HR is a powerful organization for a reason. Companies everywhere operate in a legal environment, and 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued.
Which people would be wise to remember. HR is there to protect the company, not you or your co-workers. Sometimes these two things align but not always.
For sex stuff, sure, which was my point about women. A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed, etc. And I guess having everyone jump through hoops with training about all the various isms can provide plausible deniability when something illegal happens. But I think you're overstating the role HR plays here.
Yes. This is where all the rules come from. It's just like airline safety or workplace safety: for almost every rule, you can find the incident which caused it to be put in place.
The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem. There have been enough women bullied out of jobs they loved by harassment from male co-workers, over and over again, and enough of them have won their lawsuits or tribunals against the employers, that there are rules against this, which will be enforced.
And enough people will have used "I was drinking" as an excuse for harassment that companies feel the need to limit their risk by banning drinking.
People get annoyed at HR for being a "compliance" role, but it's the same phenomenon as hating the people checking the fire exits, the ladders, PAT testing all your electrical devices (this may be UK specific?), making you wear a hard hat and safety boots, or making you reconcile the cash in the register with the receipts.
???
Where do you get that from? I do think it's a problem and it becomes a problem because we accept mixed-sex work environments. HR isn't there to protect women from getting harassed, they're mostly there to protect management. Sexual harassment is still illegal, whether HR exists or not.
I don't think HR ladies are roaming factory floors making sure people are wearing hardhats. That's a managers responsibility and the company has legal obligations.
In the past (and still today in many places), most of the workforce were not working in mixed gender places. Just take a look at photographic evidence of the many factories that only employed women.
The marriage bar forced female civil servants in Ireland to resign from their jobs when they got married and stopped married women from joining the permanent civil service.
We were far from the only country to have such mandates, and it was done so as an equivalence with the governance processes of the private sector. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland 1995.