More the former than the later IMO. When I started a decade and a half ago, our teams were small and the banter was intense. But we were a group of young, mostly single people living alone and had professional lives filled with 100 hour weeks, all-nighters, and lots of business travel. If we had maintained such a reserved atmosphere as some such as @Kimstu are suggesting, well burnout would have occurred much faster than it did.
The time we had a “senior” along with us, well we were much more demure in our deakings. I have had occasion to be the senior now, and yes as the senior person detachment must be maintained and you need to be more aloof than with contemporaries.
(Amazingly we somehow managed not to harass or falsely accuse each other. )
A few years ago I was working with a young female subordinate admin, and she came into work one day wearing a new dress. It was pretty, and without thinking I instinctively commented “Nice dress, by the way” in the midst of our other morning pleasantries. It was a nice dress, and I had no other motives than to be complementary.
However, there was a moment of quietly palpable awkwardness, whereupon the Gods of Social Etiquette reached down from the cosmos and gently placed their hands on my shoulder and whispered “Nope - don’t say anything like that again…”
I (think I) got away with it - there were no summons from HR, and she seemed unbothered after the initial post-complement pause. But it was an interesting lesson in where the line in the sand is drawn.
(I wouldn’t think twice about complementing a guy on his tie, though - so there’s one area where I definitely treat men and women differently)
I think this is kind of the point though. If you’re not trying to harass women and you’re decent at picking up on social cues, you can go about the workday not thinking about it, and the one time you say something that’s a bit borderline, nothing is really going to happen. Then you can pick up that it wasn’t the right thing to say and avoid it in the future.
Even if HR had got involved, there’s a bout a 99% chance they would just say “try not to do it again” and nothing would ultimately happen. If you actually get any punishment for something that innocuous, it was almost certainly because they’re trying to fire you for something else.
Of course, if a woman wouldn’t take a private 1:1 with a man due to concerns about sexual harassment (or worse), you wouldn’t for a moment call this discriminatory, because reasons. You’d defend it as a prudent self-protection measure because people are constantly getting raped in meeting rooms and women have a right to protect themselves.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Sure, maybe nothing happens but that HR gives you a warning or a (permanently documented) slap on the wrist for whatever mistake or misunderstanding happened. Or you might end up on a gossip spreadsheet of men to be avoided at all costs, a non-transparent reputational penalty that’s not formally documented, can’t be appealed, and you’ll never even know about it.
People have a right to guard their own safety, whether from sexual harassment, or from being vulnerable to accusations of the same. It’s not logically or ethically tenable to say women have that right and men don’t.
If a woman wouldn’t take a private one-on-one with a particular man, you have an HR issue, but it’s probably not the woman. If a woman won’t take a private one-on-one with any man in the company because there have been a lot of rapes in the conference rooms then you have a pretty major problem at the company.
In practice, the woman probably needs to accept the private one-on-one with the guy or be fired, though, unless she can come up with a plausible reason other than “i think he’s going to assault me”.
And i wrote about such a case. I supervised a man who felt he wasn’t allowed to be alone in a room with a woman because of his religious beliefs. He didn’t accuse ME of anything, even indirectly. And I did accommodate his request. We only needed to meet privately about twice a year, and on those occasions we used a windowless room (there were no small rooms with windows to the corridors in that workplace) but left the door open a couple of inches. Frankly, if I’d wanted to assault him, or if he’d been overcome by lust and assaulted me, I’m not sure anyone would have noticed. But it met his requirements of sexual propriety, and it was not a hard accommodation to make.
If he had been considered for a supervisory role it might have been a problem, however.
Your analysis is invalid here because you’ve rewritten the scenario to include a widespread rape problem in the company. Perhaps I was unclear in describing it, but I was talking about a woman who simply believes that private conference rooms as a category are less than safe at any company. Whether she’s right or wrong, for whatever reason, nobody would call her discriminatory for acting on that belief. It would be seen as a prudent self-protection measure in a world gone creepy. I wouldn’t disagree.
Or they ARE firing you for something else, but you won’t hear it. I work with a young woman who was formally told, in writing, last spring to not roller skate in the classroom (true story). This year, she was roller skating in her classroom. Sometimes people really, really don’t hear things if deep down inside they don’t see the problem. It’s just the teachers in a Charlie Brown cartoon “waa waa, was was waa”.
I know a guy who got fired that I am absolutely sure believes he got fired for a single joke. And he was, except it was a single joke after years of inappropriate documented jokes and other behaviors anyone would recognize as deeply problematic. But he seemed to treat each incident as an isolated event, and once it was resolved, he thought he had a clean slate or something.
If you really feel like you need to go out of your way to protect yourself like this as far as I’m concerned you’re free to do that.
I think the fear that just making a poorly-timed comment will have career consequences is ridiculously misplaced. If HR really put this on your permanent record it would go something like “Guy said ‘nice dress’ do a woman. Woman said she felt uncomfortable. Guy apologized. Guy was told to be careful in the future.” If the same guy says “that’s what she said” at another bad time 2 years later, his permanent record isn’t going to mean anything. Everyone realizes that what’s going on is completely innocuous.
And I don’t think there needs to be a false equivalence. It makes sense for women to take more precautions against workplace harassment than men against exaggerated accusations. Maybe I’m biased because I work in a very male-dominated field, but the stories I’ve heard from women about what creepy guys have done that they either didn’t report or was never acted on are way worse than even the stories I’ve read here of men being reported to HR for something innocuous. And I have never once heard an actual story of a man being falsely accused or accused for something innocuous to HR.
Thanks, I was waiting for someone to say it. “Women’s concerns are valid and sensible and must be heeded, men’s are invalid and silly and are fair game for criticism. Do as you’re told.”
Said every asshole leaving a conversation with HR about why he can’t say “bodacious tatas” to a female colleague because his free speech rights are being impinged.
Was there something in the thread that makes you think I advocate for this, or were you just going for a bit of cheap insult comedy?
If you like, I can show you in this very thread where I clearly stated that one of my rules is to never make sexual innuendoes, but something tells me you’re not interested in responding to what I actually said.
You’re wrong, and I’m starting to wonder if you’re using some idiosyncratic definition of “discriminatory.” If you treat women differently from men, that’s discriminatory. In some contexts the discrimination may be justified, but saying it’s not discriminatory is to display an ignorance of what the word means.
I cannot imagine a boss tolerating it if I said I would only meet with men one on one in a glass walled office. I prefer to keep the door open? Sure. I’m not comfortable working late nights one on one in a deserted building? Sure. But “I need 360 degree visibility at all times”? No.
There’s the broadest sense of “any difference whatsoever”, and there’s the narrower workplace-sense sense of “unequal benefit or harm.”
I don’t think there’s much value in hewing to the broader definition in a workplace-related discussion, because (as we’ve already established) we expect and tolerate women behaving differently toward men for their own safety. If you insisted, you could say that the women are being discriminatory toward men, but I think most of us would agree that’s a highly misleading characterization, wouldn’t you?
You’re wrong again. If I had a female boss who refused to meet with me under conditions where she met with my female co-workers, based on my sex, I would 100% have a valid discrimination case against her. Again, you seem to think there’s a double standard that there isn’t. Others may agree with you, but they’re wrong.
That’s not what I said at all. I said that based on the likelihood and severity in the real world these specific concerns are not equivalent and we don’t need to apply a false equivalence.
I’ll be clear here, I don’t take my policy to absurd lengths, or lodge it with management as a condition of employment. It’s more of a thing that I strive to do whenever possible, just an automatic habit.
It never involves any effort or disruption because our workplace seems almost designed to avoid the situation to start with. I’ve never worked anywhere that anybody really needs to meet with anyone in a room that doesn’t have at least one window. If there were some exceptional situation I’d probably leave the door open.
This thread is just really amusing to me. If it were “women, how do you avoid being alone with men at work”, I’m sure it would be seen as prudent and uncontroversial, an unpleasant and unavoidable fact of life. But let a man hold a similar position, and we’re all picking nits to find the remotest most hypothetical possibility of discrimination.
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