Perhaps we have different definitions of “at arm’s length” as I keep everyone at work at arm’s length. I’m a big hugger of my friends (or was pre-pandemic), but that kind of shit stays out of the office. As for the rest of your statement, I agree completely. I’m just still confused by the OP as to their definition as well as I thought @Quicksilver’s comment in post #6 was spot on, but @Cathy967 seemed to take issue with it somehow.
And THIS is why anybody who says that Pence (or anybody like him is an idiot) is himself an idiot. Some people just don’t have any sense of “What could go wrong?”
Before I retired last year, I followed this rule of never commenting on anyone’s appearance, with one exception: if a lab rat normally dressed in tee shirts and jeans, but one day, shows up in a suit for an award ceremony or briefing, I had no problem saying something like, “Looking sharp, Chris!”
Why do you have to say "cute"at all? (What would I say to a guy if I liked his clothes? “Cool pants, man.” So… “Hey, cool skirt.”)
In 25+ years of teaching college I never even did that. I just didn’t want students to think I was making any judgements about them other than academically. So many of them had learned to suck up to high school teachers, and thought they could get a better grade if they were your “bro”, or flirted /complimented you.
I once had a fellow teacher say “Can you come in my office for a few minutes? I’ve got a student coming in for a conference, about grades. Do you mind just reading something at another desk and spying on us?” (Large, communal office, but empty on this occasion… and this conference was about the kid failing the class. So the concern was violence as well as "But he accused me… oh, and then he called me and my skirt “cute”… and made googly eyes at me!"
Is that what you kids are calling it these days?
Seriously, I’ve been checking back since you were asked about it. Spell check gone screwy?
I wouldn’t use the word “avoid” but I do keep a certain amount of distance both in work and personal relationships.
I don’t ride alone in cars with women who are not family members. I don’t initiate hugs or other physical contact (but I don’t mind hugging them back). If someone seems to be getting a little flirty I’ll usually find a way to mention my wife. It keeps me out of trouble.
Pretty sure DPRK means having the door (oak wood) closed when he writes “sport the oak”. I’ve never heard the phrase before but internet says it is a thing.
Not indecent exposure.
~Max
Why would he invite her to lunch if they weren’t already good enough friends for it to be clear that it’s “just lunch?” I had lunches with men at work on a fairly regular basis, but it was because we became friends in the work environment. If someone I didn’t already have a friendly relationship with asked me to lunch I’d probably try to find a way to turn him down in a non-judgemental way. But a younger woman who’s maybe a little unsure of herself might feel obliged to say yes. Don’t do that…as you said.
But I don’t think you need to completely avoid work friendships. They just need to develop organically.
Can’t you just open your office door? Then it wouldn’t be ‘closed space’ anymore?
Right. That’s the difference between men and women. If a random male co-worker was at the elevator at the same time I was going to lunch, I could ask him to join me even if we barely knew each other. That’s not the case with a woman. I would have to know a woman very well to ask her to go to lunch with me. But the random male co-worker I can ask freely and we may eventually form a friendship from these kinds of casual encounters. That kind of interaction isn’t really the same with women. If I ask a random woman co-worker to lunch when she’s standing at the elevator with me, her first thought is going to be that I’m hitting on her.
Plenty of people who rightfully criticize Pence-type sexist gender segregation are perfectly well aware of “what could go wrong”. Nobody AFAICT believes that it’s truly impossible or unheard-of for a woman to make a false accusation of sexual harassment against a man.
But there’s a difference between taking justified and appropriate steps to protect oneself from false accusations, and blatantly discriminating against women while using fear of false accusations as your excuse.
In particular, if you feel that protecting yourself from false allegations of harassment requires you never to be alone with a woman while at work, then it’s YOUR responsibility to provide a chaperone, or enforce a universal rule of no one-on-one meetings, so you’re not preventing a woman from doing her job.
Where Pence and his ilk are being idiots (not to mention misogynist slimeballs) is in making women and their employers suffer the unfair burden of that choice. So they’ll agree to meet/work one-on-one with a man, but not with a woman, no matter how professional and ethical she is. As the OP notes, this kind of discrimination can have serious impacts on a woman’s career.
It’s not really a matter of self-protection so much as plain old-fashioned gender discrimination. You (generic sexist “you”) set things up so that women by definition don’t meet your arbitrary restrictions on being allowed to do a job, and then you leave it to the women to cope with having to figure out ways to work around those restrictions. And, not coincidentally, male advantage in the workplace is perpetuated.
Men who are not Pence-type idiots and misogynist slimeballs can perfectly well figure out gender-neutral ways to enforce professional workplace standards of behavior for guarding everyone against false harassment accusations.
(And given that unscrupulous men are just as capable as unscrupulous women of falsely accusing somebody of harassment, and that even staunchly homophobic right-wingers have a fairly well established track record of clandestine homosexual behavior, even the Pence-type idiots and misogynist slimeballs are probably going to have to adopt such gender-neutral tactics if they’re really concerned about protecting themselves against false accusations.)
Who asks random people of any gender to lunch?
I don’t know where many of you people work. But first of all, I’d like to know how you “avoid women at work” in this day and age. I’ve been working since the 90s and there are plenty of women at all levels in any office I’ve worked in. More than would be practical to “avoid” in any meaningful way.
Secondly, where do people work or live or whatever where you can’t be alone with a female coworker in an office, elevator, car, or wherever without her worrying about you raping her or you worrying that she will falsely accuse you of raping her?
Third, “hitting on someone” by asking them to lunch or drinks after work is not harassment unless you are totally obnoxious about it, keep persisting, or there is some obvious power disparity.
I think you’re right. When you used the phrase “at arm’s length,” based on the subject of the conversation, I did not think you meant that literally.
Mostly, ISTM, by working at persistently sexist workplaces where the institutional culture still enables traditional forms of exclusion and marginalization of women and treats traditional “boys’ club” sexism as normal and acceptable. Sadly, even in this day and age there are still a lot of such workplaces.
I’ve never worked any where that had more than 25% of the staff as female and that was a architect’s office with the architect’s wife as the only woman. For large companies my department was 100% male except for the place with a sexual harassment problem where they hired two female techs and a Canadian company where 2 out of 9 were female in my department and one was an engineer and the other was a secretary.
Even in my current consulting role I’ve had two female clients and worked with 4 women in the last 8 years of building distilleries. I have never given a seconds’ thought to acting differently around women because when they occasionally arise my behavior is mostly habitual and I treat them like everyone else. The same thing will occur if I ever work with a black man which so far in almost 20 years has never happened.
My male cow-orker was recently accused by a female coworker of being part of an old boy’s club to his manager. Bad thing is this was a meeting that I set up and the three of us were in. Said manager is moving to a new role really soon.
To me, throwing down the “old boy’s network” is akin to dropping the n-bomb. It is an accusation of sexism. Let me know if you disagree.
No one, including the manager that is leaving has reached out to me. But, I just so happen to have a recording of that call. Nothing nefarious, I record 90% of my calls so that I don’t have to take meticulous notes and can reference what was actually said. I listened to that damn thing and don’t hear anything that I would call “old boys club” “talking over” or “sexist” (but I may be biased). So, if it does get to that, I’ll just play the recording.
I’m careful and perhaps overly sensitive with female colleagues. For example, I think I’m “work buddies” with a female colleague that clearly has a live in boy friend. Said colleague is going in for out patient surgery soon and will be out of the office for a while. I got the group admin to send a care package the day after the surgery. When asked about where to send the care package address, I asked the admin to enquire. If it was a male colleague, I would have pinged the guy directly. I’m 99% sure my female colleague would have no problem giving me her home address. However, to me as a male colleague, I never want to be crossing a line into “male stalker colleague.”
Please correct me if I’m wrong here, but methinks prudence is the better part of valour. It’s simply not worth treating everyone the same versus getting fired for asking a different gendered colleague their address to send a care package. I ain’t no Mike Pence, but certainly want my colleagues to feel comfortable…
I’ve seen those threads here. In the past, they’ve always been about the way women treat men.
One of the issues I haven’t seen addressed so far is just how angry so many young women are nowadays.
All that Mad Men-style pinching of secretaries’ bums and shit is not acceptable and neither should high school shit like ranking office women by hotness or having pools on who bangs the new chick first etc, but I’ve worked with more than a few young women over the years who are clearly angry at the world, and almost seem to want to be offended by things. I try to avoid interacting with them except in a strictly professional context.
I absolutely would tell a male colleague I didn’t know that I liked their shirt, or ask about some new gadget they had or book they were reading. I wouldn’t generally do that to a female colleague I don’t know because I’m far more likely to get a narky/snide/sarcastic reply at a minimum.
At a number of places I’ve worked, women in the office have had Hunky Half-Naked Firemen calendars up at their desks. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest, except that I know full well if I put up a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar or even something tame like a Gil Elvgren calendar (neither of which I’d be putting up at my desk in an office; I’m just illustrating a point), I’d be in a very unpleasant meeting with HR before I’d finished my morning coffee.
Or, they realized that they no longer have to take the bullshit that gets heaped on them. You may be interpreting their pushing back against repeated offenses as anger, when it’s just what you would expect from a male in the same situation. If the anger is directed at you, perhaps you should consider that your actions, regardless of your intent, are not being received as you had hoped.
Either I’m super misunderstanding you, or I think that statement is egregiously wrong. Can you maybe elaborate on what you mean, here?
Edit: to be clear, yeah, it’s an accusation of sexism. But I’m really unclear what “dropping the n-bomb” means in this context as an analogy.