Do you have a husband? I think in highly gender separated societies, talking to a woman is very different if you are bypassing a husband, especially one that is present.
Seriously, women go through their entire lives with the ever present, very real, fear of actually being attacked.
Whereas these men are all whiny over fear of potential accusations.
That’s some privilege! Right there.
Not sure what to make of this. Cheating on one’s spouse is a “real risk”?? Or is the risk the gossip at work generated by the knowledge two people are going on trips together, sharing meals, hotel rooms, etc., regardless of what else they might be doing together (which, on the face of it, sounds more concerning to the supposed jealous husband/wife than to work colleagues, as much as people love to talk about who is sleeping with whom though it is not really their business).
My discomfort with interactions with women in the workplace is a direct extension of my general discomfort with interactions with anyone in the workplace. I’m not concerned about being falsely reported to HR or anything, but I genuinely don’t want to make other people uncomfortable or think less of me. But my career doesn’t really allow me to just avoid interacting with people, even “socially”.
In my experience, men whose “innocent misunderstandings” get them into trouble are men who have a reputation for being creepy (which is to say that people don’t think it’s an innocent misunderstanding). I’m confident enough in my reputation that I’m not worried that an well-intentioned/ill-received comment is going to get me into real trouble.
But, I constantly worry about having said the wrong thing (not limited to dealing with women) and I’m mortified at the idea of unintentionally offending someone (or even creating a situation where someone is seeking out my reputation to determine if it was an innocent misunderstanding). So I like clear etiquette rules. And, what I hear from women (particularly younger women) and read on the internet does make it seem like a challenge. And every time someone says that it’s easy (like the “Rock Rule” above), which I can observe is not true, it makes more more self-conscious about the things I don’t immediately recognize.
Yes, i think developing feeling for a co-worker and deciding to cheat on your spouse is a real risk, and a much more common problem than “women at work took an innocent comment the wrong way and got me fired” is by a long shot.
I mean, it’s something you can avoid, of course. But it’s a risk worth considering, IMHO.
I definitely get that. It’s pretty common for me to overanalyze some offhanded comment I made–or didn’t make–for days, trying to figure out if I was offensive. I think that’s just general social anxiety. Folks who don’t seem to have that–who can breeze through conversations, even saying things that would make me curl into a ball of embarrassment without even noticing, and then go on to make fast friends with strangers through their sheer friendliness–have my admiration, but I’ll never be one of them.
Folks with social anxiety, I figure we need to make it 100% our problem and 0% other folks’ problem. And we definitely need not to externalize the pathology, to blame other people for our anxiety.
I once had to throw a guy out of a college club for being creepy. And… It sort of was an innocent misunderstanding. He was probably a little autistic, or at least had extremely poor social skills. It was a social club, not a workplace, and there was nothing inherently wrong with his pursuing romantic attachments. I know lots of people who found spouses in that club, without ever being creepy.
But this guy did stuff like follow a group that were going home together, and then, when a young woman left the group, catching up with her and being too close. He’d walk up behind an attractive young woman and rub her shoulders without first making his presence known. He mostly hit on incoming first year women, who are inherently more vulnerable, not having the connections and experience of the older women. (And he was a grad student, and much older than the undergrads. Think 28 hitting on 17.) Several women left the club because he was creepy and hard to avoid.
When we told him he was no longer welcome at the club, i suggested he seek professional help. Not, “you’re crazy” help, but, “learn to read interpersonal clues” help. I even looked up a resource at the college. I was worried that the next time he got into trouble for being creepy, it would ruin his career, not just membership in a club.
You have to wonder, back in the bad old days, if men would harass nonconsensual women with impunity just to disprove any possible accusation of consensual homosexuality, which was the real career-killer back then. Or, in school or the military, targeted one for violence.
We skew old on this board, so false accusations of rape seems not just prima facia absurd but also actually rare-to-nonexistant in our long experience. ‘Taken for queer,” however…
I really don’t know. I don’t know about auto crash statistics either, and I generally don’t expect to get in an accident, but I always wear my seat belt. If there’s an easy way to reduce my risk, then it’s my right to do so and I’m going to do it.
Specifically which rule are you referring to? I assume you have no problem with “don’t touch women” or “don’t make innuendoes.”
It shouldn’t be a big deal to avoid being in a blind room with someone you don’t know. In my industry, the conference rooms are now mostly glass. If we need a private 1:1, then we go to a public place like a nearby coffee shop. It would be really weird and uncomfortable if someone suggested an opposite-sex meeting with only two people where neither one of us could be seen. So nobody ever has to miss a meeting, and there’s never any he-said-she-said stuff.
I don’t drink alcohol anymore because I had a problem with it, and now that I see drunk people from the outside perspective, I see how painfully tedious they are and I don’t want to be around them. If that were a requirement of my job, I’d have to find a different one.
I don’t know what to say about sales-type jobs where there’s a lot of socializing. I can’t judge those jobs fairly because I would find them unbearable, wouldn’t go within a mile of one. But if people are often forced into situations where they have to be alone with the opposite sex, possibly when one or both is drunk, that seems like a situation ripe for abuse that someone ought to change.
As long as you’re applying general protocols where a same-sex meeting with only two people follows the same rules as an opposite-sex one, then there’s no problem.
But if you’re going out of your way to follow such rules with women but not with men, because only the association with women is what strikes you as “weird and uncomfortable”, then that could potentially amount to impermissible discrimination.
You don’t actually have an automatic “right” in the workplace to do something that you perceive as “reducing your risk” if it comes at the cost of discriminatory treatment of others.
If you’re treating meetings with men the same way as meetings with women, though, I don’t see how anybody could reasonably object to your preference for non-blind rooms and so on. (Unless you’re insisting on dragging somebody off to a noisy coffee shop in a blinding snowstorm or something because you refuse to sit with them in the conveniently located windowless meeting room right across the hall.)
My employer has wisely made almost all of the small rooms – offices and most conference rooms – windowed or glass-walled. Being enclosed with a single other person in a “blind room” is just something we never have to worry about.
That might be part of the difference, yes. There’s nobody but me for them to talk to.
But that implies that what they’re uncomfortable about isn’t just the act either of talking to a woman in general, or of talking to a woman about business.
If his problem was really that he couldn’t read clues, why was he only hitting on the more vulnerable women?
Because they were less agile about staying out of his way. Because they were less likely to already have a boy friend. And yes, because they were more vulnerable, and at least in some men, there’s an aspect of “hunting” with regards to women, and trying to find more vulnerable women and separating them from the herd “feels right” to many men. After all, (as a different man who did that once said to me on a message board when I asked him why he did that) the man wouldn’t want to be rejected in front of other men, that would be embarrassing.
(I didn’t know that man IRL, but he responded as if he were honestly surprised when a bunch of women told him his actions sounded creepy. And he said he would stop doing that, after a group of us were VERY VERY clear that it was unwelcome.)
True; but it doesn’t match very well with not being able to read clues. He could apparently read the clues that showed vulnerability, after all.
Yes, but not the clues that his attention was unwanted. I think “hunting skills” and “social skills” are only loosely related.
Yeah, I’ve talked to one Amish dude who I’ve run into at a lake nearby. He’s curious about English ways and I’m curious about Amish stuff. His community is the way it is because that’s how their founding members were. Change is extremely gradual.
He convinced the community to update everyone’s boats. They all had aluminum fishing boats. All identical to avoid jealousy. The “fleet” was ancient and falling apart. He addressed the elders with information he’d found about a plastic canoe that was an excellent buy, and would last a long time. They all got new boats and it’s the biggest thing to hit the community in decades.
I once asked him if he ever questioned his way of life. “Daily”, he told me.
No, I don’t have to insist on meeting with men in glass rooms just because I do with women, and no, that isn’t remotely discriminatory.
If I were using this reason not to give women the same meetings that I’m giving to men, then you might have a point. But that’s not the case.
Well, are you making your insistence on the glass-rooms-only-with-women rule publicly known?
That is, are your coworkers aware that you have a policy of not meeting one-on-one with women except in publicly visible spaces because you’re afraid of the possibility of their falsely accusing you of assault or harassment? And that you don’t have any such restrictions about meeting one-on-one with men, because you don’t have the same feeling that it’s “weird and uncomfortable” for you to meet with men alone?
Even if so, I’m not claiming that that would necessarily make you legally liable in a discrimination lawsuit. But I can easily see a lot of employers not being best pleased with your public insistence that female co-workers need to be treated differently from male ones in this way. Especially if it ever hampers or inconveniences them in doing their jobs.
Sample dialogue:
“Alice, what did HMS_Irruncible say about the new contract during your meeting?”
“We haven’t had the meeting yet, we have to wait till one of the glass conference rooms is free.”
“Why not just use the empty meeting room down the hall where HMS_Irruncible met with Bob yesterday? This contract decision is important, we can’t dawdle around on it!”
“I know, but HMS_Irruncible won’t meet with me in that room because I’m a woman, and he refuses to be alone with me in any space that isn’t publicly visible.”
Now, if situations like that never happen because your workplace always has plenty of publicly visible space available for meetings, and especially if nobody ever even realizes that you’re implementing this “I’ll meet with a man in a closed room but not a woman” policy, then no problem.
But if you’re making it A Thing that the other people at your workplace have to recognize and accommodate, then that strikes me as somewhat unfair to your female coworkers.
And I’d say the same thing if, for example, Alice had a similar personal policy of refusing to meet with men, but not with women, one-on-one in a closed room. But Alice would typically be less likely to impose such a policy, because women have traditionally not had the luxury of setting their own conditions about their workplace interactions.
Women were expected to demonstrate that they were “as good as a man” by following the same rules as men did, and just putting up with whatever increased risks for themselves that might entail. Men were the ones who could get away with demanding to “reduce their risk” (irrespective of how small that risk might objectively be) by creating special rules for themselves.
While I would never say “That skirt looks cute on your thighs”, (and honestly I don’t know any professional men that would), “That skirt looks cute” is pretty close to “You look nice today” which was something we were told was de facto sexual harassment over 30 years ago. So I never mention another person’s appearance.
I once asked a guy if he’d lost weight. (He’s lost so much weight his clothes no longer fit, and I was relieved to hear that he’d been dieting.) I sometimes compliment pretty jewelry, or a nice tie. That’s about it for comments on personal appearance at work.