Alejandro oversees a department of ten people within a larger company of three hundred. Recently, his CEO scheduled a meeting with him. When Alejandro arrived, the head of Human Resources was sitting with the CEO. That’s never a good sign . . .

Alejandro was, as he told me, completely shocked to find out that he’d received two separate verbal sexual harassment complaints for making inappropriate comments with sexual innuendo. They wouldn’t tell him what he said and they wouldn’t tell him whom he had offended, citing the need to protect the employees’ anonymity.

As far as he could tell, there was no formal investigation conducted and he was handed a letter stating this was his first and final warning. They didn’t offer him any training so he could make sure he didn’t make the same mistakes again. Another complaint would result in termination and loss of stock options. In Alejandro’s mind, his entire career, which he’s worked so hard for, could be over in a blink of an eye—and he considers himself a good guy! Later that day, he went home and didn’t sleep for a few nights, trying to figure out what he possibly could have said.

Alejandro has stopped going into the physical office so much, choosing to work remotely instead. He doesn’t go to off-site work functions and considers everything he says in the presence of a coworker, particularly if they’re a woman. For the most part, he’s concerned about the equity he holds in the company. One more ding and his life’s work could disappear.

Modern Manhood: Conversations About the Complicated World of Being a Good Man Today

“Any woman can lodge any anonymous complaint against any male and that guy’s gonna get crucified over it. Your career’s just been irreversibly impacted and it creates a very scary environment for men, like holy shit,” he says. “And it’s unfortunate because I think it’s going to have a regressive effect where men don’t feel safe talking to women or building social connections with women, which we know are really important for the progression in an organization and for promotions.”

He’s still stumped by what he possibly could have said.

Should You Have to Watch Every Damn Word That Comes Out of Your Mouth?

Alejandro’s story seems to be the encapsulation of many of your worst nightmares—you’re just walking around, doing your job, and next thing you know, you’ve been unfairly accused. Boom. Career over.

I heard from many men that #MeToo has them walking on eggshells, scared to say or do anything that’ll land them in hot water because the new rules of engagement are really unclear. This seems to be particularly true in the workplace. So if this is how you feel, you’re not alone.

According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans said recent developments have made it more confusing for men to interact with women in the workplace. LeanIn.org also did a survey in 2019 that I frankly found pretty alarming:

Sixty percent of male managers say they’re uncomfortable participating in a common work activity with a woman, such as mentoring, working alone, or socializing together. That’s a major jump from a year ago, when the number was 32 percent.

Thirty-six percent of men surveyed said they avoided these types of activities—and more specifically, they avoided mentoring or socializing with a woman— because they “were nervous” about how it might appear to others.

Senior men report being six times more likely to hesitate to have a work dinner with a junior-level woman than with a junior-level man, and nine times more likely to hesitate to travel for work with a junior-level woman.

It’s clear that there is a lot of fear right now about a “witch hunt” mentality in the workplace. According to a Glamour and GQ survey, a third of men (ages 18–55) are personally worried about being wrongly accused of sexual harassment at work. The number gets a lot bigger for those making six-figure incomes.

I think these fears have the potential to obfuscate other real areas for improving the workplace for both women and men, so let’s examine them—starting with Alejandro. Forget touching, forget drinks and inappropriate behavior or a hookup even—this was just a couple of passing comments.

“Right now, don’t say anything without thinking carefully about every word that comes out of your mouth because one wrong word can be a career-limiting or -ending one,” Alejandro says. “One slip, one stupid comment that you didn’t think through, and it can be completely misconstrued. And that’s the scary part.”

It’s left Alejandro to wonder, Do I have to watch everything that comes out of my mouth now? What can I even say or not say? It’s an interesting question, so let’s consider what others think about it.

There are people who specialize in making workplace cultures and environments safe for employees. They’re called human resources professionals. One is Sarah Morgan. She’s a senior human resources director for an international organization. Not for nothing, but Sarah Morgan is the most candid human resources professional I’ve ever spoken to. To her, the very question of “What can’t I say?” is the wrong place to start. “What’s frustrated me in the process is—and this is typical of workplace behavior in general—people want rules and not guidelines,” she says. “I want a rule that tells me to do this and not that— which is how people end up in uniforms. Now I’m finding that people want rules surrounding interactions between women and men in the workplace to absolve them from potential liability. And it’s like no, that’s not how this is going to work. There is no list of rules.” She points out that she can’t pull out a stopwatch and time everyone’s hugs to make sure they’re under 2.3 seconds, or whatever timing would be friendly but not inappropriate.

“From a human resources perspective, there’s absolutely what’s lawful and unlawful, and I get that,” Morgan says. “But with relationships—and that’s what you have at work, you know, the vast majority of the time—sure, there’s liability involved in how people interact, but the vast majority of what you’re doing is just normal human interaction. The law doesn’t really dictate that. Power dynamics dictate that.” Those are the same power dynamics that mean you earn 20 cents more per dollar than your white female colleagues, 35 cents more than your black female colleagues, and 42 cents more than your Latina colleagues, according to the Pew Research Center.

Part of Morgan’s job is to look at where and how people are represented in different areas of the company. One project she’s working on is examining the pay discrepancy of the telemarketing team at the company she works at. Commissions are involved in the pay structure of this team, and across the board the men perform better than the women. When they looked at why that might be, they heard repeated feedback that potential clients were turned off by the higher-pitched voices of the female sales associates. (This phenomenon of people not liking the sound of women’s voices is so common that the popular podcast This American Life explored the trend in an episode. The segment revealed the disproportionate amount of negative feedback that female radio reporters receive about their voices, versus male colleagues.)

One way to look at the situation is to hold up your hands, sigh, and grumble about how the world is sexist, but Morgan and her team tried to take a more nuanced view. Could they fix the internalized sexism of someone who won’t make a purchase because a higher-pitched voice called them? Nope. But, there are a bunch of other areas to look at.

First, they scoured the pay inequality data for areas to improve. “What can we do to support those individuals to make sure that we level that playing field and give them the opportunity to be able to achieve, despite the external factors that are making it more difficult for them?” she asked. That might mean supplying additional training for those who want it.

Next, they looked at the world years down the road. There’s a pay discrepancy at her company now, in 2019, so what can they do to help alleviate that a decade from now? In two decades? She started looking at how they recruit. “We’ve got to be actively looking to diversify our talent, now,” Morgan says. “We have to also say, ‘Okay, this pipeline is clogged. And what can we do to make sure this pipeline is more equitable?’” Morgan has steered her recruiting team to look at communities and organizations that support women to tap talent for her company.

This may feel like it’s drifted a long way from #MeToo, but Morgan sees it as all part of the same conversation. Bouncing your ideas off people from a variety of genders and races helps shape them in ways that might not expose your blind spots if you’re talking to only one group.

“Any workplace that lacks gender diversity is going to have #MeToo issues,” Morgan says. Now, if I imagined Sarah Morgan and Alejandro in the same conversation, I think Alejandro would likely reply, exasperatedly, that he still doesn’t even know what he said. He doesn’t know whom he offended or why, so how’s he supposed to fix that? Alejandro was very clear with me that he still wants women to be able to make anonymous complaints. He’s thought a lot about the gender pay gap. He was raised by a single mother and cares about women and equality. But now he’s worried that he’s on the receiving end of “fake news,” as he called it, or an embellished complaint from a miscommunication with a stuffy female employee or an HR director he’s butted heads with in the past.

“We have this knee-jerk reaction to shoot first and ask questions later. That’s a dangerous place to be. And that’s kind of where we are right now,” he says. “I don’t know the state of where we are with regard to how you protect women or men who are feeling unsafe or in a hostile work environment. How do you protect them while at the same time not allowing for baseless witch hunts to take place? All it takes is one—one instance where someone misunderstands, and that’s the game changer,” Alejandro says.

The fear of false accusations rippled through almost every conversation I had about this topic, so I think it bears repeating that the numbers suggest the risk of false allegations is very low. In the workplace specifically, these numbers are confirmed anecdotally by professionals. In 2018 the Employment Law Alliance, a global human resources legal solutions firm, conducted a survey of nearly four hundred employers from all fifty states. The survey found that harassment claims were rarely fabricated, with only 6 percent of respondents indicating “more often than not” that claims were false.

“I can tell you in my fifteen years working in HR, I have never had somebody come to me that did not believe that the situation they went through was legitimate enough to come forward,” Victorio Milan says. Milan is a human resources professional who has worked in the retail, restaurant, and now nonprofit industries. “Nobody ever lied. They may not have had all the facts, or the context by which they were coming forward. It might not have been as bad as they thought, but they did not do it because they wanted to get back at somebody.”

When Alejandro complained to his CEO that he’d have to watch every single thing that comes out of his mouth, the CEO, also a man, was sympathetic. “It’s just a really shitty time to be a man,” Alejandro remembers his CEO saying to him. “I have to watch every single word that comes out of my mouth,” Alejandro repeats to me.

Despite Alejandro’s frustration, thinking before you start talking is actually sound advice for professionals in any setting—and it’s something women are already quite used to doing.

“We all have a responsibility for how we show up, the energy we bring, the way we make people feel in our presence,” Morgan says. “I don’t think #MeToo changes that. I think it brings a different level of attention to it, and men haven’t had to pay attention to that before. So it’s uncomfortable for them, because suddenly now they have to be mindful.”