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Comment by 549362-30499 | Hacker News Reader

Not knowing anything beyond your irrational refusal to have meetings with women and your apparent contempt for their careers, I'm inclined to believe the (multiple?!) sexual harassment complaints against you. It's really not normal to be regularly accused of that kind of behavior.

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Three accusations in thirty years hardly qualifies as a "regular occurrence." Having spent part of my career in HR, it is not nearly as rare as you would like to think for people (both men and women) to be accused of sexual harassment.

I do meet with women, regularly, just never alone. My refusal to meet alone with women is hardly irrational. It is one of the safest and sanest choices a man can make in the current environment where a mere accusation is often enough to cause the loss of a job and future prospects.

I sincerely hope it never happens to you, but odds are high that it will if you acquire enough power at work. Not a popular view, I know, but still true.

No, it's really weird for you to refuse to have a regular 1:1 with your direct report because she's a woman. That's creepy and not normal at all.

That's one of the weaker attempts at shaming someone into doing something foolish and unnecessary that I've encountered.

Contrary to popular belief and widespread practice, 1:1s are not essential to developing employees. There are lots of other very effective ways to develop people on a team. (That's right, the men on my teams didn't get 1:1s either. And yet, somehow we got stuff done.)

This is exactly why I don't manage anyone any more. It's so tiresome when people with ten or twenty or thirty years less experience fight you every step of the way. I made enough doing that, now I make enough doing something else.

Obviously you are not up to date with the current state of militant feminism in many parts of the western world. Some women will easily make up accusations for personal reasons and even for career advancement. Not meeting them one-on-one in a professional setting is a perfectly valid protection from this. (Why would you need to meet them one-on-one in a workplace anyway? Do you have secret projects you don't want other co-workers to know about?) (Not all women do this obviusly, but a small part. Just like not all men harass others. But it takes one to destroy a career.)

No, it's getting quite common. The pence rule, they call it in America.

I've been on the pointy end of a false accusation by a woman in my team who was upset I insisted on supervising and double checking her work (which was extremely poor). Lucky me, the accusation wasn't sexual and double lucky she was a terrible liar. But if you think false accusations are rare you are pretty naive and probably just were never in a position to make an enemy of a woman.

It's not at all common. "The Pence rule" is noteworthy because it's so weird; it's reported as evidence of how out of the mainstream Pence is. If it was common, or becoming increasingly so, it would not be newsworthy when it's discovered that, for instance, he tried to organize an all-male jogging group "because he is married".

If the accusation you were at the other end of "wasn't sexual", I'm not sure what it has to do with this story, this thread, or with the gender of the accuser. I've been falsely accused of things at work by dudes, too. That is a thing that does happen.

"Irrational refusal"?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/linus_torvalds_targ...

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