Network-based hiring, which involves recruiting individuals through social connections, offers many organizational benefits, such as streamlining the hiring and onboarding processes and improving the match quality between organizations and new hires. However, it may also contribute to the limited access to certain job opportunities for marginalized workers. This study investigates how a social movement, #MeToo, which attracted widespread public attention to gender harassment, can influence an organization’s reliance on social connections for hiring decisions in an analysis of archival data on hiring decisions for top cast and crew positions in U.S. film releases from January 2010 to April 2021. Specifically, the analysis involves examining whether and how film directors shifted their collaboration patterns with women following the #MeToo movement, which raised awareness on gender harassment and sexual assault. The results show that more women are hired after #MeToo and that this increase was associated with film directors expanding their network of female collaborators. However, these network-expanding effects are concentrated in occupations off the film set, in line with moderation effects related to the perceived risk of accusations when working in close proximity with new female colleagues. These findings highlight conditions under which structural interventions may diminish the reliance on social networks for hiring, potentially mitigating its exclusionary effects.

Regulators increasingly adopt mandatory disclosure regulations to address social challenges. Requiring information disclosure rather than directly regulating firm behaviors and outcomes relies on social enforcement—a decentralized process where stakeholders may monitor, identify, and report on legal, ethical, or community norms violations—to ensure progress. Its efficacy, however, is contingent upon stakeholder access to information about the firm. Prior research shows that firms use symbolic management strategies in voluntary disclosures to make information harder to retrieve and evaluate. We theorize that this will also be the case in mandatory disclosures but that a firm’s visibility—the attention it receives from its stakeholders—will moderate its strategic response in terms of whether they use symbolic management strategies such as obfuscation and abstraction and how this is associated with subsequent substantive action. We test our hypotheses using the texts of 3,213 diversity disclosures from firms under the Ontario Securities Commission’s mandatory “comply-or-explain” regulation for women’s representation on boards (2015–2018). Our analysis suggests that disclosure regulations relying on social enforcement may only work to the extent that firms are visible to stakeholders. If they receive less intense and multifaceted scrutiny, firms may be able to hide behind symbolic management strategies.