If you combine someone frequently expressing sexual/romantic interest in you when there’s a power differential, that is a problem. It might mean, especially when the person who’s doing that is your boss/mentor/someone more senior than you, that you don’t feel like you can (clearly) refuse. When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone “no” often make this worse.
Even if both people are interested in each other, the way they relate to each other in an organization should ideally be changed to reduce the power differential. This is a standard procedure in some countries, e.g. Israel.
When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone “no” often make this worse.
I do think many women experience fear around this, and many have troubles expressing their wants in general. Many don’t though. What’s the solution then?
Should we encourage women to be strong, to do things that scare them, to stand up for themselves? Should we encourage women to tell people what they want instead of holding it in and not getting their needs met?
Or should we make it so they’re never in situations that they might feel scared? Should we protect women from any danger, including the danger of being asked out and it feeling awkward to say no?
It might mean, especially when the person who’s doing that is your boss/mentor/someone more senior than you, that you don’t feel like you can (clearly) refuse
It looks like this is saying that women can’t say no to powerful men? Why is that?
I assume that women are strong and independent and if a powerful person tells them to do something, they can say no just fine, just like anybody else.
I think it’s also highly salient that concerns about frequency were apparently raised by multiple women. This implies that they believed they had made it sufficiently clear enough that the attention was unwelcome before at least some of the expressions of interest. If there were just one report of that nature, one might conclude that the identified individual was not given enough information to reasonably understand that further attention was unwelcome. This becomes an increasingly unlikely theory as the number of reports increases.
My best guess is that it’s not correct that concerns about frequency were raised by multiple women, and the sentence is referring to different things contributing to the feelings of different people (most likely two).
In the case I’m aware of the key thing that went wrong was that I didn’t realise some of what I was communicating would be taken as continued expression of interest (I thought it was a settled “no”). Of course there may be a case where I’m still unaware of this facet of their experience.
If concerns about frequency were only raised by one person, the Boards should amend the second factual finding. If changing the text much would be problematic due to confidentiality concerns and/or ambiguities in the investigative report, changing “and” to “and/or” would at least help.
In my reading, the fifth finding involves a specific complaint about frequency.[1] Given that, there shouldn’t be references to frequency in the second paragraph in a context that implies that there were multiple such complaints (e.g., stating that frequency “contributed to the women’s feelings” (emphasis mine)). Rather, referring to the same complaint in both the second and fifth finding would constitute double-counting and thus overstate the findings.
In common language, I would describe a frequency concern as ~”it happened too many times.” I think that “it happened too many times” is necessarily implied by the fifth finding, that ~”it happened again to the same person after Owen was asked to stop.”
Thanks, I thought a bit more about this (I’d previously just been assuming that it meant the case I knew about), and I find it plausible it was more than one. In particular, as I explained in my notes there was a pattern in the cases of harm in which I read the other person as having more reciprocated attraction than they did. I find it plausible that things I said working from such a mistaken impression would have been read as advances, and have little idea what the frequency of such things could have been.
So there’s no confirmed person aside from the one listed, but there could feasibly be more?
Is there anybody aside from the one person publicly listed who asked you to stop expressing interest or asked you to stop talking to them or anything like that?
If you combine someone frequently expressing sexual/romantic interest in you when there’s a power differential, that is a problem. It might mean, especially when the person who’s doing that is your boss/mentor/someone more senior than you, that you don’t feel like you can (clearly) refuse. When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone “no” often make this worse.
Even if both people are interested in each other, the way they relate to each other in an organization should ideally be changed to reduce the power differential. This is a standard procedure in some countries, e.g. Israel.
I do think many women experience fear around this, and many have troubles expressing their wants in general. Many don’t though. What’s the solution then?
Should we encourage women to be strong, to do things that scare them, to stand up for themselves? Should we encourage women to tell people what they want instead of holding it in and not getting their needs met?
Or should we make it so they’re never in situations that they might feel scared? Should we protect women from any danger, including the danger of being asked out and it feeling awkward to say no?
I think the former is a better solution.
It looks like this is saying that women can’t say no to powerful men? Why is that?
I assume that women are strong and independent and if a powerful person tells them to do something, they can say no just fine, just like anybody else.
Am I missing something?
I think it’s also highly salient that concerns about frequency were apparently raised by multiple women. This implies that they believed they had made it sufficiently clear enough that the attention was unwelcome before at least some of the expressions of interest. If there were just one report of that nature, one might conclude that the identified individual was not given enough information to reasonably understand that further attention was unwelcome. This becomes an increasingly unlikely theory as the number of reports increases.
My best guess is that it’s not correct that concerns about frequency were raised by multiple women, and the sentence is referring to different things contributing to the feelings of different people (most likely two).
In the case I’m aware of the key thing that went wrong was that I didn’t realise some of what I was communicating would be taken as continued expression of interest (I thought it was a settled “no”). Of course there may be a case where I’m still unaware of this facet of their experience.
If concerns about frequency were only raised by one person, the Boards should amend the second factual finding. If changing the text much would be problematic due to confidentiality concerns and/or ambiguities in the investigative report, changing “and” to “and/or” would at least help.
In my reading, the fifth finding involves a specific complaint about frequency.[1] Given that, there shouldn’t be references to frequency in the second paragraph in a context that implies that there were multiple such complaints (e.g., stating that frequency “contributed to the women’s feelings” (emphasis mine)). Rather, referring to the same complaint in both the second and fifth finding would constitute double-counting and thus overstate the findings.
In common language, I would describe a frequency concern as ~”it happened too many times.” I think that “it happened too many times” is necessarily implied by the fifth finding, that ~”it happened again to the same person after Owen was asked to stop.”
Thanks, I thought a bit more about this (I’d previously just been assuming that it meant the case I knew about), and I find it plausible it was more than one. In particular, as I explained in my notes there was a pattern in the cases of harm in which I read the other person as having more reciprocated attraction than they did. I find it plausible that things I said working from such a mistaken impression would have been read as advances, and have little idea what the frequency of such things could have been.
So there’s no confirmed person aside from the one listed, but there could feasibly be more?
Is there anybody aside from the one person publicly listed who asked you to stop expressing interest or asked you to stop talking to them or anything like that?
Nobody else like that.