In the case you cite, they were fired for not disclosing the relationship. My understanding is the way this normally works is that you to tell HR, and then the company figures out how to move people around so that neither is in a position to unfairly affect the other’s work at the company.
(To give a non-central example, when my wife (then-fiancee) and I worked in a kitchen I reported to the head cook even in cases when my wife would normally have been my supervisor.)
Although sometimes mitigating methods aren’t going to be effective. As an extreme example, there is no plan HR could have put in place to green-light encounters between Bill Clinton and a White House intern.
That’s a good point: this doesn’t always work out nicely. Often this means that the more junior person leaves, which disproportionately falls on women.
(My impression is that there’s usually severance and this isn’t considered a negative by others the same way as being fired for an undisclosed inappropriate relationship would be? But it’s still not a good situation.)
Yeah though to my knowledge most heads of EA orgs don’t actually date (right) so this isn’t a problem we actually have. If it’s just inside an org then one or other moving is pretty feasible.
Senior people at EA orgs certainly date within the community, and I could imagine it being a problem—you can’t transfer away from, say, the head of HR, or the head of operations. But I don’t really know if or how this happens within EA orgs, and think organizations need policies to deal with this.
In the case you cite, they were fired for not disclosing the relationship. My understanding is the way this normally works is that you to tell HR, and then the company figures out how to move people around so that neither is in a position to unfairly affect the other’s work at the company.
(To give a non-central example, when my wife (then-fiancee) and I worked in a kitchen I reported to the head cook even in cases when my wife would normally have been my supervisor.)
Although sometimes mitigating methods aren’t going to be effective. As an extreme example, there is no plan HR could have put in place to green-light encounters between Bill Clinton and a White House intern.
That’s a good point: this doesn’t always work out nicely. Often this means that the more junior person leaves, which disproportionately falls on women.
(My impression is that there’s usually severance and this isn’t considered a negative by others the same way as being fired for an undisclosed inappropriate relationship would be? But it’s still not a good situation.)
Yeah though to my knowledge most heads of EA orgs don’t actually date (right) so this isn’t a problem we actually have. If it’s just inside an org then one or other moving is pretty feasible.
Several people were confused by what I meant here
Senior people at EA orgs certainly date within the community, and I could imagine it being a problem—you can’t transfer away from, say, the head of HR, or the head of operations. But I don’t really know if or how this happens within EA orgs, and think organizations need policies to deal with this.