as more and more women are coming out as part of the metoo movement, it seems like men in positions of power are deciding it's not worth the risk of hiring women who can easily ruin careers they've built over decades with little to no effort
seems sensible
https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-metoo-backlash-hurting-womens-opportunities-in-financeQuote
As someone who works in finance and is currently a student in the executive MBA program at the Wharton School, I’ve heard men say that they’re less likely to hire or associate with women as a result of the intensity of MeToo. Whether consciously or not, I am not sure how any man in America isn’t reassessing his hiring practices. I have heard directly from male executives at two prominent Wall Street firms that they are moving their female direct reports to report to female bosses.
Even if we could get past the troubling message this sends, this isn’t practical — women only make up about 25% of the executive team at the top Wall Street firms, and there simply aren’t enough women to sustain this model. I’ve also heard from male fund managers that they didn’t want to take on the “risk” of hiring a woman in their small shops. An employee of a large bank shared that any future women analyst hires should be “unattractive.”
This environment is particularly troubling for my female classmates and me if we want to obtain a job in financial services, which is what Wharton is known for. Even if I were smarter or more qualified than one of my male classmates, why would an employer hire me when the guy next to me is good enough and is less likely to make an accusation of harassment? Females make up just over 25% of my class, there is no short supply of male MBAs to hire. I have already heard from some men at small hedge funds that they won’t hire women because we’re too “risky,” and from men in VC that they won’t have one-on-one meetings with female founders.
But such candor is rare, and off the record, because such discrimination is illegal. And women may never know why they were passed over. In some ways, I think my mother was afforded a better interview experience — at least they were being honest when they flat-out told her they won’t hire women. I fear this spring will see many female MBAs interviewing at firms that wish to appear to be striving for gender parity, but have no real intention of hiring any young women.
To some, including the men I spoke with, it seems like the MeToo movement is not just about stopping harassment, but essentially trying to achieve the impossible: desexualize the workplace, which goes against Darwin. Chemistry between human beings can’t be stopped, so what’s the answer? To many men, that answer is protecting themselves by avoiding socializing with or hiring women. It may be illegal, but that won’t stop it from happening — most cases would never get to court, and even if they did, they’d be really tough to prove.
My close friend, Vanity Fair contributing editor, Bethany McLean, views this fear as another excuse to exclude women. Before becoming a writer, she spent her days as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and certainly understands Wall Street culture. “That argument betrays a fundamental lack of respect for women,” she told me. “When men say that they’re afraid of being alone with women, what they’re actually saying is that there is a high likelihood that all women are crazy and will read something into a situation that isn’t intended. Women shouldn’t buy into the patriarchal point of view that women can’t be trusted.”