I appreciate the amount of detail you go into in your comments.
As a woman / “junior EA” / recent “EA student”, I do feel some amount of wariness around my dating choices being policed/restricted out of a desire to protect me and think there has to be a bar for when that seems appropriate—having rules against bosses/professors starting romantic relationships with current employees/students is above that bar but I currently think many potential situations of senior EAs dating more junior people in their field they interact with in social contexts (or students who are not much younger) would not be above that bar.
It feels like there are two problems here (which overlap):
EAs who have some type of influence using that in bad ways to harm the careers / social reputation of people who have rejected them. To the extent that this is a problem, I think more explicitness helps, both in stating conflicts of interest and in propositioning people
More junior EAs feeling pressured into saying yes or not calling out bad behaviour because they think the above could happen, regardless of whether it actually could. This is affected by junior EAs feeling uncertain about what kinds of influence people have within EA and what conflict of interest policies are like
I have encountered abuses of power in romantic relationships outside of EA settings that seemed to me to be exacerbated by things feeling shady such that people felt like they couldn’t be explicit enough and had to navigate plausible deniability. I am much more comfortable in situations where people can express their interest in someone openly if they do intend to start a romantic/sexual relationship and can be clear about their past relationships, as this makes it easier to detect potential abuses of power. I think power abuses happen more in situations where there’s lots of fuzziness.
Thanks for sharing this. To begin with, if most “juniors” or students don’t support any specific proposed rule along these lines, then the idea is bad and it should not be enacted. I do not have any clear idea of where the “bar” should be.
I certainly agree that imposing a prohibition on certain seniors, as well as lesser restrictions, would be paternalistic (as are prohibitions/restrictions in other professions, such as the rule of professional conduct that bans me from starting a sexual relationship with a client). Identifying circumstances that justify a prohibition or restriction would certainly be a difficult line-drawing exercise, which is one of the reasons I left “senior EA” undefined and included a step two at which the policymaker examined whether alternatives to prohibition would be sufficient. I should have been clearer that evaluating at step two also includes consideration of background issues like whether there is a solid process in place to detect potential retailatory behavior, whether there is an independent third-party adjudication process for those who believe they have experienced retailiation, etc.
I appreciate the amount of detail you go into in your comments.
As a woman / “junior EA” / recent “EA student”, I do feel some amount of wariness around my dating choices being policed/restricted out of a desire to protect me and think there has to be a bar for when that seems appropriate—having rules against bosses/professors starting romantic relationships with current employees/students is above that bar but I currently think many potential situations of senior EAs dating more junior people in their field they interact with in social contexts (or students who are not much younger) would not be above that bar.
It feels like there are two problems here (which overlap):
EAs who have some type of influence using that in bad ways to harm the careers / social reputation of people who have rejected them. To the extent that this is a problem, I think more explicitness helps, both in stating conflicts of interest and in propositioning people
More junior EAs feeling pressured into saying yes or not calling out bad behaviour because they think the above could happen, regardless of whether it actually could. This is affected by junior EAs feeling uncertain about what kinds of influence people have within EA and what conflict of interest policies are like
I have encountered abuses of power in romantic relationships outside of EA settings that seemed to me to be exacerbated by things feeling shady such that people felt like they couldn’t be explicit enough and had to navigate plausible deniability. I am much more comfortable in situations where people can express their interest in someone openly if they do intend to start a romantic/sexual relationship and can be clear about their past relationships, as this makes it easier to detect potential abuses of power. I think power abuses happen more in situations where there’s lots of fuzziness.
Thanks for sharing this. To begin with, if most “juniors” or students don’t support any specific proposed rule along these lines, then the idea is bad and it should not be enacted. I do not have any clear idea of where the “bar” should be.
I certainly agree that imposing a prohibition on certain seniors, as well as lesser restrictions, would be paternalistic (as are prohibitions/restrictions in other professions, such as the rule of professional conduct that bans me from starting a sexual relationship with a client). Identifying circumstances that justify a prohibition or restriction would certainly be a difficult line-drawing exercise, which is one of the reasons I left “senior EA” undefined and included a step two at which the policymaker examined whether alternatives to prohibition would be sufficient. I should have been clearer that evaluating at step two also includes consideration of background issues like whether there is a solid process in place to detect potential retailatory behavior, whether there is an independent third-party adjudication process for those who believe they have experienced retailiation, etc.