The trouble is the standard isn’t applied equally to everyone… even by the same person. Plenty of people are fine with minor touching by strangers or co-workers… as long as they don’t have something else against the person doing it.
It also depends on the situation; instinctively extending a hand or taking an extended hand to keep from falling or to get back up freaks out very few people regardless of who’s doing it. Very deliberately approaching from the rear and placing both hands on a seated persons shoulders as though to give a massage probably would make most people uncomfortable.
Also who’s touching who matters… men touching men and women touching women are generally pretty well tolerated (again as long as they don’t dislike each other). Men touching women seems to cause the majority of problems, regardless if it’s done by a kind old grandpa, powerful middle aged executive, or goofy young teenager. Women touching men is also generally well tolerated (sometimes even encouraged), although there are some circumstances where men don’t like it (creepy ugly old trucker-broad aggressively pinching his cheek kinda situations).
While these large ranges in perception to touching make a blanket don’t-do-it-at-all policy the safest, you’ll always have a large group of people that don’t mind it and maybe even like it.
A woman I worked with at my first job was a hugger. Not a hugger, but a HUGGER. She’d hug you like she hadn’t seen you in years and missed you. She hugged me like that when we MET. Odd woman. But a very nice lady. It always made me very uncomfortable (especially because I was raised in a non-physically-expressive family) but she was so nice and I didn’t want to insult her so I never said anything. Oddly enough, this was the same place that fired my friend who was accused of harassing someone.
Are you sure that’s why he was fired? And, if so, are you sure your place of employment called “hanging out with female employees” sexual discrimination?
I don’t think it’d be a big problem to give only the women a gift on International Women’s Day. But, yes, expense would matter. An incidental gift costing less than $20 probably wouldn’t be a problem.
Just don’t do that. You’re setting yourself up to create a work environment where the women feel marginalized. I can’t answer about the legalities but my company would put a stop to it I think.
These might be hard to answer because they are kind of weird behaviors, in addition to being microaggressions if nothing worse. They seem, to me, to be probing behaviors trying to test exactly where the line is, in a subject that we’d hope would be more infused with good judgement and good intentions.
Suppose you handed out printed copies of the meeting agenda that were on different colors of paper, and you announced that the different colors were for employees of different ethnicity, and said the different colors didn’t mean anything and you were doing it this way for no reason. It’s all perfectly above board, you said, because what was printed on them was exactly the same. This would be bizarre and it would be hard to accept that it didn’t mean anything. Everybody would want to know why. Perhaps the only thing that would be explicitly wrong about this would be that it was injecting ethnicity into the conversation completely without reason or relevance, but I think it’s also obvious that it’s generating gratuitous hostility, and would just stink overall.
These are all pathological test cases. They’re trying to create vaguely hostile situations where the harm is somewhat more difficult to pin down and the benefit is hard to see. If people had an overall appreciation for how their actions would be seen, if they had some imagination for seeing the workplace or the world from somebody else’s perspective, these things typically wouldn’t be happening. That might be a better way to create decent workplaces than crafting rules which could catch even these pathological test cases.