A few years ago, Song Ma, a professor of finance and entrepreneurship at Yale, found himself torn between two competing ideas about the state of the workplace.
The first was that the #MeToo movement had generated a powerful wave of reforms to protect victims of abuse. Starting in 2018, states including California, New York, and Washington had passed laws to weaken non-disclosure agreements, which had long been used to silence victims of harassment at work. In 2022, Congress passed the Speak Out Act, which prevents employers from being able to demand workers to sign NDAs preemptively, before an incident or dispute occurs.
"These were reforms nearly everyone cheered for," says Ma. "And for good reason."
His other idea was that these laws may have backfired, and made it worse for women.
"As economists, we've learned that well-intentioned labor regulations don't always produce the outcomes we hope for," he says. After the Americans with Disabilities Act came into effect in 1990, he notes, employment among disabled workers declined as some employers avoided hiring them to sidestep compliance costs. Similarly, so-called Ban the Box laws, designed to help people with criminal records get hired, ended up hurting young Black men, because employers fell back on what Ma calls "cruder demographic proxies." Because of harmful racial and gender stereotypes, Ma explains, hiring managers drew the conclusion that a Black man applying for a job was more likely to have a criminal conviction...
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