Stop Talking About Sex at Work

Recently I received the following comment on my post: My Co-Worker Won't Stop Talking About Sex:


I'm having an issue at the moment. I work in a very small workplace with only women where I am the manager. Our oldest employee (29) has been describing her sex life in GRAPHIC detail to my youngest employee (15). I have NO idea how to handle this. I've already rang my area manager and he's getting onto HR about it. Anonymous




Dear Anonymous,

You are the manager. Pull this employee aside immediately and tell her she needs to stop talking about her sex life at work, her conversations are inappropriate and unprofessional and that HR has been contacted. HR will most likely perform an investigation and will at the very least place a note in her file and send her to harassment training. They also may give her a written warning. HR departments do not mess around with sexual harassment complaints.

A few weeks ago I had a question from a different anonymous commenter describing sadistic sexual activities a co-worker wanted to perform with her. (Her comment was too graphic to post). Her question for me was if she reported this harassment to HR, would they think she was a co-conspirator if she had initially played along.

My answer:

No. No. No. They will not. It sounds to me like you initially didn’t want to be mean, but your co-worker has now become bolder, you want him to stop and are afraid to tell him so yourself. Plus, the things he is saying (putting you in a cage, etc.) are scary and need to be taken seriously.  

While reading her question about playing along I couldn’t help but be reminded of the new male manager my company hired. In a casual conversation about getting his company vehicle repaired he asked me if I’d come along and sit on his lap. I don’t remember exactly what how I responded, I think I made up an excuse why I couldn’t. I didn’t play along, but I didn’t tell him he was out of line either. Unfortunately, these type of comments continued. I’m not sure what his motives are other than a boast to his ego, but I am offended. It bothers me that he thinks of me as a female, rather than the professional I worked so hard to be. No wonder women feel the need to dress in drab colors and not draw attention to their femininity. I now don’t acknowledge his flirtatious comments and stick to business when talking to him. As I write this post, I can’t remember the last time he made a suggestive comment.

As a follow up to my previous post, the co-worker I talked about has not talked about sex since I told him he was being inappropriate. As to the female who shared her favorite sexual positions with her co-worker was finally promoted – twenty years after the incident and with reservations from HR. 

Talking about sex at work is a major career blunder – knock it off.

The Real Reason You Weren’t Invited Along on that Consulting Trip

Last month, The Savvy Reader Book Club, read Debora L. Spar’s book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. In an earlier post, I revealed a perfume commercial from the 70's was responsible for shaping my life’s vision. Then we discussed whether greater sexual freedom meant a loss of power for women and why women opt-out of their careers.

Today I want to tell you the real reason you weren't invited along on that consulting trip. In Wonder Women, Spar recounts a conversation she had with a senior executive who openly joked he would never take a woman on a consulting trip. 

"My wife would kill me!" (Pg. 238)

I wonder how many women were not invited to lunch, out for drinks or on overnight business trips because of what others may think. These missed opportunities result in another advancement strategy not available to women.

Spar recommends two thing that will prod the evolution along:

1. We need to get a larger critical mass of women into the organizations dealing with these tensions. The more women there are in an organization, the more openly gay men and women - the more diversity - the less potent the sexual pressures will be on everyone.

2. The senior men in any organization need to engage actively and professionally with the women around them. They need to bring them along on trips, take them to lunch, invite them for golf and to meet their wives.  If there is a hint of sexual attraction involved, so be it. Deal with it, and move on.   

In my position as accounting manager, I am almost never included in management meetings held off-site. For many years I was the only female manager at my company.  I had assumed I was required to stay back to manage the office while my boss was out, then one of my employees pointed out I should be at those meetings - all of the other departments seem to make it through the day with their manager absent. Also, by not attending these meetings I miss out on critical organizational information no one thinks to share with me not to mention the relationship building opportunities I miss out on. It is interesting to note my female predecessor was not invited to those meetings either.

I have a female friend who works in HR. In her first job she was regularly invited to lunch by her company’s CFO.  She often comments that she learned more about finance during those lunches than she ever did in the classroom. Unfortunately her co-workers spread rumors that the two of them were having an affair.

Then there is my former female co-worker who in the 80’s claimed she had been propositioned for sex while on a business trip with her boss. She refused.  Upon returning to work after the trip, working for him became so unbearable she had to leave.

Contradictory to Spar's advice, Anna Runyan in her book The Professional Woman's Guide to Managing Mensuggests:

Be aware of one-on-one meetings with the men you manage at restaurants and coffee shops. These can quickly turn into “date” types of situations.  Try to bring along another work colleague to these meetings. Try to hold the meeting in the office or where there will be a lot of people around.  If you need to leave the office, recommend breakfast or lunch meetings over happy hours and dinners.  You don’t want a business meeting to turn into an uncomfortable situation. (Pg. 38)

She then gives the following advice if a male employee makes an unwanted sexual advance:

The most important thing you can do is to catch this immediately before it turns into sexual harassment.  Try to resolve the situation right away with a conversation.  If you feel comfortable enough, you can use humor to try to keep the working relationship on a positive level and say something like, “Were you flirting with me? I hope not, I really like working with you.” If humor is not working, be clear and straightforward.  Tell him that you are not interested and your relationship needs to stay professional.  If he continues to hit on you, contact Human Resources. (Pg. 44) 

What is your experience? Are you or the women in your workplace given opportunities to network with men at lunch, on business trips or on the golf course? Were they positive or negative experiences?

*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on Femme Frugality and Savvy Working Gal*

Has greater sexual freedom meant a loss of power for women?

This month, The Savvy Reader Book Club, is reading Debora L. Spar’s book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. In last week's discussion, I revealed a perfume commercial from the 70's was responsible for shaping my life’s vision. Today I’d like to discuss chapter 3 – sex and the social contract.

Spar begins by explaining that the courting/dating culture that was common prior to the sexual revolution no longer exists. Today’s young men no longer ask women out on dates or to go steady. Instead they “hook up” - a boy meets a girl at a party and takes her home for sex. In one recent survey of college students, 75 percent of the male respondents and 84 percent of the females reported having hooked up at least once during their college years. (Pg. 68)

Spar feels this greater sexual freedom has resulted in a loss of power for women:

There’s something about hooking up that seems to reflect a diminution of women’s choices rather an expansion, a decrease in women’s power rather than a rise.

Ultimately the crux of the matter is whether women truly enjoy the freedom that comes from uncommitted sex. And it’s not clear that they do. Instead, as Stepp reports in Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, many of the women who embrace the hookup culture for some period of time (usually their freshman year of college) later come to regret it. Rather than feeling empowered by their conquests, they feel abandoned by the men they thought might be their boyfriends. Rather than whisking blithely from one affair to the next, they are waiting by the phone (now, at least conveniently in their pocket) for last night’s encounter to call them back. Because the hookup is so clearly not about commitment, though, he rarely does. And the women are left, longing for something they swore they didn’t want. (Pg. 70)

Then there is the money proponent:

Sex has long been connected to some underlying notion of exchange; to some sense, in other words, that each of the parties in a sexual relationship was getting something- be it property or pleasure or a lifetime of protection – out of it. Hooking up challenges this historical relationship. Echoing the anthem of the sexual revolution, it presumes that men and women are free to have sex whenever they want, with whomever they want, and with no commitment implied by the act. 

The question, though, is whether women truly get equal value from a relationship based on “free” sex. Are they equally content to give-and get-sex for nothing, or have they perhaps given men what they want (easy, cheap sex) without getting much in return? (Pg. 72)

While reading this chapter, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a young woman who lived in my dormitory my freshman year of college. I distinctly remember the afternoon a group of us were sitting around discussing our Saturday night plans when this girl announced she hoped to get lucky. If a guy could have a one-night stand without anyone thinking twice about it, she could too. Later that year, I would find her crying in the restroom because a boy was no longer interested in hooking up with her. A year or two later I would run into her again, she would confide she had just had an abortion. She hadn’t even liked her baby’s father yet terminating her pregnancy was one of the hardest decisions of her life.

Eventually, she would marry and have two daughters.

I would meet her for drinks a few years ago when she was visiting in my area. Her former hook-up lifestyle came up in conversation. This was not the life she wanted for her daughters.

As to the loss of power, I wouldn’t want to go back to the era where women were treated as possessions or a man felt he had to marry a women who became pregnant (then would abuse her), but I do think something can be said for waiting a bit before having sex. People tend to appreciate something they have to work for a little bit more.

This quote from Terry Tempest William’s book When Women Were Birds is a good example of why the hook-up experience is different for a woman than a man:

Because what every woman knows each month when she bleeds is, I am not pregnant. Because what every woman understands each time she makes love is, Life could be in the making now. Which is why when a woman allows a man to enter her, it is not just a physical act, but an act of surrendering to the possibility that her life may no longer be hers alone. Because until she bleeds, she will check her womb every day for the stirrings of life. Because until she bleeds, she wonders if her life will be one or two or three. Because until she bleeds, she imagines every possibility from pleasure to pain to birth to death and how she will do what she needs to do, and until she bleeds, she will worry endlessly, until she bleeds.

Today’s question again comes from The Reading Group Guides discussion questions for Wonder Women:

Compared to women who courted and married before the sexual revolution, do unmarried women today do a better or worse job managing love, money, and sex in the context of their relationships? Do you agree with Spar that greater sexual freedom has meant a loss of power for women? Have men lost anything?