When It’s Hard for Women to Find Male Mentors

theatlantic.com

14 points·grrrtttt··5 comments

I find it ironic that because men are wary because of sexual discrimination _laws_, the solution proposed is to pass more _laws_.

In the article, there is a direct quote from the person being interviewed. "If they only do things with people of the same sex, that is discrimination."

Maybe your wife/gf is really jealous and you'd prefer not to walk into that minefield. This article is proposing more regulations to solve a problem that was caused by legislation to begin with.

This is actually something that has happened to me before. A female coworker came to me asking if I could help her learn some skills that would advance her career. I agreed to teach her and she ended up making romantic advancements toward me. I immediately told my significant other what was happening and started working towards resolving the issue.

The incident made me fairly wary.

Agreed. I had a free ticket to a comedy show, and I wanted to give it away without it going to waste - I had to think very hard and carefully about if I wanted to offer it to a female coworker on short notice.

The comedian in question did some rather blue jokes, and that could possibly be construed as harassment. It's a shame you can't just offer tickets to coworkers of the opposite sex without worrying about consequences.

The cited paper The Glass Partition: Obstacles to Cross-Sex Friendships at Work is available at [0].

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255597459_The_glass...

While we are all individuals there are still some traits more common to one sex than the other. It seems women more often than men become attracted to a teacher/mentor/supervisor. Ask any diving instructor for instance. This makes cross sex mentoring where the man is the mentor a minefield.

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