A movement or a moment? An intersectional analysis of student perceptions of the impacts of #MeToo

In 2017, #MeToo became a public way for victims of sexual assault and harassment to share their stories and demand social reforms. Despite the widespread use of the hashtag on social media, little is known about what post-secondary students thought of the impacts of the trend. To this end, we surveyed a probability sample of undergraduate and graduate students about their perceptions of #MeToo in a spring 2019 questionnaire at a private university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States ( n = 1,435). We assessed the extent to which students agreed that #MeToo: (1) had gone too far; (2) created an environment where those accused of assault or harassment will be held accountable for their actions; and (3) made them rethink their past experiences. In our multivariate ordinal logistic regressions, we found most students disagreed that #MeToo went too far, most agreed that it created an environment of accountability, and more than half agreed that #MeToo made them rethink their past experiences. Yet, our understanding of student perceptions becomes more refined once we add interaction terms to the models, where we find that students’ multiple identities matter when it comes to perceptions of #MeToo that, according to many, primarily centred white, cisgender women as victims, and cisgender men as the perpetrators. The results of this study help advance our understandings of the impacts – and limits – of #MeToo for our sample of students.