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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem

???

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.

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So when exactly has that non-mixed-sex workplace existed? It hasn't, the mixed nature was just buried under ungodly amounts of hierarchy full of gender defaults. With harassment just taken as a given. Partially held in check by, well, good guys who I guess have always existed, and the ones from the dark ages must have been very good given the lack of external checks, but those 20 or whatever percent who weren't must have made life quite miserable for those at the wrong side of the default imbalance. Yes, progress has happened but we should still have more of it, not less. And HR plays a role in this progress, even if at times it appears a little annoying or excessive.

The non-mixed-sex workplace was definitely a thing in the early 20th century that required explicit effort to change.

How many lady sailors, how many lady soldiers, how many lady construction workers, how many lady ditch diggers, how many lady truckers?

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.

There was literally a legislative marriage bar in the Irish Civil Service from 1924 till 1973.

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.

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