#MeTooSTEM leadership: accountability, solidarity, and love
Seattle 500 Women Scientists
There is a need within our community, at this acute moment, to build a feminist vision of the #MeTooSTEM movement and leadership. We envision a movement centered on the most marginalized voices, informed by trauma survivors, and built through collective accountability.
#MeTooSTEM is derived from the leadership of Tarana Burke and her creation of #MeToo, which is a movement focused on healing, defending, and uplifting survivors of sexual abuse and violence, specifically black women and women of color who are systemically harmed and erased.
#MeTooSTEM, as a social movement, was collectively built through the heartbreak, violation, and bravery of women, non-binary people, and men in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields coming forward to advocate for themselves, their colleagues, and their students. This is a movement undergirded not only by fierce advocates, but also by data. As the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) reported in June of 2018, academic science has the highest rate of reported workplace sexual and gendered harassment, second only to the military.
In parallel to other struggles for social justice, within #MeTooSTEM those who have been hurt are forced into the impossible task of advocating in public for their own safety, dignity, and basic human rights. When you are submerged within your own grief and pain and trauma it is far too easy to misunderstand or look away from the pain of others. But ignoring the pain of others is a transaction of privilege that prevents us, time and time again, from standing in solidarity with one another.
Indeed, this is the privilege of white feminism. White women have, time and time again, looked away from the pain and violation of black women, women of color, and indigenous women, whilst simultaneously carrying the banner of the “Women’s Movement”. This is how white supremacy works: white women can dabble in addressing the wounding of people of color, turn away from those grievances at their leisure, and still self-deputize as public leaders.
In the #MeTooSTEM movement, some of these dynamics and struggles, specifically centering the pain and violation of white women, have played out far too often. Indeed, even the NASEM report is an academic report which documents white women’s pain. There is an enormous omission of attention on the malignant recombination of misogyny, racism, and homophobia that black women and women of color experience both in STEM workplaces and in the broader culture.
Moreover, the #MeTooSTEM movement and many other mainstream feminist movements, including our own, have had little curiosity or attention on ameliorative approaches which center the needs of victims of trauma, despite advocating for bodily safety. Trauma-informed approaches require a recognition of the ubiquity and debilitation of trauma. Such approaches specifically and strategically turn to address the unique needs of trauma survivors, by focusing on safety, trust, peer-to-peer support, collaboration, and transparency.
What a terrible paradox that the needs and voices of trauma survivors are marginalized in attempts to advocate and movement build for the rights of those same people. We have to stop hurting people and turning away from their wounding in order to do the “more important” task of holding very, very bad actors and rudderless institutions accountable. Rather, we need a movement and accompanying leadership styles, which are responsive to and safe for trauma survivors. We have to stand in solidarity with one another.
It is our responsibility, as an organization and as individuals engaged in leadership and public scholarship, to commit to turning towards and centering the voices and needs of those who have been hurt and violated in systemic and individual ways. We must be self-aware, because of the ease of transacting in ways that continue to erase and ignore the pain of others. This is especially and specifically important for white women — although systemic privilege obviously occurs across many axes of gender, race, sexuality, language, ability, or immigration status.
This kind of commitment also ensures that we, as individuals and as organizations, will get things wrong. It’s a guarantee. This is also about public accountability — because we cannot grow as people or as organizations without the capacity to listen, apologize, repair, and redress harm. Feminist leadership, especially feminist leadership embodied by systemically privileged white people, requires the vigilant refinement of that moral lens of worth and attention in the world.
If the movement is to grow we must be accountable, to ourselves and to each other. To do any less is to be complicit in each other’s subjugation. But we can do so from a place of love and caring, a place where, as Loretta Ross says, we “call in” rather than “call out.”
Feminism is a very big tent — and we don’t all agree with one another. And we make mistakes, really profoundly terrible and hurtful mistakes, underneath that tent. We are accountable, to ourselves and each other, to listen to feedback and learn from our mistakes. Moving forward, we must always, always continue to ask: who is being hurt? who is being centered? who benefits? who is responsible?
Patriarchy is very interested in revealing feminists to be ultimately incompetent and incoherent — and as morally bereft as those we stand in opposition to. This is the misogynistic prism by which all women’s leadership is viewed and indicted. A paradox of false equivalencies, red herrings, and impossible expectations are leveled at the leadership of women and non-binary people. Story after story is broken in our culture about women simply being unlikable or whose past mistakes invalidate their future leadership. Meanwhile, men in power, and the institutions they control, continue to traffic in and benefit from horrific and egregious abuse, subjugation, and incompetence. What an impossible, unwinnable rhetorical landscape.
Any whole-cloth attempt to undermine the broad, complex tent of feminism, including the #MeToo and #MeTooSTEM movements, is an attack on justice and progress itself, and we reject it wholeheartedly. Simultaneously, we welcome public, feminist critique of these ideas, and our leaders should be responsive to feedback about how to improve. The work of un-doing internalized subjugation and white supremacy is about walking a path, not arriving at a destination. We are a work in progress.
Patriarchy is predicated on strength and power gained through subjugating and hurting both people and planet. We refuse to transact in such ways. Rather, we want to suggest that a different, softer, and more loving form of power building and power sharing is required to do this work. Indeed, it is much much more powerful, in the long arc of history, to lead with love. With hearts in our hands, we are here to uphold the dignity and sanctity of one another and this world we share.
Let’s do it together.
