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Comment by sqldba | Hacker News Reader

It sounds terrible. And yet working in he unrelated field of IT I haven't seen it.

I have seen a bunch of assholes in high positions though and have to put up with their idiotic demands and abuse.

So when I read these articles I wonder if it's the same people and how they translate treating male workers like garbage into treating female workers like garbage. It's not misogyny; it's welcome to the workforce and dealing with people above you who are neither competent not deserving of their positions and their power trips and borderline psychopathy.

What do you think? Or are there really nice bosses who are just complete assholes to women with zero crossover?

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Yes. People exist who may seem like really great bosses and nice people but are also aggressive and entitled with their female coworkers. It is important not to think of sexual harassment as only the skeevy creep who purposely takes advantage of women he has power over (although these people definitely exist too). Women have a right to work without being sexualized at all. Many times it is well meaning, otherwise good people who over step professional boundaries. They don't make an advance expecting to make the woman feel uncomfortable, but that doesn't make it ok either!

> are also aggressive and entitled with their female coworkers.

and more generally any one deemed of inferior status and/or easy to prey on (women commonly being slotted in these categories either way), the number of people who will seem perfectly nice around their colleagues but will abuse staff (e.g. serving or cleaning agents, or secretaries) at the drop of a hat is astounding and disheartening.

Yet something like 30% of office workers have had office romances. Are you going to tell all of those people they should not have flirted?

Office romances are fine. Even in the military, relationships between coworkers are accepted. It’s part of life. What’s not accepted is hitting on or dating your subordinates. One, it’s inappropriate since the subordinate may feel forced to comply with the advances for the sake of his or her career. And two, even when it works out and isn’t harassment, team dynamics are about to go into the toilet. Who gets the next promotion? Who gets the next good deal assignment? When the boss is dating one of the team members, any decision will be suspect. The whole thing is entirely unprofessional. An office romance between consenting coworkers is different from harassing/dating people you have power over.

We are in a bad way when one's subjective "feelings" determine the order of the day. There is a POSSIBILITY that one might FEEL they owe something (regardless of the reality)... So therefore, we need to guard against what may very well be an outlier case by restricting what the majority of people who do not have these feelings can do.

Depending on the circumstances, asking someone out for a coffee is one thing. Asking them five times is almost certainly harassment.

Eh, I think restraint beyond "don't ask someone out five times, like a creep" is called for. I don't know of you've ever had anything ... distinctive about your appearance -- really thick glasses, unusually tall or short, uncommon facial hair style, hypnotic voice -- but attention, even non-creepy compliments ("your beard is awesome, can I touch it?") get really draining after awhile. Each individual's interest isn't a problem, it's the never-ending trickle that just wears away at you.

It's not just that someone might have to deal with an overwhelming amount of unwanted interest from a single person, but that the aggregated polite inquiries from dozens or hundreds of interested coworkers and colleagues could add up to something overwhelming. It's like littering.

So while being in a relationship with a co-worker may be fine, starting a relationship with a co-worker is tricky. It's like why you shouldn't hit on wait staff or flight attendants: they are there because it is there job. Your co-workers come into work every day for the same reason.

> Asking them five times is almost certainly harassment.

Yet this behavior is romanticised is popular culture, and has been from the dawn of time up to and including the present: Oddyseus and Helen of Troy, Shakespeare's "The taming of the shrew", tons of Fred Astaire movies, as well as modern movies like "Ghost", "Life is beautiful", "Chasing Amy", TV shows like "Sex and the city"... I could go on. Lucikly I don't need to, since TVtropes has a site dedicated to this character (the "dogged nice guy"). And note that many of these are targeted at, and very popular with, women (who are usually at the receiving end of the initially-unwarranted attention). Apparently this behaviour can walk a thin line between illegal and very very romantic.

Thank you for not linking to TV Tropes. I've lost a great many hours to that site. :)

Yes, it was a deliberate non-link ;)

(Oblig. http://xkcd.com/609 )

As I recall it, Odysseus was just one of many suitors of Helen and in fact had to be strong-armed into joining the Greek invasion. Might you perhaps be thinking of Penelope?

(Also "The Taming of the Shrew" is firmly in the "oh fuck no" category of 21st century society)

It goes both ways. Numerous female pop stars, and in entertainment in general, angling and fishing to steal away the guy from his relationship because she KNOWS they are meant to be together... She doesn't hear "No thanks" and go away.

Mature adults stop flirting when it is clear the other party is not interested.

If they're flirting with someone who they can fire, or hit with a damaging performance review? (Or an unjustly flattering one, for that matter.) Absolutely I'd tell them to knock it off. The possibility of things sometimes going right in that sort of situation isn't worth the cost.

If this was your friends who worked out, would you feel happy for them or scold them for setting a bad example for everyone else?

I agree that once it has worked out for folks, it's hard to say, "You shouldn't have done that." But aren't there still costs? Everyone else in the company now gets to wonder whether the lower-ranking person's raises and promotions are due to merit or just because they're in a relationship with the boss.

Beyond that, the bigger issue to my eye is that it doesn't always work out. If your boss flirts with you and you aren't interested, that puts you in an awkward position. What if saying no makes them upset with you, or just negatively colors their perception of your work in the future? (Human beings being what we are, it's hard for a negative feeling about someone in one context to be entirely compartmentalized away from our judgement about them in another.)

Also, whether it works out or not: If romantic attachments between supervisors and subordinates are an accepted part of the culture of this workplace, what are the odds that the boss's attraction to you factored into your hire? Are your colleagues aware that the boss is attracted to you? Does that undermine their confidence that you got your position based on talent? Does it undermine your confidence that you got the position for the right reasons? (Might the boss think that you owe them some sort of sexual payoff for the job? There's a comforting thought as you try to do your job.)

I'm not saying that any of those suspicions or worries are justified in most cases! I'm sure that most people do a decent job of separating their work responsibilities and their personal lives, even in these sorts of circumstances. But a culture that accepts supervisor-employee relationships invites this class of concerns in a way that a culture that prohibits them would not. (And maybe my thoughts here really are influenced by thinking about this in a grad student context: Ph.D. advisors have a truly astounding amount of power over their students' futures.)

All of these scenarios are possible but often they are presented as a certainty. This speaks more towards fears and feelings; I'd be interested to see studies that claim most office romances turn out badly.

People are being trained to make these leaps even if there are no facts to back them up. You might _feel_ your boss is treating you differently because she asked you out, but should we all adjust behavior to accommodate _potential_ negative impressions in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way (You seem to agree that we should not...)? These discussions tend to assume the absolute worst outcome regardless of incidence.

Some quick googling suggests 30% of office romances lead to marriage. Even if that stat is wildly inaccurate, it still feels bizarre to tell so many people they should have taken one for the team (not had a relationship).

It feels to me like you're conflating general "office romances" with the more narrow "supervisor/employee romances". I've been focused entirely on the latter (which fits the main topic here: senior faculty members pursuing sexual or romantic relationships with students, often in their own labs).

My reason for preferring an outright ban on supervisor/employee relationships is that they can have nasty effects on the entire workplace culture, that they can be exploitative or feel exploitative, and that based on many reports neither of these effects is particularly rare. Good leadership can't only be fair, it has to also cultivate a belief among employees that it is fair.

Is there a cost to this in lost opportunities for positive relationships? Absolutely. But even the highest-level executive won't have more than a few thousand people declared "off limits" to them by this: surely that's a drop in the bucket compared to the total population of the cities or communities where they live.

I understand; even in the case of "power imbalance" relationships, I'm still asking the question: What is the evidence these are primarily negative relationships for the participants?

When you read about these, the authors almost exclusively present it as the person in the dominant position somehow taking advantage of the other. Are you equal, though, in your condemnation of e.g. the flirty student successfully seducing her professor? This happens. Is your message to her that she has no idea what she is doing, and that she's setting back gender equality by doing so? The answer is usually dodged because admitting the situation happens (both participants being into it) pollutes the desired narrative- That one partner has no agency by dint of the power imbalance.

re: your 2nd paragraph, can you provide some links? You present it as common knowledge. What's the actual incidence of negative outcomes? If it's, say, 15%, that means 85% have positive outcomes, and you want to tell those people to go pound sand. I find that unreasonable.

Years ago, I had intense debates with my mother about the Monica Lewinsky case. I made essentially the same point you're making here: that focusing on the power imbalance stripped Lewinsky of her agency as an adult woman. My mother's arguments that Bill Clinton had too much relative power (and was too much older) for the relationship to be reasonable didn't really sink in for me at the time.

As I've learned more about feminism in recent years, I've found myself thinking about Clinton and Lewinsky again, and I'm much more on her side now. (I still don't entirely buy the age-based concern that she raised.) Even if the relationship was entirely consensual and entirely initiated by Lewinsky and they were both happy about it, that still doesn't mean that it was healthy for the morale of their workplace, for all the reasons I listed before (quite apart from Kenneth Starr). I don't put primary blame on Lewinsky for that (though as an adult she ought to have known better): as the "boss" in the situation, it was Clinton's responsibility to turn her down, at least until he was out of office or she no longer worked for the federal government.

As for the flirty student seducing the professor, it takes two to tango. Speaking as a professor who's been pretty clearly flirted with at least once, I can tell you that I had no trouble at all indicating my lack of interest. I'm not condemning her for "setting back gender equality", but it was blindingly clear to me as the person on top of the power imbalance that anything other than a professional relationship would absolutely call my objectivity in the class into question. (In that particular case it didn't help that our broader conversation that day was about her concerns about her grade, but I would have had the same issues even if she'd had a solid A.) If a pairing like that were truly meant to be, the student would be welcome to come back and make a proposition after commencement. In the meantime, I can assure you that having my undergrads be "off limits" romantically doesn't feel like an undue burden on my love life. (Admittedly, I've been married the whole time I've been a professor. But the point still stands.)

Re: your last paragraph, about my 2nd paragraph: The original article that this whole thread is responding to is literally a collection of quotes and stories from women who found this sort of environment miserable and want it to change. If that's not enough for you, I don't think me Googling to find you more examples is likely to change your mind.

It is ridiculous for outsiders to stick their noses into consensual relationships engaged in by adults. If I were Lewinsky or any other woman you might theoretically be addressing, I'd be highly annoyed at your patronizing "Oh honey, I know you wanted to but he should have saved you from yourself" kind of attitude.

Clinton morally erred by breaking his vows to his wife, but if we set that aside, he did not do anything wrong by the simple act of having sex with Lewinsky. Let's assume, though, that the power differential argument _is_ valid- Who _could_ he engage in a relationship with, being President? Not politically powerful women, because his power is always going to be greater. Maybe other world leaders only? Only world leaders in the G8? He has no peers.

The student/professor example has a few _practical_ concerns regarding why you might want to avoid that situation and you've laid those out, and I agree. But ethically there would be no cause for objection unless actual grade massaging was occurring. That's not a given. In other words, appearance of impropriety is a practical objection, not an ethical objection. I'll zing any professor for taking advantage, express or implied, of one of her students but I will not automatically assume something shady is happening without evidence.

Anecdotes are not data. If we can show that the majority of these relationships are negative, that's a stronger case, but still not worth blanket-ruling the exceptions out of existence.

At best you get a relationship with an improper power dynamic embedded in it. I can't imagine any workplace would even allow that to continue.

I would ask why the hell you're presenting such a rare and convoluted scenario as something that we should be treating like the norm.

They have a right to, but they can waive the right voluntarily.

Yes there are people that act just fine to people they believe are capable or otherwise worthy who are total assholes to those they deem unworthy of their time/effort/care.

Yes sexism really exists and that line of worthiness/unworthiness may be drawn at your genitals.

In many cases this is not pure sexism. Often people have a few 'exceptions' for some highly competent people.

In many cases it's closer to hazing where people can be incredibly nasty to people they think are acceptable targets. And then after a transition treat as part of their inner circle.

Not that I think either are acceptable, but it's important to try and understand behaviors you want to change.

I did say 'may', and I said that for a reason.

Or are there really nice bosses who are just complete assholes to women?

My friend's ex-boss was like that. All the guys at the company thought he was the best boss ever and all the women hated him with a passion.

The opposite absolutely exists. I've had female bosses, professors, etc. that all the women loved and admired, while all the men agreed she was out to get them.

Are you certain of that? In my experience, women superficially will say glowing and great things about other women, but when the honesty comes out, there's vitriolic hatred.

Women have a far more sophisticated sense of situation-appropriate speech. Men think of it as "two-faced," but it's just Machiavellian maneuvering. When taken at face value, it's easy to mistake women as having great respect and love for one-another.

I get where you're coming from, but I'm pretty sure in most of the cases I'm thinking about. Say, with women I was close enough to that we could have a great time privately talking shit about other professors, yet when it came to the "man hating" one almost all genuinely seemed to like or at least respect her.

EDIT: I was just thinking about how this professor would grade men worse than women for essentially the same answers and realized that you could make a pretty compelling case for early education (which is predominately staffed by women) being biased against boys, and cite the greater number of women that go on to enter higher education as a potential consequence of it. I wonder why nobody raises a stink about that.

yea it really depends on the person. I've had female bosses that went out of their way to harass men because they knew they could get away with it (HR didn't believe the men), and I've also had female bosses who were threatened by younger women, and harassed the heck out me.

The female boss in one place I worked seem to hate all the women who worked under her, but generally loved the guys.

This seems to be my general experience. Female boss/female employee seems to be the most volatile combination.

To be fair, from my viewpoint, most of them seemed to be actually acting fairly. If a guy had done something similar, any one of them would have ripped him apart, too.

I don't have any explanation.

What a strange comparison. I have had my fair share of less than stellar bosses, but just by virtue of being male none of them tried to touch me, invite me to a date or told me to wear sexier clothing in order for the client meeting to be more successful.

Yes, it can very well be that the same people are treating male workers like garbage and treating female workers like garbage, it's just that when you are male, this mistreatment is restricted to the work place and non-physical, which makes it far less intrusive (I would guess... I am male so it is hard for me to really relate with women in such situations, but I do know that I would freak out if my boss would try to touch me!).

I've worked at a company that clearly had a brogrammer, hostile environment vibe, which the people in power were simply not conscious of.

I'm happy to report that over several years, attitudes improved, more women got hired, and the environment became much better.

It took effort and strategic issue framing from those of us who wanted to see change, and it took flexibility from those who decided to become part of the change -- but it happened.

> And yet working in he unrelated field of IT I haven't seen it.

The article notes various reasons for this. It gets covered up, abusers are generally cautious about where/when they do it, some people don't perceive it as abuse, etc.

Take Bill Cosby as an example. Decades of consistent reports of behavior (to the point where 30 Rock was making pointed jokes about it years ago), dozens of victims, legal settlements, and he's still got plenty of people who won't believe it happened defending him.

> Bill Cosby as an example.

Rich and wealthy people can cover up a lot. See Michael Jackson. It doesn't mean that child abuse is rampant among musicians.

I also work in IT and I share the GP question. If it's as rampant as some articles and people make it out to be then the harassers are getting very good at covering it up.

They might be good at covering it up. Or you're not actively looking, and so it's not in your sphere of awareness. Or the coworkers to whom it's happening don't trust you enough to discuss the problem with you, and so it's not in your sphere of awareness.

I'm a pretty average straight white dude, but I have seen this happen, right in front of me, at multiple jobs, and absolutely nothing happened except when I spoke up and started something over it. The targets didn't say anything, because the power imbalance (real or perceived; I tend to think the latter, but then, I'm not the one being attacked and made to feel powerless in the first place) was too great.

Unfortunately, child abuse is, in fact, rampant among musicians. Want to try a different argument?

> Or are there really nice bosses who are just complete assholes to women with zero crossover?

That's an unnecessary dichotomy. A third possibility is that there are asshole bosses who have additional tools in their arsenal when it comes to harassing woman employees.

if your bosses are groping you sexually, then they are sexual harassers, it doesn't matter what gender you are. If by "their idiotic demands and abuse", it's asking you on dates / groping you / etc., I wouldn't really classify that as "welcome to the workforce", it's harassment.

That's not harassment, that's assault.

> So when I read these articles I wonder if it's the same people and how they translate treating male workers like garbage into treating female workers like garbage. It's not misogyny; it's welcome to the workforce and dealing with people above you who are neither competent not deserving of their positions and their power trips and borderline psychopathy.

I think what the issue is when it comes to the male boss/female employee dynamic is those power trips frequently take on a sexual dynamic in private.

> What do you think? Or are there really nice bosses who are just complete assholes to women with zero crossover?

I know one manager I used to work with who seemed nice but literally every single hire he has made has been an asian female.

He also was the only one besides me with an office with essentially no windows. [i.e. You close the door, no one can see in.] However, I never close my door for that reason while he does so all the time.

I think that was a lawsuit waiting to happen and I've said as much. However, my concerns were basically ignored since the one who confided in me that he does that sort of thing was terrified of losing her job since this was the third job she has had in 2 years [She is extremely attractive and had a similar problem at the previous jobs she got out of college]. She started carrying pepper spray instead.

I think what the issue is when it comes to the male boss/female employee dynamic is those power trips frequently take on a sexual dynamic in private.

Dominance is messily tied into sexuality. This plays out in school locker rooms and boarding school dormitories.

I know one manager I used to work with who seemed nice but literally every single hire he has made has been an asian female.

So what? In itself, this shouldn't be a significant factor. Please explain this: Do you think for some reason that asian females are somehow more enticing or vulnerable? Just how large a sample size are we talking here? Is his department a dozen asian women? Twenty?

> So what? In itself, this shouldn't be a significant factor.

1) He is clearly hiring based on a fetish he has.

2) They were hired to replace male, white, african-american, or hispanic members of his department over a period of ~2 years. The area is almost entirely a white and/or hispanic population so there is no way this is coincidence.

3) The odds of a guy rolling the same 20 sided die 12 times and always coming up with the same number is highly improbable. Roughly 5% of the applicants were female and Asian. I somehow doubt the most competent were always in that 5%.

4) Its a baker's dozen (13).

1) He is clearly hiring based on a fetish he has.

That's a pretty strong, even in terms of your analysis. Would you have thought he had a fetish if all of his hires were black men?

> That's a pretty strong, even in terms of your analysis.

You do understand the probability of the strongest hire in 12 separate rolls of the die being female and asian is absurdly small right?

We are talking thousandths of a percentage point here. The odds of that being a "natural" distribution is absurd.

Similarly, I know from one of them that he has engaged in the sort of sexual harassment behavior I'd expect from a guy who hired on a fetish.

> Would you have thought he had a fetish if all of his hires were black men?

If one of them mentioned sexual harassment and he was living in an area where they were a single digit percentage of the population? Yes.

You do understand the probability of the strongest hire in 12 separate rolls of the die being female and asian is absurdly small right?

We are talking thousandths of a percentage point here. The odds of that being a "natural" distribution is absurd.

There are a bunch of places that hire out of whack to the natural distribution of the population.

If one of them mentioned sexual harassment

That's much stronger evidence in combination. But I think it's weird you led with the population distribution in your account, not the reported behavior.

> That's much stronger evidence in combination. But I think it's weird you led with the population distribution in your account, not the reported behavior.

I wasn't expecting someone to argue that it was reasonable to have a homogeneous population of hires on a gender/race axis.

> There are a bunch of places that hire out of whack to the natural distribution of the population.

I've never encountered one IRL that was homogeneous of a female minority hired by a white male.

Can you provide examples of this happening on the scale you state?

Can you provide examples of this happening on the scale you state?

I find it telling that you were assuming I was talking about female minorities. Reread.

Why don't you provide examples rather than insisting I read your intentions in vague statements?

I was discussing the context of my comment, not the world in general.

So once again:

Please provide examples where homogeneity on both the gender and race axis occurs so frequently this could be considered a reasonable event?

And the boss is attracted to that gender?

EDIT:

> There are a bunch of places that hire out of whack to the natural distribution of the population.

That is what I was talking about xD

Please provide examples where homogeneity on both the gender and race axis occurs so frequently this could be considered a reasonable event?

I never made such a claim. I'm not sure what you're going on about, as I essentially agreed with you a few comments ago. Reread. Check yourself, specifically the conclusions you are jumping to.

I know some past male coworkers who were general assholes to both men and women. But out of those, the women got it much worse. Like in the article, these men were often in some kind of "good ol' boys" club - friends with important people, etc. So yeah, it happens (IT/CS field).

I agree with a lot of the other responses, but also keep in mind that academia has a very different structure than what you're used to. Individuals tend to be less able to move around, particularly when they are grad students. That tends to give others more power over them.

I don't see how this make a difference. Workers shouldn't have to accept abuse and poor treatment from others. Saying that someone treats everyone equally poorly too doesn't excuse their behavior. If we can effectively fight against jerks in the workplace by making it a fight against misogyny in the workplace, that seems better than the current situation.

"sexual harassment for nearly over a decade, with student allegations of unwanted massages, groping, and kissing"

I think that is much more than being an asshole. As a straight man, I don't even know if it's possible to make me feel this uncomfortable in the workplace.

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