Kiss it goodbye, girls; you had your chance, and you've blown it bigly.
No more dinners with female colleagues. Don’t sit next to them on flights. Book hotel rooms on different floors. Avoid one-on-one meetings. In fact, as a wealth adviser put it, just hiring a woman these days is “an unknown risk.” What if she took something he said the wrong way?
Across Wall Street, men are adopting controversial strategies for the #MeToo era and, in the process, making life even harder for women. Call it the Pence Effect, after U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he avoids dining alone with any woman other than his wife. In finance, the overarching impact can be, in essence, gender segregation.
Hey, why tiptoe around if you don't have to?
The changes can be subtle but insidious, with a woman, say, excluded from casual after-work drinks, leaving male colleagues to bond, or having what should be a private meeting with a boss with the door left wide open.
Well, girls - you've nobody but yourselves to blame. Why would a guy want anything to do with you in anything but a very public setting these days? We're all supposed to believe a woman's claims, after all.
The reality is that you're not all that attractive, you're not all that important, and you certainly aren't worth jeopardizing a guy's career because you had a bad hair day.