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Sexual harassment and sexists behaviors are pervasive issues in the workplace.
Around 12% of women in France have been subjected to toxic behaviors at work
in the last year, including sexist comments, moral, sexual or physical harassment,
or violence. Such toxic behaviors can not only deter women from entering the labor
market, but can also lead them to leave toxic workplaces at their own expense.
This article is one of the first to examine the relationship between toxic behaviors
and worker flows. We use the #MeToo movement as an exogenous shock to
France's workplace norms regarding toxic behaviors. We combine survey data
on reported toxic behaviors in firms with exhaustive administrative data to create
a measure of toxic behaviors risk for all French establishments. We use a triple difference
strategy comparing female and male worker flows in high-risk versus
low-risk firms before and after #MeToo. We find that #MeToo increased women's
relative quit rates in higher-risk workplaces, while men's worker flows remained
unaffected. This demonstrates the existence of a double penalty for women working
in high-risk environments, as they are not only more frequently the victims of
toxic behaviors, but are also forced to quit their jobs in order to avoid them.
