A Year On From #Metoo, Little Has Changed

Last week marked the first anniversary of the inception of the #MeToomovement yet sexual harassment at work is as rife as ever. VictoriaSprattinvestigates

- Victoria Spratt

THE #METOO HASHTAG is one year old. ‘This is it,’ people proclaimed when the movement started. ‘The reckoning on sexism that we’ve been waiting for since forever.’ But #MeToo was never going to be a solution, it merely exposed the sheer scale of the problem.

Two stories last week highlighted just this. First, a highly critical independent inquiry revealed the House of Commons to be a workplace in which sexual harassment and bullying have long been ‘tolerated and concealed’. Labour MP Teresa Pearce then drew gasps from Parliament when she detailed how a colleague had been sexually harassed and was treated by management as ‘the problem rather than the victim’.

No wonder, then, that a recent study conducted by the TUC in partnership with The Everyday Sexism Project found that more than half of women, rising to nearly two-thirds aged 18 to 24, feel they have experienced sexual harassment at work. Meanwhile, the latest figures from the Young Women’s Trust (YWT) found that 32% of young women still don’t know how to report sexual harassment at work – and 24% say they would be reluctant to anyway for fear of losing their job.