Case in point. You work at a technology company. You are attracted to another coworker, who is NOT your subordinate. Is there some manner in which it is acceptable to express your interest? Or is this just not OK at all?
Ask them out someplace public outside of work. If they say no, that means no, and just drop it. If you hear "I don't know, I don't really like to date coworkers" that's also a no - don't push the issue. If they say "I don't think that's a good idea" - also a no. If they say "Eh....." or laugh or whatever, it's a no, and just drop it.
Be aware a no could make things really awkward for you two, and it may even piss off your co-worker who perhaps viewed you as this great work friend but now thinks things are weird. It can hurt them in other ways: they may also blame themselves for not being more into you, and question if they lead you on. So if you get rejected, just say "Hey that's cool. It was a long-shot, I understand."
That's the whole point of asking someone out -- to find out whether the feelings are mutual.
This story is not about couple where two people were fond of each other and started relationship. This is about sending text messages out of cold to women he barely know, who never shown interest and you have power to hire or not. That has nothing to do with love.
I mean, it's OK to be naked, but it's a bad idea to be naked in a public park. We don't assume that means that the municipal government has total supremacy over your being and free will and is anti-humanist.
You may think it's lame (I do too fwiw), but it's still clearly acceptable almost everywhere, so I don't appreciate your gatekeeping.
Then a very, very significant portion (quite possibly close to half of the population, or approaching thereof in some fields) have personal life developmental problems......or....it could just be that your world view or definition of "appropriate" is a bit off. Which one of those situations is more likely?
It just so happens that traditional women tend to chose more feminine professions and people with little carrer ambitions tend to prefer slower workplace.
So, good luck.
No way. It's a case by case basis. If someone legitimately seems interested in you, and you are interested in them, there's nothing wrong with asking them if they want to get a bite to eat or something once. Baby steps. It's just inappropriate to immediately reach for the "let's go out" or a romantic advance, and especially inappropriate to "pursue" someone. This is true in almost every social sphere, not just the workplace. It's called being a gentleman.
The idea is to be a gentleman, not a creep. Whether at a bar or at the park or at work.
The only difference as far as the workplace is if you have some sort of position of power above the other employee. Even if you somehow maintain complete impartiality to them, others will probably not see it that way and think it unfair to them. Not to mention that 9.9/10 times someone doesn't want to be hit on by their boss.
You gotta understand, for many people their work life and personal life are the same. A lot of happy couples met in the workplace.
At this point, you need to figure out based on body language which one they mean. If you guess wrong and ask again, you're a sexual harasser. If the original conversation was over text and you have no body language other than emojis you're more likely to guess wrong. Nice going, sexual harasser.
And I think it's safe to say that many women will refuse to even consider asking a man out. It's entirely on the guy to initiate everything. Now put yourself in the shoes of someone who spends most of their time at work. In this thread I've seen jibes about how such people should get a life, but let's admit for a second that that's not easy. Such people have a choice - ask out a coworker or remain alone for a long while. In a situation like that, I can understand how they'd be strongly inclined towards interpreting "some other time" as an opportunity rather than a rejection.
This dude wants it both ways. He wants to be seen as super hard worker, hero who is all the time working - and at the same time he wants to have non work life experiences. So he wants workplace to become like a bar or playground. Then the workplace becomes ineffective but we all get to pretend we are hard workers.
> In a situation like that, I can understand how they'd be strongly inclined towards interpreting "some other time" as an opportunity rather than a rejection.
But then she gets blamed for "not being direct enough" - including here on hacker news. Altrough the issue is not that he did not get it, issue is that he really really does not want to hear the no.
I mean, I get the wishful thinking and dont mind relationship between people, but don't then chalk the persistent dude behavior on girls not being clear or direct enought.
Or you could ask for clarification. To get a definite answer, you should not ask the same kind of question that got you an ambiguous response last time, but instead directly address that ambiguity.
There's a lot of moaning here about how any interaction with a potential partner is an arrest waiting to happen, but the underlying sentiment to that is that everyone else is a vengeful harpy waiting to crucify you. It's an endless nice-guy support group meeting. When you read the articles about Mcclure and Sacco and others, though, you see common things: they're hitting on women coming to them for professional consideration, which necessarily involves a power imbalance; and their requests aren't to go on a date, they're "let's fuck" (i.e., they're inappropriate in most circumstances). You wouldn't ask a girl you met through mutual friends to just go to bed, you'd say "let's get dinner and drinks". But the creep behaviour here is creep behaviour almost everywhere, with an added dose of "I can make or break your career, so choose your answer carefully."
Let's be realistic about harassment: While seeing something like this triggers fear that suddenly innocent behavior will lead to harassment calls, in practice, your typical male engineer will get away with habitual misbehavior: An employer will only get involved if the behavior at least comes close to qualify as harassment and is well documented. One has to be quite clueless to get anywhere near that level accidentally.
We can be afraid, but that doesn't make the fear well founded. The cases that we see in the media involve systemic, repeated misbehavior from people in situations of power, not a random IC that asks a woman engineer out politely when she isn't interested. Asking your coworkers out is fine.
A good antidote to the fears is to just listen to women talk about what they deal with. There's plenty of articles out there, and heck, even tweet storms form well known women engineers, explaining the kind of shitty behavior they are exposed to every day. It will show you how there's an abyss between what you think is OK and what they have to put up with.
Yes, there are plenty of manners to express it, just like at any company. That said, there are a lot of ways to express it that are just making someone's work life terrible.
If a male employee not in a position of hierarchical power innocently expresses his interest to a single female coworker in the entire course of his career, is he evil? Is it harassment? Probably not... But from their female coworker's perspective, that's enough to create a pretty steady stream of random attention.
I think even that best case "only once" scenario creates a sort of crowd-sourced harassment baseline, on top of which you have to add repeat offenders, ones in a position of hierarchical or effective power, those who deal badly with rejection, the fact that the same thing happens in the street, the subway etc...
Offering guidance to men without acknowledging the cumlative effect of these random interactions is an oversight.
Due to the statistical imbalances of men and women in various workplaces, a slightly better rule than "ask once, and be polite if they say no" might* be "roll d20, on 20 ask once..."
*just a strawman, this isn't actually a good solution; nor are prediction markets, lotteries, drawing straws, competitions of fitness
Have we all become so engrossed with our smartphones 24/7 we've forgotten how to be face-to-face direct with other actual humans?
"Hey, do you want to get coffee sometime?"
"Oh, no thanks"
"Ok, cool. No problem"
Proceed to move on with your life.
You are asking single 18-30 year old who spend most of their waking hours at work, to not make any advance to the only females they probably see in the week.
Good luck with trying to fight nature.
IMO being professional is more about how you handle the situation if the relationship goes south or never gets off the ground. PDA in the workplace is also unprofessional, obviously. But asking someone out? Doesn't seem unprofessional tbh.
I would expect that the overwhelming majority of normal/adult women in tech want to live in exactly that world, and I certainly want to live in a world where roughly 50% of people in tech are women. So it only takes a few men to agree to make it the majority.
[1] Also, please let them opt out of any more messages.