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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

A man does not need to be attracted to me to be worried that close collaboration -- working late together, having dinner together, etc -- will lead to other people wondering if there is an affair. Bonus points: My experience has been that men who aren't attracted react really negatively to me giving off signals that I am interested. So men who are not hoping to sleep with me can have powerful reasons to just not want to work closely with me in the kind of manner that could dramatically further my professional goals.

(I am the author, in case that is not obvious.)

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> A man does not need to be attracted to me to be worried that close collaboration -- working late together, having dinner together, etc -- will lead to other people wondering if there is an affair.

While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with professionally-appropriate "close collaboration" between two colleagues, "close collaboration" is possible without "working late together" or "having dinner together."

In my experience the vast majority of working professionals, even those who forge close ties with their colleagues, don't see working late or dining frequently with colleagues after work hours as being fundamental to "close collaboration." They have their own lives and don't want to be spending their evenings with co-workers, male or female.

> My experience has been that men who aren't attracted react really negatively to me giving off signals that I am interested. So men who are not hoping to sleep with me can have powerful reasons to just not want to work closely with me in the kind of manner that could dramatically further my professional goals.

If a man or woman takes the risk of signalling romantic interest in a co-worker, he or she should be prepared for the possibility that the co-worker will react "negatively." While most adults are capable of handling this situation maturely and kindly, for obvious reasons the rebuffed party will almost certainly experience some level of discomfort after being rebuffed. This is the primary reason folks should be careful about expressing interest in somebody they have to work with. Are you prepared for the potential of self-inflicted awkwardness?

Unless you are frequently signalling romantic interest in the co-workers you are hoping will work most closely with you, I don't understand why you believe men who are not hoping to sleep with you are generally disincentivized from building a healthy and mutually-beneficial working relationship with you.

The only thing I can surmise is that your expectations around what "working closely" with a colleague looks like are unrealistic.

You seem to be making a lot of inferences that I don't see grounds for. As one example, I did not say that I was giving signals of interest to coworkers, much less on a regular basis. I only made a general observation that if a man has no desire to be personally close to me, it is easy enough to avoid any of the potential downside that might concern him by just choosing to not work closely with me. Done. It leaves me out in the cold when most men consistently do that, but that isn't his problem.

I worked for a large corporation for over 5 years. My opinions on how this works are certainly informed by those experiences. However, I currently do freelance work and my own independent projects. So, when I network now, I am not representing a company or department or whatever. I am only representing myself.

That appears to inherently come with challenges that men do not seem to have. When I try to make professional contacts, I am asking individual men to trust me as an individual. Many of them have far more reason to decline taking that bet than to accept the risks involved.

I have spent a lot of years trying to figure out how to make forward progress on this issue. Framing the problem the way I currently frame it has gotten me far better results than what I used to get. Trying to emulate what men were doing was flat out failing to get me the results I was looking for -- i.e. the kinds of results men got.

There are no doubt many factors involved in determining any particular outcome, so it is not possible to prove my hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt. That fact doesn't inherently make it a weaker hypothesis than the rest of them.

Thank you for commenting. I appreciate the engagement.

> As one example, I did not say that I was giving signals of interest to coworkers, much less on a regular basis.

You previously wrote:

> My experience has been that men who aren't attracted react really negatively to me giving off signals that I am interested.

I'm genuinely confused. If you are not giving signals of interest to men you are interacting with in a professional capacity, how do the reactions of men who you're ostensibly interacting with in a personal capacity relate at all to your professional ambitions?

> When I try to make professional contacts, I am asking individual men to trust me as an individual. Many of them have far more reason to decline taking that bet than to accept the risks involved.

Our backgrounds and experiences might very well be quite different, but I think attitude plays a big role in how your efforts pan out and going into interactions with this kind of world view is not healthy in my opinion.

I am an adult male professional. If there's a good reason we should do business together or help each other professionally, I don't care if you're half squirrel. I don't know what you're asking of the folks you meet, and when and how you're asking, but in my experience, most professionals, male and female, don't harbor irrational reservations about building strong working relationships with colleagues of the opposite sex.

I'm genuinely confused.

I am sorry that you are confused. But the manner in which you are framing this makes me feel that there is nothing constructive that will come out of any additional efforts to try to clarify anything for you. You are being fairly dismissive and consistently suggesting that if I am not getting the results I desire, it must be that I have personal issues that are hampering my performance and my gender cannot possibly have anything to do with why a woman is getting a subpar performance, and never mind the aggregate statistics that agree that women generally see less success than men do professionally.

Take care.

I'm sorry you've interpreted my attempts at responding to your comments as being dismissive, but, based on my own experiences at work and in business over the past decade and a half, I do feel strongly that the world view you have apparently adopted, which assumes that men tend to build professional relationships with women only when they harbor romantic interest and avoid them when they don't out of paranoia, does not reflect what happens in most professional settings. Furthermore, I cannot imagine that taking such a world view into every professional interaction with a member of the opposite sex can be a positive influence on the interaction.

The mere fact that there exist statistical inequalities between the sexes does not in any way prove that your world view is the root cause of these inequalities.

which assumes that men tend to build professional relationships with women only when they harbor romantic interest

Small quibble: I am not suggesting that men will only work with me if they are hoping for romance. In most cases, men willing to interact with me because they want romance are of zero value to me professionally. In fact, they often represent an obstacle to my professional goals.

I am saying that heterosexual men generally have reason to be leery of getting too close to any woman at work and, if they are in a committed relationship, can have reason to avoid being close to another woman in any way for any reason. This throws up barriers to networking, collaboration, etc for women that men typically do not face.

I don't know how I can be more clear about that. It doesn't have to involve attraction from either side, though when that is there, it certainly can complicate things.

I see nothing paranoid about men being more hesitant to seriously engage women professionally to a degree they would not hesitate to engage a similarly talented man. The possibility of it leading to problems strikes me as quite reasonable.

I don't know what you consider "getting to close to any woman at work," but I have seen plenty of men build close working relationships with female colleagues, mentor female direct reports, etc. And vice versa. I would also point out that lots of people, male and female, simply don't want to invest the time and energy required to build strong professional relationships.

Final comment: I am a heterosexual male in a committed relationship and I have never avoided a professional relationship with a woman out of fear of the "problems" you refer to. Interestingly, there are many women decision-makers today and the number of women in positions of power and influence will only grow, so men who avoid relationships with women as you suggest are just as likely to find their own professional and business interests harmed. Fortunately, I simply don't believe that most male professionals are operating the way you believe they are and I have met plenty of men and women with strong professional networks who reflect that.

So I'm a man, and I'm married, and I'm committed to my marriage. I'm not just worried about my reputation; my marriage is a more important issue. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean I'm immune to temptation. So if I'm having to work closely with you, and you're interested in me, and I also find you attractive, I'm going to take steps to distance myself from you. That may take the form of not working late with you. It may even take the form of asking to be assigned to a different team than you. (Note well: It's not OK for me to try to get you fired, or damage your career. It's not even OK for me to ask that you get reassigned.)

If you want to blame me for that, saying that it's my weakness that is the problem, I can agree with you. But I'm not trying to discriminate against you, or put a glass ceiling on your career, or anything like that. I just know that I can be tempted, and if I give in, it will really mess up my life.

Unfortunately, that can still leave you blocked from your professional goals. I don't know how to fix this.

Thank you very much for that. That is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about: Men can be trying to be good men and make this choice. It isn't some nefarious, malicious, woman-hating choice. It's simply a hard problem to solve and the sooner we can look at in that light, the sooner we can find real solutions.

1. How many years have you been working?

2. How many times in your career have you found yourself working closely with a woman who you found attractive and who made it clear she was interested in you?

3. In these situations, how many times were you the woman's superior, equal or direct report?

I think answers to the above would be more beneficial to this discussion than the admission that you could theoretically be tempted by a co-worker to cheat on your wife.

1. 30

2. Once. I found her attractive, and I think she was at least willing to become interested in me. (Of course, I'm a clueless male geek, so I easily could have been mistaken.)

3. Her equal.

So, yeah, it hasn't happened to me very much. But the time it did, I did what I felt I had to to make sure that nothing happened. (What did I do? I sent one message that I wasn't going to play, and I asked a male co-worker that I trusted to hold me accountable for what I did and thought about her. It was enough.)

Your response sort of demonstrates the point I made above about most people not being attracted to most people.

In a career of 30 years, you found yourself working closely with a total of one woman who you were attracted to and who you thought might be "willing to become interested" in you. This co-worker was your equal, and you dealt with your feelings in what seems like a mature manner that caused no professional harm to you or her.

Where's the problem that needs solving?

> ... and you dealt with your feelings in what seems like a mature manner that caused no professional harm to you or her.

Thank you.

> Where's the problem that needs solving?

I was responding to Mz's post about how men who were not attracted to her reacted negatively to her. My point was that men who are attracted can be just as difficult.

It's fine if you don't see the problem based on my personal situation. In fact, I prefer it that way...

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