Are you suggesting founders are required to treat professional events as places of business as well as the sole venue for finding a potential partner/lover because they'll have no chance otherwise? That's silly.

Working long hours doesn't immediately excuse you from adhering to social contexts, especially when there are obvious power structures present which evidently is rampantly abusive across industries.

'Innappropriate incidents' is entirely subjective and can't be defined beyond a personal context. If one party believes the manner in which someone else operates in a context is inappropriate, that's enough of a definition, especially in the context of such a survey.

> 'Innappropriate incidents' is entirely subjective and can't be defined beyond a personal context.

That's unacceptable. If there are no firm, objective rules then anyone can be guilty of anything and "inappropriateness" loses all meaning.

I could consider the fact that you don't pray before eating something inappropriate in a work dinner context.

The post in question refers to harassment of female founders by VCs. Thus, your wibbling on about how founders work long hours is a non sequitur at two different levels (both the fact that you're attempting to excuse the wrong population and that you're attempting to excuse people for doing the ethically wrong thing 'because busy').

The "inappropriate incidents" bit is not "completely undefined" - it refers to the things in the list that follows. I think for a survey the response was surely detailed enough?

i'm not entirely unsympathetic to this argument, but i don't think it only applies to busy executives. there's a certain cruelty in expecting people to spend so much of their lives in a setting where it is prohibited (or at least very taboo) to look for love. especially so for engineer types who may not have the skills or energy to maintain a social life outside of work. unfortunately, i don't think our society is healthy enough to do this in a safe way.

That seems like a problem with the culture that women shouldn't have to bear the consequences of.

Interestingly, when my company proposed banning all workplace relationships (as opposed to only those between team members and superiors in the reporting chain) the biggest pushback was from women.

That's likely because banning consensual relationships is a incredibly poor attempt at fighting sexual harassment.

Allowing workplace romances inherently entails romantic advances between coworkers (some, or all of which constitute harassment depending on your views on the acceptability of asking out coworkers). If women are put off by these advances (as stated in the original comment to which I replied) one would expect that women would be more interested in halting this. But interestingly, women at my company seem to value the chance at making relationships with coworkers more than stopping advances from coworkers.