We often hear about how office affairs can poison a workplace — but the romance also harm women even in offices where no hanky-panky is taking place.
In the Harvard Business Review, Sylvia Ann Hewlett explains that women in junior positions can’t usually rise the top without the “sponsorship” of a senior executive. But such senior executives are still often married dudes, and they may be unwilling to take on sponsorship duties, with the frequent one-on-one contact they require, if they’re going to be suspected of having an affair. Part of the problem here is that office affairs do happen — in one survey, 34% of female execs said they knew a woman who’d had an affair with her boss, and 15% had been that woman. Hewlett recommends restraint for both male supervisors and female employees, and stricter office relationship policies “that punish offenders.”
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