If you need a trillion dollar idea: teach socially unsavvy people how to recognize a yes before they have to ask the question.
I know you can make boatloads of money, because I am one of those unsavvy people and every bit of information about dating basically comes down to:
"Here are 10 hints that tell you she might be interested. If you want to know for sure, ask. Oh and she might be too polite to actually turn you down, so here are 5 more tips to recognize when a yes actually means no."
This means don't ask colleagues for a date. Instead, ask social acquaintances from other parts of your life.
Whether you are socially savvy or not, you should treat all business associates first and foremost as people looking to benefit professionally from their relationship with you. Treating women like their professional life is irrelevant because you find them hot is fundamentally not going to go good places. It tends to undermine them professionally. This isn't a way to "win friends and influence people."
Operating under the old rules is frequently not (apparently) problematic for well established people who belong to a privileged class. For purposes of this discussion, that would be men who make good money and see themselves as "catches" because of it -- edit: which describes a large number of HN commenters -- sometimes while being quite bitter about all the gold digging whores in the world and failing to see that if you bait your hook with money, you shouldn't be surprised if that is the type of fish you attract.
Additionally, some blind spots are genuinely rooted in personal disability. Lack of social savvy can be due to Autism Spectrum Disorder.
I have two sons who likely qualify as ASD. I find it very effective to give them helpful tools for navigating the social landscape and avoiding the worst errors they could make due to their personal handicaps. I find it quite counterproductive to blame them as if they are being troublesome on purpose.
I try to keep that in mind when framing comments of mine. I'm human and I don't always get it right by any stretch of the imagination. But that's where I'm generally coming from.
There's a gap between an overture which gets a “yes” and one which is unwelcome, within which an overture is acceptable and will not adversely impact a relationship even though it is declined; how wide this gap is varies by individual and context (it tends to be particularly narrow, and sometimes of negative width such that there are unwelcome advances that will be met with grudging acquiescence, where the recipient is on the downward side of a power imbalance) and, I suspect, is on average in our present society much narrower for women than men (becaus of, at least, general social power dynamics rather than necessarily any inherent gender feature.)
While obviously one will prefer that the answer be yes to any overture (even an implicit one), I think that—particularly with the kind of subtle, implicit, preliminary overtures that are used to gauge interest before an explicit overture is made—the thing a savvy individual will want to be certain of is that the overture will be within the permissible range irrespective of whether it will elicit a positive response.
I think a lot of the problem (other than active malice) comes from people not recognizing the effects of context and lacking empathy and thus projecting their own broader range or permissible-even-if-not-interested onto the recipient of their advances.
In a situation where there is a lot at stake, socially savvy people generally want to know the answer will be "yes" before the question is asked.
Historically, when men were the primary breadwinners and women were expected to be homemakers, a man asking for a date from a woman he had determined was single was not likely to be causing big problems for anyone. If she said "No" and he dropped it, no drama would ensue.
This is not true where they are business colleagues and she has career aspirations.
I had an entry level job at a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years. I wanted to get a better paying job more in line with my education in the IT department.
One day, a senior programmer asked me for a date. I'm sure he had stopped to consider if he was in the clear and determined he was. He wasn't doing anything wrong and he wasn't going to get in trouble.
I'm equally sure he didn't stop to wonder how it impacted my career aspirations. It basically killed any hope I had of getting a job in his department. Simply asking me out closed doors for me.
I left the company shortly thereafter. I left for largely unrelated reasons, but that incident made it clear to me I could basically give up all hope of ever escaping the Pink Collar Ghetto I was trapped in because some powerful man at the company saw me as date material and never stopped to ponder how that framing might impact me.
In over 5 years, he was the only person I ever met at the company who knew what GIS was without me having to explain it. He never once wondered what my career goals were, nor what my unusual skills might do for the company. Nope. He just got all excited about the possibility of getting a date. Full stop.
This is the essence of why we are seeing studies like this one about the impact on women in specific, even though anyone can be a victim of sexual harassment.