When #MeToo went viral last year,
it pulled back the curtain to reveal a problem
that had really been hiding in plain sight.
We weren't shocked or surprised to learn that information -
these were not new statistics.
What it really exposed was our lack of action,
our inadequacy at responding.
#MeToo collected the stories, it gave them faces and names,
and it brought them forward and it put them in front of us
and it begged a new question.
It said, Are we going to do something about this?
Which is why, I think, as a lawyer, educator and trainer,
the question I've been asked the most often in the last several months is,
"So what do we do now?"
What do we do now?
Now, in all of my heads, I should be able to rattle off a whole list of ideas,
but the first time somebody posed that question to me,
I didn't give any great policy insights.
The first time somebody asked the question, I gave my gut reaction,
the first thing that popped into my head, and I said,
"I think we need to keep talking about it."
And I kind of looked back on that answer, and I thought,
"Isn't that a little overly simplistic?"
Over the last several months, though, I've had a lot of conversations
in a variety of contexts, formal and informal,
with all kinds of people,
and I'm sensing that people are really uncomfortable.
I keep getting the same comments, hearing the same kinds of questions.
People are saying things like, What about hugs? Are hugs okay?
Should I open my office door? Is it bad to have closed-door meetings?
I get nervous when I give a coworker a compliment.
And everybody wants to talk about the spectrum.
Because it's a spectrum, right?
Some conduct is worse than others.
It has led me to the conclusion
that #MeToo has presented us an opportunity for a reckoning,
but we seem really anxious to get to some kind of reconciliation.
Is there some new set of rules we can apply here so we can just move on?
I think we can get from reckoning to reconciliation,
but not until we change this conversation.
Luckily, as any good TED speaker should,
I have come equipped with five steps to changing the conversation.
(Laughter)
So, step one, we are going to stop training and start talking.
Yes, I came to advocate that we stop doing sexual harassment training.
And yes, I still feel like the lawyers and the HR people in the room
are a little nervous about that.
In order to get us all on the same page,
I decided that we should do just a quick sexual harassment training in 30 seconds.
In order to do that, I dusted off an old PowerPoint presentation
that I gave probably 15 years ago about this topic.
And here we go.
Sexual harassment training in 30 seconds.
There are two types.
It takes a lot of words to explain those two types,
especially the second type.
Even the courts aren't entirely sure what it is -
they just know that bullying, that's not enough.
But don't worry, this is just about what's illegal.
Your employer can set a much higher bar -
cue an inappropriate, awkwardly acted video
about a weird back rub in the copy room,
(Laughter)
a reminder that you should call HR if you have any questions.
Don't forget supervisors can be individually liable -
don't be creepy and seen.
(Applause)(Screaming)
Sexual harassment training hasn't changed a lot
in the last several decades.
Now you can do it all online without ever seeing another person.
(Laughter)
There have been some strives to change it,
but the problem with sexual harassment training
is that it is rooted in risk prevention.
Sexual harassment training exists because the courts said,
"Hey employers, if you do this thing, you can avoid liability if it happens."
Thus, sexual harassment training was born of litigation,
and it has been raised by lawyers.
Now hopefully, for the sake of my three children,
being raised by lawers is not the worst possible unbringing.
(Laughter)
Nevertheless, it is time for sexual harassment training
to move on out of the house of compliance
because conversation is risky.
We will not get from reckoning to reconciliation
unless we are willing to cross a path of risk.
So, step two, we need to take some risks.
Conversation is risky.
One of the risks we need to take
is we need to be willing to admit our past mistakes.
We haven't always engaged exactly right in this conversation,
and we've got to be willing to own that.
In organizations, if leaders can step up and say,
"You know, I used to think about this this way,
but now I think about it differently."
That opens the door for other people to do the same.
But talking about things we've gotten wrong is scary,
so I'll go first.
This is me.
I am the curly-haired one in the back.
The much younger, much cuter, much blonder girl is my little sister,
and this is our horse - his name is Jim.
I loved my Montana upbringing, and I loved that girl -
she was strong and independent -
but there were a lot of things that she did not know.
One of them
is that if you would've asked me then or for years afterwards,
if I was a feminist,
I would've probably told you "No," right?
But then I listened and I lived and I learned, and my perspective shifted.
I recognized that there was room at the equality table for all of us,
even those of us who could drive a stick shift
and saddle a horse and slap a pig.
(Laughter)
We are all on a journey,
and we have to be willing to own our mistakes.
The flip side of that, of course,
is that we have to be open to other people's journeys too,
to letting them make mistakes.
If every time in this conversation
we think someone is getting something wrong,
our reaction is to gather our swarm of little blue birdies
and come peck them to death on the Internet,
we're not going to invite people into the conversation;
we're going to push them away.
(Applause)
Step three, we've made some time, we've decided to take some risks,
What do we talk about instead?
We need to be talking about power, permission, and interruption.
When we think about the news stories that we've seen
with examples of sexual harassment and sexual violence,
the power is easy to spot.
The people in the news are wealthy politicians.
They're media moguls who have control and power,
not only of their own contexts,
but of the law and culture that the rest of the consume.
But you don't have to be a media mogul or a wealthy politician to have power.
Power can exist in a community -
it can be simply based on having information somebody doesn't have,
control over someone's pay;
it can be speaking a language.
We need to start identifying the power in our contexts and who holds it,
and whether we hold some and of what kind.
Because sexual violence thrives
when bad intentions meet power, opportunity,
and a low risk of accountability.
We need to identify and talk about power.
Instead, our conversations always seem to go to this place
of romance gone wrong -
it's an unhappy accident, a mistaken communication.
I think there's something more sinister going on
in almost all of the stories we hear.
But even if sometimes the issue is miscommunication,
then why aren't we talking about permission?
We're not talking about permission in sex education with our kids,
and we're not talking about it in training in our workplaces.
And here in stoic Minnesota,
I'm not sure we're talking about it with each other either.
We need to talk about permission.
When should we be asking for it?
How do we ask for it?
And how do we deny it?
(Applause)
We also need to talk about interruption -
it does not take long to find a bystander
who didn't know what to do or what to say
or simply chose not to.
Why is it so much easier when our colleague says,
"You know, Bob makes me feel really uncomfortable,"
that our go-to response is always "That's just Bob."
Why is it so hard to say, "How so?" "Are you OK?"
"Is there anything I can do?"
We need to talk about power, permission, and interruption.
And then we need people, step four, to show up for the conversation.
I give a lot of talks about these kinds of things,
and I often find myself staring out at a sea of women's faces.
I did a little what we call "lawyer math"
over the last couple of presentations I've given
to just kind of see what the statistics were,
and I counted up that less than 10%
of the people coming to a talk with #MeToo or sexual harassment in the title
were men.
Yet at the same time, I kept getting this question,
usually from women at the talks:
"What about all the really good men in my office?
I work with some really good men, and they want to do something.
They feel awkward. How can I help them?"
My answer is pretty simple:
participate.
Men, we need you to show up for this conversation.
You know what? Scratch that.
You need you to show up for this conversation.
Three percent of men will experience a rape or attempted rape -
that's just the ones who are reported.
Many of us in this room may never experience sexual violence;
most of us will never commit sexual violence.
But it is going to impact all of us.
It's impacting us all right now and every conversation we have in the workplace.
So, my challenge, my hope, is that when men are talking
about whether they should open the door of their offices to be safe,
go ahead and open the door.
But can you also open your eyes and hearts and minds
to the stories that #MeToo is telling us and the reality of those stories?
Step five: we have got to retire this spectrum.
Because we're talking about this all the time,
on one hand, here's the stuff that's not a big deal,
you should probably get over it;
down here is the stuff that's really horrifying -
it's pretty awful.
We're actually not going to talk about the horrifying stuff
pretty much ever;
we're going to really focus on this get-over-it side,
especially at work and in our training.
We may not even be on the get-over-it side,
because when we're talking about hugs and compliments,
I don't even think they're on the spectrum.
I love hugs and compliments. They're great.
The problem with hugs and compliments is only when they're misused,
when they're used to demean instead of to lift up.
But we spend so much time on that end of the spectrum
that we don't have time to dig into what's really going on,
and we don't want to believe in the horrifying end, anyway.
We want to peel everything out of that and categorize it over here.
So, here's the thing. It's not a spectrum.
It's a system.
And until we start getting comfortable with the idea that it might be messy
to talk about its interconnectivity, about its intricacies,
then we will not dismantle it,
and we need to dismantle the system.
In education, we have a concept we talk about sometimes,
called "the compelling why."
The idea is that if we know why we're doing something,
we'll be better at it, we'll learn it better,
we'll understand it more.
We need to change why we're having this conversation.
We can't be having it to avoid getting sued;
we've got to have a better reason.
And trying to come up with better reasons,
we've come up with things like, "It's better for a bottom line.
There's a business case for it -
if we really make the workplace safer and better,
we'll have a better workforce, we'll produce more work."
And that's a better reason,
but I still don't think it's "the" reason.
I want to tell you my reason for talking about sexual assault and harassment -
my compelling why.
I have a #MeToo story to tell you.
My #MeToo story doesn't belong to me.
This is Suzie.
I met Suzie when I fell in love with her big brother,
and we became family when I married him.
By the time I'd joined the Hanson family,
Suzie had already been sexually assaulted.
I never really talked to her about it very much;
I didn't know a lot about what happened.
What I did know will sound very familiar to you:
she was sexually assaulted at work, at her part-time job,
by someone with authority.
There were people who could intervene and interrupt - who didn't.
Mostly, everyone wanted her to get over it and move on.
There was a lawsuit, and she couldn't really talk about it, anyway.
So, we never really talked about it.
I did notice that Suzie was trying really hard to do all of those things,
to get over it and move on,
but even in her happiest time,
she would carry with her a cloud of shame and fear and anger.
I would learn later that what was in that cloud
were the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Suzie and I would have one conversation that I recall so clearly about it.
I knew she was in therapy, finally,
it was the summer of 2000, and I asked her, "How's it going?"
And she said, "It's going pretty well." She said, "It's kind of hard, though."
And I said, "Why?"
And she said,
"My therapist wants me to tell the whole story of what happened to me.
I've never told the whole story."
I got kind of scared and nervous.
I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the whole story -
we don't want to hear the horrifying things.
And I said, "Why not?"
And she said, "I'm just so scared."
I would never hear Suzie's story.
I would never talk to her about it.
She would reveal more horrifying details to her therapist and to her parents,
and then she would die by suicide.
We would lose her to her post-traumatic stress disorder.
We would never talk about it.
Suzie's death was a defining moment in my life,
not just for my own grief
but also because it gave me the front-row seat
for the devastation of some of the people I loved the most in the world.
What I've learned as the years have past is that that one act of violence,
it spread the consequences over so many people.
This is not just about perpetrators and victims of sexual violence;
it is about all of us.
The impacts were huge.
There were even consequences for my children,
and they weren't even born yet.
It's been 18 years,
and our lives are full of laughter and life and fun,
but I have heard her voice and seen her story
in the voices of clients and students and #MeToo,
and I've often wondered why the cycle never changes.
It's been kind of depressing that I see the same thing,
the same circle of shame and silence, again and again.
And then, last year,
I got kind of optimistic.
It seems sort of strange to think
that #MeToo might have made anyone optimistic,
but it did.
And I realized that the reason that was making me optimistic
is because when the movement gathered these stories together
and it set them out there in front of us
and it said, "Are you going to do anything about this?"
we said, "Yes!"
We said, "Time's up!"
We said, "Enough is enough."
We started asking people like me, "What do we do now?"
And the energy of people I talked to,
even though they know they're not getting it right
and even though they know it's messy,
the energy of the people I talk to is "Let's do something about this;
it is impacting all of us."
So, my charge to you is, "Yeah, let's keep going."
Let's change this conversation:
Show up. Listen up. Step up.
And do what my gut said that we should be doing all along:
let's keep talking about it.
Thank you.
(Applause)