That said, women as a group are disproportionately on the receiving end of improper workplace behaviour overwhelmingly perpetrated by men.
And you can't address that dynamic without first acknowledging that it exists and putting words to it. And so, men as a group do this to women as a group and it has real-life ramifications for women. That doesn't mean we don't address what is happening to men. It's not a zero sum game. But it also means we can't ignore how gender is implicated in this discourse for women.
Yes, that is definitely the case in places where men outnumber women in positions of power, which is still most businesses. I can tell you, from first hand experience, that when that dynamic is flipped, men, perhaps equally as often, become the more objectified party.
IMO this is an issue of human nature and power dynamics, not the genetic proclivities of any one sex or gender identity. I know that my own experiences made me completely avoid mixing work and "attraction". I suspect that the higher percentage of women facing this abuse and coming to the same conclusion also drives the disparity.
But we don't have to single out men and give offending women a pass, even if it's supposed to be temporary, to solve the problem. "Nobody can do this to anyone and get away with it" also solves the problem without making the non-offending men feel unfairly singled out.
I can tell you, it's extremely frustrating to have people assume that I'm a potential offender, only because of my sex and gender identity when, in fact, I've repeatedly been the victim.
I think that notion is irrelevant to the problem.
It's the nature of SSD to get corrupted. It's the nature of the internet to be unreliable. Yet many companies in Silicon Valley build robust and reliable services atop those fundamental starting points. "Oh, I'm using an SSD, guess my repo will just become corrupted," is not something you hear technologists utter.
However, it's apparently accepted as natural that employees of some Silicon Valley companies might say to themselves, "Oh, I just turned down that project manager's sexual advances, guess I can't work on that project in my future." That can only happen if the company has no interest in addressing those kinds of problems. I know that sounds flippant, but GNU/Linux was built largely upon the initial work of Linus and Richard-- two developers who apparently wanted and had zero social interaction with one another. So even from a narrow productivity standpoint, it's insane to ignore those problems and throw that value out the window.
I believe the awareness of the #metoo movement is powerful, in that it allows me as a male, to say stuff like "that's not cool" when needed.
General principles of human rights broadly forbid notions of collective guilt and collective punishment: one formulation is that everyone is entitled to be treated as an individual before the law. This doesn't mean one can't sue a company or nation; but men don't act as a group in the sense of having a steering committee with clearly articulated policies on gender politics.