I think this is something that mostly needs to be left up to individual organizations, and the media’s framing of “EA has a sexual harassment problem” is really misleading. It should be “Organizations X and Y have a sexual harassment problem”; if people didn’t want to name specific orgs then it never should’ve been published, and if people are going to try to tar others who were uninvolved that should be treated as the dishonest garbage it is. The media coverage and the community debate on this have been like if someone said “Democrats have a sexual harassment problem” and tried to paint Obama as a rapist based on what Clinton did.
Certainly employers do have an interest in their employees’ romantic relationships in the examples you cite and have a right to limit them. But I don’t think you can make a blanket rule that works community wide; informal power is often more important than formal power, especially in a small community, and if you start limiting relationships where there’s even informal power dynamics you get either infinite complexity or a total ban on intra-community relationships, neither of which is healthy. Individual employers should make their own decisions about HR policies and people can make their own decisions about how much protection they want.
Now, on an individual level I think a lot of people should be thinking more about how their relationships/hookups limit their ability to do the most good they could do, and should take a hard look at whether being able to sleep with whoever they want is really worth the losses it may cause in their effectiveness. This is true for all the reasons you cited that an employer may have an interest, but ALSO because public perceptions of them/the community may matter, and for long-term relationships it goes even beyond that because you need to think about the sacrifices people sometimes have to make for their SO. Who is supposed to take the career hit if one of you gets a great job offer far away and the other doesn’t have anything comparable to/better than their current job available there? For an EA dating a non-EA, the solution is you demand that your career take precedence and you do everything in your power to make it up to them somehow, but for an EA dating another EA who is approximately their equal in ability and dedication (and presumably you’re dating your equal...), you’ve created a dilemma that you could have avoided with different relationship choices.
Side note: “Hookups within a military unit” is an interesting example because those are mostly permitted, and not just in ancient Greece. At least when I was in service, the rule was no sleeping with anyone in your direct chain of command and no officers sleeping with enlisted even not in chain of command. Now, maybe this is a bad idea; the military does have a sexual assault problem and perhaps you’d reduce that by saying no one in the same platoon/company/whatever can sleep together, period. But that’s not the established rule.
There’s no way people could have named specific organizations in the Time article without compromising their anonymity.
In the US military at least, fratnerization (which covers a lot more than sex) between people of significantly different rank isn’t generally allowed. That’s the closer analogue to most situations discussed here.
That’s the tradeoff you have to accept when you decide to go on the warpath. Smearing completely uninvolved people because they have an ideological orientation in common with the guilty parties makes you the bad guy. Being a victim of one bad thing doesn’t give you a free pass to victimize other innocent people with a different bad thing. Again, it would be like if they published an article saying “Democrats have a sexual harassment problem” without specifying that they mean Bill Clinton and not Barack Obama.
The military’s policy is what I said it is, not the thing you’re trying to make it.
I think this is something that mostly needs to be left up to individual organizations, and the media’s framing of “EA has a sexual harassment problem” is really misleading. It should be “Organizations X and Y have a sexual harassment problem”; if people didn’t want to name specific orgs then it never should’ve been published, and if people are going to try to tar others who were uninvolved that should be treated as the dishonest garbage it is. The media coverage and the community debate on this have been like if someone said “Democrats have a sexual harassment problem” and tried to paint Obama as a rapist based on what Clinton did.
Certainly employers do have an interest in their employees’ romantic relationships in the examples you cite and have a right to limit them. But I don’t think you can make a blanket rule that works community wide; informal power is often more important than formal power, especially in a small community, and if you start limiting relationships where there’s even informal power dynamics you get either infinite complexity or a total ban on intra-community relationships, neither of which is healthy. Individual employers should make their own decisions about HR policies and people can make their own decisions about how much protection they want.
Now, on an individual level I think a lot of people should be thinking more about how their relationships/hookups limit their ability to do the most good they could do, and should take a hard look at whether being able to sleep with whoever they want is really worth the losses it may cause in their effectiveness. This is true for all the reasons you cited that an employer may have an interest, but ALSO because public perceptions of them/the community may matter, and for long-term relationships it goes even beyond that because you need to think about the sacrifices people sometimes have to make for their SO. Who is supposed to take the career hit if one of you gets a great job offer far away and the other doesn’t have anything comparable to/better than their current job available there? For an EA dating a non-EA, the solution is you demand that your career take precedence and you do everything in your power to make it up to them somehow, but for an EA dating another EA who is approximately their equal in ability and dedication (and presumably you’re dating your equal...), you’ve created a dilemma that you could have avoided with different relationship choices.
Side note: “Hookups within a military unit” is an interesting example because those are mostly permitted, and not just in ancient Greece. At least when I was in service, the rule was no sleeping with anyone in your direct chain of command and no officers sleeping with enlisted even not in chain of command. Now, maybe this is a bad idea; the military does have a sexual assault problem and perhaps you’d reduce that by saying no one in the same platoon/company/whatever can sleep together, period. But that’s not the established rule.
There’s no way people could have named specific organizations in the Time article without compromising their anonymity.
In the US military at least, fratnerization (which covers a lot more than sex) between people of significantly different rank isn’t generally allowed. That’s the closer analogue to most situations discussed here.
That’s the tradeoff you have to accept when you decide to go on the warpath. Smearing completely uninvolved people because they have an ideological orientation in common with the guilty parties makes you the bad guy. Being a victim of one bad thing doesn’t give you a free pass to victimize other innocent people with a different bad thing. Again, it would be like if they published an article saying “Democrats have a sexual harassment problem” without specifying that they mean Bill Clinton and not Barack Obama.
The military’s policy is what I said it is, not the thing you’re trying to make it.