I don’t think anyone is arguing that sexual harassment doesn’t exist. Or that it needs to be dealt with by HR or management.
My take on the OP was the chilling effect on male/female interaction in the work place. I think that I, and others, have expressed that a certain amount of caution is prudent. But that is also form of sexism in the work place.
If I think nothing of inviting a male employee to lunch, but avoid inviting a female employee to lunch. Well I can see why female employees might think they are being slighted. But OTOH, I don’t want to be accused either formally through HR or office gossip, that I am hitting on the female employee.
I was just discussing what I call the “business hug” the other day. An example would be I run into a bunch of long lost former colleagues at a conference or something. The men do that sort of half handshake / half hug bro-hug thing while the women (typically in sales or an executive role) do the “so great to see you again!” hug, possibly with an “air cheek kiss”.
And that’s fine.
What’s not ok is this guy I used to work with who used to contrive some way to give the attractive interns and associates creepy hugs.
A form of sexual harassment that I’ve seen in person in the workplace that is less often described.
Instead of the classic form where a female employee is treated by the male employees as a positive sex symbol, object of desire and all that shit, instead of being treated as a fellow employee…
Instead, hostility to the female employee because she isn’t someone they can perceive as a desirable sex symbol. As if, being female, that’s what her role here should be and she’s failing it. Nasty contemptuous comments, not all of which are out of earshot of the employee in question: “Eww, who would hit that, I certainly wouldn’t” "Can you imagine how horrible it would be in bed with her? [Graphic description following, as offensively derogatory of her in various ways as possible. Her shapes are horrible. Her personality is horrible. Hence her bedroom behavior will be like this, utterly horrible. She’ll say this. She’ll do that. She’ll look like this while doing it.]
People are arguing that completely fabricated accusations are common and providing as evidence that their perfectly blameless relatives and acquaintances have been ruined by these.
I am saying that this is no evidence at all. Almost every actual harasser either believes that they are blameless or can claim that they are blameless and their friends and relatives are not going to get the other side of the story.
The minefield is largely imaginary. It is a fantasy made up by the guilty to protect themselves.
Also, I think, exaggerated by people who 1) have a a tendency to identify with the man in any story they’ve ever heard about these things, and so tend to think that that man was like me, and therefore probably not guilty because I would never do that and 2) are, for whatever reason, processing this risk as a whole new thing, different than the risks of all kinds of false accusations and misunderstandings that were already present.
Years ago, I was enthusiastically offered a side job by someone. It was in no way solicited, I was approached. But I was then abruptly ghosted. I have no idea what happened there. This is one of those situations where there were a LOT of common acquaintances between me and the person who approached me. I’ve often wondered if after one acquaintance recommended me, someone else (no idea who) heard about it, and because of some misunderstanding, un-recommended me. It’s entirely possible that at some point, I committed some innocuous action but because of circumstance, someone developed a negative opinion of me and that had an impact on my life. I’m sure that’s happened, honestly. Happens to everyone. And I think people know it. But somehow the idea that the misunderstanding might be gendered has some men freaking out, like it’s a whole new thing.
The only thing that’s new is that now if a woman misunderstands you and thinks you are acting inappropriately with her, or your behavior is borderline, you are no longer protected by a culture that actively protects actual harassers and assailants and used to protect the merely misunderstood as a side effect.
I am sure the answer is going to be “but this is different because the slightest accusation of the mildest sexual impropriety can destroy your entire career” But that’s not my experience. In this thread, we are reading about investigations. About being talked to. It seems like sexual impropriety at the workforce is treated more like bad BO than being caught embezzling: you may get talked to by HR, because no one wants to bring it up to your face, but if the behavior stops, that’s the end of it. Actual assault or harassment (which is when the behavior doesn’t stop) is treated more severely.
I believe both my brother and my husband’s friend.
No one else has ever accused my brother of anything like that, and the woman was ultimately fired, not because of that, but because she lied on a number of falsifiable ways. Of course, his career wasn’t destroyed, his career progression was slowed down a little. Also, none of the things people have suggested would have helped him, since, other than the “ride in the same airplane” accusation, she made up the rest out of whole cloth.
My husband’s friend wasn’t without fault. He talked to a student behind closed doors, about emotionally fraught issues. I don’t believe he was trying to get into her pants. But i believe that she believed he was. And he really could have avoided it. My husband said the student was walking around with red flags all over her.
In my imbecilic youth, and the start of my working life (think the start of this century), there was a great deal of sexual workplace banter. Colleagues would fairly routinely hit on each other, and everyone pretty much flirted with everyone. When I think back to what we did, said and got away with now I am astonished - was all this down to our youth, or the fact that it was 20+ years ago? And, I think back on that time quite fondly (it was fun) - but how many of our colleagues, females in particular, were quietly uncomfortable about the whole thing? Suppose I’ll never know.
Anyway, as a middle-aged man now with some workplace seniority, the question of how to work with female colleagues post-#metoo is something which I have struggled with (and kind of evolved-though) over the past few years.
A while ago I decided that I would never be alone with a female colleague, lest either she feel uncomfortable being around me, or I be accused of something untoward. My position has since softened a little - mostly because of two realisations…
Most women are not put on edge simply by virtue of being in the company of a man. He has to do something creepy for alarm bells to be raised. It’s okay to have a one-to-one meeting with a woman, as long as you’re not acting weird about it.
Sure, false allegations happen - but waving a sharp stick at all women within a two-mile radius is a disproportionate response to that
I’ve never met a woman who was uncomfortable working one-on-one with a man in a professional setting. I would never have succeeded in my largely-male industry if my supervisors and colleagues had avoided working with me, or required chaperones.
I did once work with an Orthodox Jewish man who was uncomfortable being alone with me. I was his boss, so that was a little awkward come annual review, etc. We resolved it by leaving the office door ajar. People walking by could peek into the room if they looked that way. Mostly we worked in cubes, though, and he was fine with me sitting in his cube and working one-on-one with him there.
Our friend/neighbor runs her family’s farm market. She purchases and resells stock purchased from the local Amish community.
The Amish men she deals with hate that she won’t allow them to just talk to her husband. Although she’s been doing this for years now, they are still uncomfortable, refusing to look her in the eye.
I’m just going to say briefly that I was a sales representative/ account executive for many years and, while you can glibly say “no one needs to do any of these things I’ve listed as part of their job”, that’s just not true.
If there had been a substantial number of men that adhered to rules like this, I wouldn’t have been able to succeed in my chosen career.
If you feel uncomfortable with an individual woman, if you suspect she has a grudge against you, is gunning for your job or would otherwise benefit from your removal from the workplace — you should not ignore your instincts and take all the precautions you think are necessary.
Similarly, I was able to do plenty of “wining and dining” while avoiding one on one after work dinners with men who I thought had ulterior motives.
Ask yourself how many times a day, in workplaces across the country, a man and a woman are alone in a room together where no one can see their feet?
How many times does that result in a false harassment complaint? One in a hundred million or something?
I get it, every job is different. Some jobs never require you to be alone with someone of the opposite sex, but some do. While no job ( except maybe a handful of jobs in the alcoholic beverage industry) requires you to consume alcohol -I was a non-drinker during most of my sales rep days-, some require you to socialize with people that have consumed alcohol.
At bottom, every job is different and there are no one size fits all rules. But I always found the Billy Graham / Mike Pence type rules particularly offensive because they affected me.
And they’re also a glaring evasion of personal responsibility. As I said, if you (generic you) feel you can’t be alone with a member of the opposite sex, then it’s on you to provide yourself with a chaperone and/or set up universal protocols that don’t disadvantage a particular group of people professionally.
Saying “Welp, I’ve got to protect myself from the possibility of false accusations so I refuse to work one-on-one with any women, and if my discriminatory attitude makes it harder for women to do their jobs and thus disadvantages them professionally then that’s their problem” is an asshole move. It’s not about self-protection, it’s about punishing women for the fact that sexually harassing women is no longer consequence-free.
If the situation were reversed so that women had most of the power, positions and money in the professional world, and some women insisted on excluding men from any one-on-one meetings to avoid the possibility that men might assault or harass them, men in general would be howling their lungs out over the obvious unfairness of such “self-protective” rules.
I think this is a really important point. If a man is worried about a woman actually outright lying, very few precautions will prevent that, or even prove she was lying: you can say the door was open the whole time, she can say you hauled her put of sight, in the corner. You can say you never went to the hotel bar. She can say you and she were there. It’s true you could get accused by a pathological liar. But that’s always been true, and not just about sex. You can also get mugged in the parking lot or killed by a drunk driver. If someone feels like they need to take enormous precautions about lying women wildly disproportionate to the precautions they take regarding other random threats, it says a lot about how they perceive women.
The other worry is that an innocuous action will be misconstrued and have a disastrous outcome, or that “the rules” have changed and previous innocuous actions are now bad. I think that doesn’t seem to be the case. There are a lot of friend of a friend stories, but when you dig into them, it seems like the vast majority of the time, it either wasn’t actually innocuous or the misunderstanding was cleared up pretty quickly and with no long term damage. It could happen, of course, but it appears very very unlikely as long as one’s behavior truly is innocuous.
I feel like some guys feel like they need to find an “absolute no exposure to risk of accusation or misunderstanding” position, but that’s really not possible. Just like all the other vulnerabilities we have to live with.
Actually, I suspect the intent of the Billy Graham rule is not so much to protect against the possibility of false accusations as it is to protect against something that’s much more common.
Sometimes when men and women work together closely for an extended period of time, they become mutually emotionally involved.
Now, unlike a false accusation of harassment, which I’ve never seen happen, I’ve seen this happen plenty of times. The work together a lot, then there’s a business trip and they both miss the plane home, then both their marriages fall apart.
The “miss the plane” thing is something I noticed after years of personal observation. I can’t explain it, but whenever a man and woman are traveling together and miss the plane, that’s means they did it. I can’t prove it’s 100% true, but it’s always held true in my observation, no matter how unlikely the coupling seemed.
But this is totally in the man’s control……the rule is there to protect them from falling for the tempting Jezebel who can break the will of even the mostly godly man, like some some sort of corporate Eve in the primal garden of the C-suite. It’s kind of demeaning, actually.
It’s also telling that such men often get insulted if women “take enormous precautions” (or any detectable precautions at all, even) against the possibility of being harassed or assaulted by them.
Women are expected to perpetually put up with and compensate for the not insignificant risk of sexual harassment, assault, etc., without causing any inconvenience or disadvantage to anybody else. Whereas when men are confronted with the far smaller risk of being unjustly accused of harassment or assault, it’s considered natural for them to freak right out and implement a bunch of paranoid draconian rules like “never be alone with a woman even for a second”.
Interesting. I am female, run a farm, and sometimes deal with local Amish men. They’ve never seemed to have any problem dealing comfortably with me.
It very likely of course differs from community to community and from person to person.
And women, of course, have been living with this all along: accusations that we’re incompetent and must have gotten our positions by sleeping with somebody, assumptions that we’re in the workplace looking for a husband or a lover, and the possibility that being alone in a room with a co-worker might lead not just to gossip and accusations and a poor reputation causing lack of promotion or even loss of the existing job (which has been true all along), but might lead to actual assault. Yet we’re supposed to, and generally do, go about our jobs in an ordinary fashion without avoiding our co-workers, at least unless there’s evidence that the particular co-worker is a problem (and very often we’ve been expected to keep working with such people anyway.)
When I run into men complaining that they have to be careful what they say and in what circumstances they’re alone with others, what I’m thinking is “welcome to our world.” If you don’t like it, change it for everybody. We’re done with having it work that way for women but not for men.
Yes. This is a real risk. Personally, i guard against it by telling my husband about all the times I’m alone with a guy. I mean, not sitting next to a guy in a public cubical with our feet out of sight, but if i have lunch with one guy, or if a male friend and i chat in a hotel room or alone at the bar at a business meeting, i mention it at family dinner sometime shortly afterwards. My feeling is that so long as know I’m going to share with my husband, i won’t do anything I’m not comfortable sharing with my husband. It’s worked fine so far.
I’ve shared hotel rooms with guys at conventions (play, not work) and been close with many male colleagues. I’ve never missed the flight home.
But, but, but, women have had to put up with harassment in the workplace for, like, ever, so it’s nothing new. Men having to take accusations seriously is new. I mean, until recently accusations, true or false, didn’t hurt men because they didn’t carry any consequences!
Another instance of “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. The idea that your gender could play a role in bad stuff happening to you in the workplace that you don’t deserve is a concept that most men have never had to wrap their heads around until recently.
Sure, it’s always been true that many men have had bad stuff happen to them in the workplace that they don’t deserve. But they have never previously had to worry about the possibility of being vulnerable to any undeserved bad stuff specifically because of their gender. Welcome to our world, indeed.
