One of the things that we know for sure is that leadership at the top on any issue, in any institution, is what changes the game. If you want to talk about new rules you can put together all of the new rules that you want to. But if you don’t have leadership behind those rules, they don’t get effective.

MS. BENNETT In the year after your testimony, complaints to the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] about sexual harassment went up 73 percent. Some of the working women’s groups like 9to5 reported their phone lines ringing off the hook with women — largely women — saying: “You mean this is illegal? You mean I can do something about this?” And, of course, in the year after, a record number of women ran for Congress. Why did it take so long for #MeToo to happen?

PROFESSOR HILL Because I think we had to come to terms with a number of facts. We had to come to terms with the fact that people really didn’t know that this was illegal. I mean, it had been so normalized in our workplaces that people just assumed this is the way life is. And then we had to start thinking about, what kinds of things do we need to do?

And I think the first approach was to say, let’s change behavior. That’s all we have to do. We’ve got to, you know, get a few bad apples out of the system and that’s going to be enough. Then we realized that that wasn’t enough, that the few bad apples really was not entirely the problem, that what we had were cultural problems, and cultural acceptance of it, and that around the cultural acceptance were structures that were built to support it. And that includes some legal structures that were built.

The nondisclosure agreements that were put into place, the forced mediation around claims of abuse in the workplace — those were things that we just sort of had thought of as neutral, but were actually contributing greatly to an ongoing problem. So we didn’t really understand the complexity of it.

And the #MeToo movement came about because we started to understand the complexity of it, and, I will say, because the press started covering it. And if you don’t have all of those things coming together, you’re not going to have the kind of reckoning that actually engages people and puts together out there the stories and the analysis that will make for a #MeToo movement, and that invites other people to come in and engage in the conversation.

MS. BENNETT Do you see parallels to your experience there? You’ve spoken a lot about the letters you received, hundreds upon thousands of letters that came to you. And now there seem to be communities sprouting up. Was it an incredibly isolating experience for you to speak out?