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REMARKS
Bloomberg Businessweek
October 1, 2018
When women do leave, they tend to land in posi-
tions that pay less, not more. The occupations with the
highest rates of harassment also happen to be the most
male-dominated, highest-paying
ields. Looking for safety,
women seek out spaces where they’re less likely to get
harassed, which means they land in less lucrative ields or
positions—a negative economic impact that persists through
the rest of their working years.
In 2003, while working on Howard Dean’s presidential
campaign, Sarah Schacht says a fellow campaign worker
attempted to assault her sexually. She reported the incident
to the campaign, but her assailant kept his job. By 2005, she’d
left her chosen ield, political technology, to pursue a path
that felt safer. From the sidelines, she watched as her attacker
grew increasingly successful. “These career investments you
make as a young woman get destroyed,” she says. “It’s like
putting a down payment on a home that the moment you buy
it is blown away in a hurricane.” (Dean says he wasn’t aware
of the incident. “If I’d known about it, I would’ve ired [the
alleged assailant] immediately.”)
This logic may seem not to apply to what allegedly hap-
pened between Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford. They were teen-
agers, after all—efectively classmates, not co-workers. Some
of the consequences of assaults within that age group, though,
are remarkably similar. Elite colleges and prep schools are
designed to foster the kinds of connections that propel their
alumni’s careers. Kavanaugh attested to this at a Sept. 6
conirmation hearing, calling his high school years “very for-
mative.” Some of his high school classmates were in atten-
dance, he noted.
Victims are also put into the position of having to pro-
tect their future reputations. Speaking up can be “career-
trajectory altering,” says Joni Hersch, an economist at
Vanderbilt University who studies employment discrim-
ination. “If you are known as that girl who complains,
even informally, about ‘boys will be boys’ behavior, will
you have the same opportunities to form connections that
will eventually be valuable in the workplace?” Or, when
your résumé crosses the desk of a former classmate in the
future, do they remember hearing about “something that
happened” in high school?
None of us want to be judged as adults for the worst deci-
sions of our youth. During the teen years, the part of the brain
that responds to rewards is incredibly sensitive, says Laurence
Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University
who studies adolescence, risk-taking, and decision-making.
At the same time, the part that’s responsible for self-control
is still catching up. “It’s like having a car with an accelerator
pressed to the loor and not a very good braking system,”
says Steinberg. With age, the reward response blunts, and
our self-control gets better.
This is one reason people can be convinced to forgive
past misdeeds, especially if it looks like their perpetrator has
changed for the better. At 30, George W. Bush was arrested for
driving while intoxicated, an ofense that contributes to 10,000
deaths every year. “I used to drink too much in the past,” he
told reporters on the campaign trail in 2000. Five days later,
Americans voted in the election that gave him the presidency.
Time, though, is often kinder to the perpetrators than
it is to the victims. That 2003 campaign incident fol-
lowed Schacht through a decade of her career, she says.
Schacht, who now does consulting work, still worries that
people who learned about the incident thought she was
unprofessional. She wonders how many panels she didn’t
get invited to speak on or which fellowships turned her
down. “You can’t put a speciic dollar amount on missed
opportunities,” she says.
To some, Kavanaugh’s insistence that he has “never done
anything like what the accuser describes—to her or anyone,”
as he said in response to Blasey Ford’s allegation, seems, at
best, politically imprudent. Why not, like Bush, acknowledge
that he drank a lot—maybe too much—in his younger days,
and that there are parts he can’t remember. “I don’t think I
did these things,” he could say. “If I did, I’m horriied and
ashamed, because that’s not who I am today.”
Since Blasey Ford came forward, more allegations have
surfaced: that Kavanaugh exposed himself to Yale classmate
Deborah Ramirez while they were both undergraduates;
and that he and Mark Judge, a close friend during his high
school days at Georgetown Prep, were present while fellow
Maryland-area high school student Julia Swetnick was gang-
raped at a house party in the early 1980s. Kavanaugh’s con-
tinued denials are as troubling to some as what may or may
not have happened more than 35 years ago. “A single event
from your teenage years doesn’t tell us much about you as
an adult,” says Steinberg, the adolescent researcher. “But if it
happened and he’s denying it, that tells us something about
who he is today: He’s a liar, and we don’t want liars on the
Supreme Court.”
The cruel twist is that it’s women who have historically
been accused of lying. Many women say they don’t report
sexual assault or harassment because they’re afraid no one
will believe them. There’s a longstanding myth that women
make false reports in order to hurt men. It’s a weird lie: Like
voter fraud, false crime reports of all kinds are by all mea-
sures basically nonexistent. We certainly don’t subject vic-
tims of other crimes to the same kind of doubt.
As a result, we’ve been loath to hold men of any age
accountable—until recently. As Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford
prepared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee,
comedian Bill Cosby was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison
for drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004. She
waited a year to tell anyone about it, and it took an additional
10 before he was charged with a crime.
This year, sexual harassment and assault abruptly shifted
from something men could reliably get away with to some-
thing they maybe can’t. For teenagers today who aspire to the
judiciary or the corner oice, that’s a very diferent message
than “What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown
Prep.”
With Dune Lawrence and Josh Eidelson