervous about any manifestation
of any behavior that's vaguely sexual
under any circumstances what-so-ever that are
What's starting to bend and distort company policy
NBC prohibits hugging and Netflix
doesn't allow you to look at anyone
for more than five seconds.
Now really?
That's supposed to be a solution?
Who thought that through?
It's the suspicion of men, I would think
as men per say that's...
clearly not in anyone's interest at all.
So I don't wanna shock anyone, I really don't
but the world is still run by men.
And I'm just not sure it's going that well.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
is a leading supporter of MeToo.
Even she is worried that some of
the reverberations could prove counterproductive.
I think MeToo is an opportunity.
It's an opportunity to get rid of behavior
that never should have happened in the first place.
But we want to make sure this
doesn't have negative consequences.
Sandberg is a prominent advocate
for gender equality in business and the
founder of the women's empowerment foundation, Lean In.
In early 2018 a survey conducted by Lean In
found that MeToo has had an
adverse effect on gender relations.
You have senior managers who are male
are 3.5 times more likely to hesitate
to have a dinner with a female junior colleague
and almost half of male managers
are nervous about having a one-on-one
meeting with a junior woman.
You can't do work if you can't have a one-on-one meeting.
My view is, everyone should be able to work together,
have one-on-one meetings and behave appropriately.
But at a very minimum make access equal.
If you don't feel comfortable having dinner
with women don't have dinner with men.
In New York one pioneering company
has come up with an innovative solution
to improve relations between sexes in the workplace.
There we go.
That one is all set up.
Morgan Mercer is the founder of Vantage Point.
Her company is exploiting the power
of virtual reality to train men
to see the world through women's eyes.
Research shows that most men don't
actually have a mental framework to reference.
So most men quite literally do not
understand what sexual harassment feels like.
Today a team from
customer analytics firm Castora
will be exposed to sexual harassment scenarios
based on real life case studies.
Great, great, great, this is gonna be a great year.
Rachel, really important now to remember it's a party.
So pack something fitting.
A lot of times with sexual harassment
it's the build up, you know the body language
and the feeling of the elephant in the room.
I just, I honestly don't know if I wanna go anymore.
What do you mean we've been working on this for months.
And what about all the after parties.
Well honestly Luke, that's part of it.
James was texting me all night
asking me what I'm gonna wear.
So what did you guys think of it?
I was like shocked at how real it actually felt.
Yeah. Yeah.
They like look at you and it just like,
the whole like how quickly a seemingly non-harmful
conversation about going out as a team or something
or like having fun as a team can turn
into like awkwardness and harassment.
Like it feels it could be here.
Like that bench they have, I've seen it
in a million start-up offices.
A man was sitting to close to a woman
and it was right next to me, right.
So I felt pretty uncomfortable.
And also her reactions to some of the comments.
You can pick up on some of those cues.
So the discussions that have taken place
in this past year especially,
I think people are innovating in ways
to facilitate better conversations, like using technology.
Stuff like this is incredibly important.
Large companies, including Google
and Price Water House Coopers have expressed interest
in using this VR technology to train
their workforces, as has the US Congress.
It all points to an important shift.
I think that we are at a a pivotal point
in society where women's roles are being questioned.
We have fought for rights and now we're
fighting for equality in the workplace.
The fallout from MeToo
has prompted some men in Western countries
to question traditional notions of masculinity
and what it means to be a man in society today.
In Britain former film maker David Fuller
recently founded an alternative men's collective
focused on challenging conventional forms of male behavior.
Thanks for coming and can you come in a little bit.
Let's make it a little bit more cozy.
Men are being challenged culturally right now.
And I think the right response to that is to up our game.
At an arts festival in Southern England,
David is running a work shop promoting what he sees
as the solution to the issues raised by MeToo.
Gender is a really hot topic right now
and a lot of the things that we're seeing out there
and a lot of the anger that is being felt.
I think it's towards men who are not really showing up.
To me the solution to the times is not to
sort of shame masculinity.
It's to really refine healthy masculinity.
David believes the key to this
is teaching men to be more open
and communicative about their feelings.
So this whole process that we're going through
it's about how we hold ourselves back.
The argument goes
if more men improve their emotional intelligence,
relations with women will improve.
And this will result in greater harmony between the sexes.
Always compare myself to my peers, my friends--
You know I want to be responsible
but of course what that means is you sacrifice
a lot of things in the present
cause you're always trying to make sure
the future is gonna be okay.
I'm always amazed at how quickly
men open up in our workshops.
In society we're supposed to be a bit
sort of tougher and that kind of stuff.
So it's kind of to be able to let that go
and just be able to be ourselves felt
in a safe environment to be however
you wanted to be not you being judged.
It could be some time
before fringe groups like this
make any real noise in mainstream society.
But gender roles and gender relations
are being questioned more than ever before
in the wake of MeToo.
MeToo started as a conversation
about sexual harassment in the workplace.
But really it sheds light on that problem
and a underlying fundamental problem.
The lack of power that women have historically had.
This global movement
has helped expose a flaw at the heart
of all societies and unleash powerful forces
for change that might just kick-start efforts to fix it.