Companies will no longer tolerate brilliant jerks: Arianna Huffington

NEW DELHI: Arianna Huffington, the editor-in-chief of

Huffington Post

, said on Tuesday that companies will no longer tolerate “brilliant jerks”.

"Across the world, if a man produced brilliant results, he was forgiven everything else.

#MeToo

is changing that. As companies like Uber have found out, when you don’t focus on creating the right culture, the bottom-line suffers. Companies will no longer tolerate brilliant jerks. It won’t help to be brilliant if you’re a jerk.” she told TNN.

The co-founder of The Huffington Post was referring to an episode when the renowned cab-hailing company was accused of promoting a culture of sexism within its organization after its engineer

Susan Fowler

came forward with allegations that her complaints of sexual harassment were "systematically ignored" by the human resource department of the company.

In the past, there had been reports of instances when cases of sexual misconduct against people in powerful positions had been deliberately ignored.

However, in November last year, a social media campaign, #MeToo, changed the status quo.

The campaign urged the victims of sexual harassment to post their experiences to demonstrate the widespread nature of the misogynistic behaviour.

The campaign was initiated by Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano in October last year and soon became popular across the globe. Within its first 24 hours, the hashtag was used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts.


It elicited discussion about sexual harassment and abuse in not only Hollywood but in the music industry, sciences, academia and politics as well.

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