Facibus Reviews

I wrote about a sensitive topic in Gender in the workplace: On Confrontation and Flirtation - that of dating co-workers:

Flirtation is an easier line to draw in the sand: any unwelcome advance is unlawful harrassment. For myself as a consultant, clients are off-limits. This is an easy call to make. For the last year-and-a-half I’ve worked on a client site where there are thousands of employees - anecdotally 80% women - and if that reduces my dating pool, then so be it.

With colleagues, I tend to agree with Tim Bray - within the geek community we spend a lot of time in work and afterwork - accordingly, there are fewer opportunities than previously available to find a partner. Gloria infers that women never want to date anyone else in the office, so everyone should forget about office romances - and while this is usually a good practice, I believe that it is incorrect to say that it never happens. It’s still possible, just not easy or practical. That said, as always, any approach to a potential love interest should be done with decorum, tact, and respect - otherwise it is predatory, and wrong, regardless of where the approach takes place or your gender/orientation. Gloria’s example of the married middle-aged man hitting on the 17 year old woman is a prize example of wrongness - but to extrapolate this to the premise that all women are always offended by more than professional interest in the office is taking it a little too far.

Penelope Trunk wrote this today in her own blog:

Date coworkers.
I can see how 40 years ago, when it was still legal to ask a woman what her husband thought of her career, it would’ve been bad to date coworkers. Back then, women felt powerless in the workplace.

But today, young women feel they have equal power to men. And they aren’t deluding themselves — women and men receive equal pay in business until they have children (after which woman are penalized for having kids more than men are). So men and women approach dating at work as equals.

The bigger issue here is that if you’re working 40 hours a week, you’re more likely to meet the people you want to date when you’re at the office. If you tell yourself that all men at work are off-limits, you put yourself at a huge disadvantage.

And if you want to have children, you need to make getting married a higher priority than your career. This isn’t some radical statement — it’s backed by a lot of research, not the least of which is that you can’t tell your biological clock to wait while you refuse to date all the men you come in contact with.

So the adage to not date men you work with is totally antiquated. It assumes that women aren’t equal to men, can push back childbearing indefinitely, and should put their career ahead of getting married. All of these are bad assumptions.

I’m not sure that I agree entirely, but it is interesting that she puts it so directly. Time will tell if this is a general change in perception - or perhaps it is misplaced nostalgia on her (and my) part for the “My goodness, Miss Simpkins, without your glasses you are beautiful!” good old (bad old) days of 1960s movie office romance cliches in a world where our real relationships may not be all that we could hope for.

PS: My goodness, Penelope - who do you know that only works 40 hours a week?