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I agree that #MeToo has gone too far and in fact has been weaponized. One example from my own recent experience: I was a manager of a software development and innovation team at a well-known nonprofit research institute. I hired a fairly junior developer who happened to be female. As it turns out, she took the job just as a stepping stone to another, arguably more prestigious team in my institute. She basically punted on her responsibilities, ignored specific requests and tasks, lied constantly about her progress, demanded that we pay for her art education out of our project budget, and generally did little but get coffee and chat with people on the team she wanted to jump to. Meanwhile I frequently had to clean up her messes and fix what little code she managed to write, at significant personal cost. After doing all the things a supportive manager should - praising her publicly, coming up with plans to improve performance, being quite encouraging and supportive in our 1-on-1s, and giving her specific warnings about her behavior and performance - it finally came time to fire her. She went literally crying to my boss, who then told me we couldn’t fire her, because we might get sued for sexism, or something. Despite the fact that I treated her with utmost respect and superhuman patience. But since my workplace was raging with #MeToo consciousness (as evidenced on our Slack channels daily, and elsewhere), she got away with it and in fact got exactly what she wanted all along. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” - Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time |
I think you misspelled “managerial incompetence”. Either (1) you weren't documenting that concrete relative (to other staff) poor performance on measurable performance criteria and the related counseling that you gave, or (2) you were wasting your time doing that (not just documenting, but even doing the counseling) when higher management wasn't willing to follow through on (for probably really bad reasons, whether it's “we’ll just assume lawsuit risk is unacceptable without reviewing the facts”, or “the facts of the specific case don't matter because we are actually so neck deep in sexual discrimination that any scrutiny, no matter how unwarranted the triggering complaint is, poses unacceptable danger”) in any case.
Either way, it's a management problem that #MeToo, at most, exposed, not a #MeToo problem.