What are the constraints?
Driving those changes will be technology like Tinder. By making the market for dating more efficient, it will reduce the need to permit romantic solicitations in other contexts.
It has also probably hindered the careers of some of the women who were my direct and indirect reports, but that's not my problem. I've been waiting for the legislation against those unintended consequences for a long time now. It's closer than ever, I can feel it in my bones.
You should stop doing that.
In fact, one of them is now a senior VP at a Fortune 100. I take no credit for that. She was extremely talented. OTOH, I certainly could have hindered her advancement but did not obviously. In fact I warmly recommended her for a promotion and later gave her very good references when she moved on to other companies. These were important steps in her career. Others have continued to advance as well, if not quite as spectacularly.
What I did say is that there are some who I did not help as much as I probably could have. They could have possibly benefited from some private coaching. I am not a crappy manager for not doing that. I am a good husband and provider for never allowing a situation to occur that could have put my career in jeopardy.
I didn't make the rules, the government (and especially the courts) did.
And calling me sexist is a cheap shot that only proves my point. Accusations are easy; proof is hard. This is especially true when you take a defensive position against the known risks of being falsely accused, as I have been several times.
Your edit to that last comment doesn't clear anything up. It's non sequitur logic. "I'm not a crappy manager, I'm a good provider"?
I never said I intentionally hindered the careers of any of them. When facing a choice of going above and beyond to help develop a female employee's career and risking my own career (and my family's well-being) by exposing myself to the very real and well-known risk of being accused of sexual harassment, I have chosen selfishly. (Here is where you tell us all how you would choose to risk your career to advance your female employee "because it's the right thing to do.")
It's exactly this sort of rhetoric that makes it difficult to have any rational discussion about how best to develop talent (whether men or women) in the current climate. The thesis that MeToo is more harmful than helpful is unpopular, I know, but thankfully no one has to defend its helpfulness because discussion of the realities involved is forbidden.
And then stop doing it!
It's a little weird that you think you have all the information you need to pass judgment on my career from a few short comments on an internet forum. It's even weirder that you haven't made any substantive comment or query on how that policy played out in real life, but rather resorted instantly to shrill pronouncements on my character.
If you can't look back over your career and see where some things you did might have been harmful to some of your employees, you either lack self-awareness or you never had any employees. I'm guessing it's the latter. You have way too many internet points for someone with real responsibility for other people's well-being at work.
Finally, I no longer manage people, so I have stopped doing it. I hope you can sleep now.
Did you also refuse to meet with men privately?
Edit: No, I don't socialize with the people at work. I have friends for that.
I think your advice is completely sensible for people who are a little more risk averse. Sad that such measures are necessary, but we all decide our acceptable level of risk.
(Advising people not to meet with anyone without a witness is not good management advice, for obvious reasons, but at least it's not unlawful).
Except you read it that way because you're biased to see bad faith and sexism everywhere. And look what happened: you uncharitably condemned and berated a fellow human being for literally no reason. And you're not even remotely apologetic for it. This pattern is sadly not at all exclusive to you, or uncommon.
As others have pointed out that this thread has gotten off-topic, I'll not be replying further. I'll merely suggest you learn from this mistake.
Right there - that's the sexist part. Do you believe there's an epidemic of vengeful women running around falsely accusing men of sexual harassment?
Because there isn't - but I'd love to hear your stories.
Rather, go make friends with someone who works in HR at a large company that employs lots of men and women. For this experiment, best not to try to befriend someone at your workplace. They may be hesitant to speak freely, since it could come back on them. HR people are nothing if not close-mouthed. At least the ones who last long enough to have good stories.
But lest you accuse me of dodging the question, I'll say that my personal favorite story is the woman who accused me of sexual harassment because I refused to remove a bad quality score from her record. (This was a call center, quality scores were only removed in very narrow circumstances.) She was three levels below me on the org chart.
I spoke to her exactly twice, in public, with several witnesses. She asked me to remove the score. I went back to my office, reviewed the call, and went back to let her know the score would not be removed. I was the final authority in any appeal of quality scores.
A week later I was informed by HR that she had accused me of sexual harassment. It turns out that she also contacted the FBI about me. Not even kidding.
But you might think that was a good idea. Hell, I might be a Russian bot sowing discord to affect the midterm elections and hasten the decline of America. I mean, I don't meet alone with women! Clearly that's un-American!
You should be ashamed of yourself.
That is what I was hoping to discuss: how some of the side effects of MeToo might actually be detrimental to actual working women, and what strategies might be used to change that outcome.
Instead, that comment only opened the door for a bunch of posturing and virtue signaling so that the wider audience knows without a doubt that those who reply are nothing at all like this sexist commenter.
I've explained further what I meant in another comment in this thread and it would be very tiresome to repeat it.
It is worth repeating, however, that your default response is to attempt to shame me, like other commenters here. Why can none of you provide a substantive response to my original comment? Do you really think all women are virtuous all the time, and all men are weak slaves to their sexual impulses so it must be true if they're accused?
Nowhere have I defended anyone who sexually harasses employees. (We haven't even touched the possibility that men can be victims of sexual harassment, but I don't have any faith that would be productive in this forum.)
No, I merely shared a strategy that was successful and legal, but I have been treated as if I were hitting on the women who worked for me and using them for my personal pleasure. I'm embarrassed for you, but I need to point out that that is the exact opposite of what I have done at work for the past thirty years. I have almost certainly furthered the careers of more women than all my detractors in this thread combined. Yet I stand accused, and that is enough to convict.
So which is it? Are all managers legally obligated to do everything in their power to ensure that women receive not just the same exact management that the men on the team receive, but also additional coaching that could be interpreted by certain unthinking people as sexual harassment if a woman makes an accusation? Because men have all the power and deserve to be brought down a peg or two, evidence and due process be damned? And besides no woman would ever ever ever make a false accusations, because they're not even able to do so if they wanted to, which they never would because they're all pure as the driven snow and anyway none of them would ever do such a thing, why are you blaming the victim anyway, you probably harass them all day and all of the night, you sexist pig?
Or could it be that I'm not the only one who has devised a strategy to avoid being torpedoed by a sexual harassment claim, but in the only one foolish enough to talk about it? Ah well, better to sweep any discussion like that under the rug, everyone else is at least as virtuous as the other loud public proclaimers of the correct philosophy. Move along, nothing to see here, sure hope China catches up to us in this category of virtuous living, hope this guys company fails, he's obviously a creep, I would never do anything like that nor do I know anyone who would, can't believe this guy discriminates, hope he gets sued and dies penniless, glad I'm not him.
You should be ashamed of yourselves for lacking the ability to reason without resorting to emotional name-calling and useless shaming tactics.
I'll back off just like everyone else will now that you've stepped in, but there aren't really two sides to this issue; someone said something problematic, and other people responded, perhaps heatedly but not unexpectedly or gratuitously so.
Fortunately most of the responses did just that (i.e. responded cogently without being aggressive) and were the more effective for it.
Are you arguing that women would never want a relationship with someone they met at work?
I know another Microsoft employee who is now happily married to his assistant. Office romances are very commonplace, I recall reading somewhere that 40% of married couples met at work.
Interested in your opinion.
BTW, if someone continues to ask for dates after being told "no", then I'd agree that is harassment and must stop.
Most of my socializing and friends come from work. What a sad world it would be if work was strictly for work.
I'd be careful taking it as an accurate picture of the 1960s. Hollywood pieces, even period pieces (and most especially period pieces) are creatures of the time in which they were filmed, not when they are set.