Does Lower Sexism Lead to More Sexual Violence? Evidence from #MeToo

In this paper, we exploit the sexism index at the media market level to study the effects of the MeToo movement on sexual crime. We show that the MeToo effects are heterogeneous on documented sexual crimes across different areas in the United States, with low sexism areas witnessed a greater and statistically significant increase in the number of documented sexual crimes. Investigations on the mechanism of the MeToo effects show that the surge was primarily caused by reporting of sexual crimes rather than an increase in actual incidents.