What if a woman was offered a lucrative, plum position in a particular field – let’s say engineering – for which she was required and expected to perform said tasks and critiqued accordingly. To finalize the mix, her supervisor expected an ongoing sexual relationship. But the woman employee would be expected to perform the job requirement tasks and subjected to the same performance reviews as any other employee. So, is this prostitution or is its removal from the direct exchange of sex for money take it out of that category? The situation has a very murky feel to it IMO.
Yeah, it’s murky all right. If the employee initiated the deal, it would certainly be a form of prostitution (though kind of a dumb one for reasons we’ll go over in a minute). But if the employer initiated it – which is what I assume you’re proposing due to the phrase “expected an ongoing sexual relationship” – it would be sexual harassment in the purest form. Such arrangements were at one time not at all uncommon; I’m sure you’ve heard of the Hollywood “casting couch”. In the days when men pretty much ran everything and women were hard-pressed to break into decent jobs, many women felt as though they had little choice but to accept such lopsided deals when they were offered; it wasn’t until women as a group had gained enough clout in the marketplace that individual women felt secure enough to call attention to this kind of extortion when it happened. But since the language you use seems to indicate that you don’t see the fundamentally coercive nature of these work conditions, let me spell it out for you: the employee would be expected to perform two jobs for one paycheck, and as you describe it she wouldn’t be getting any kind of slack in the “official” job. So not only would she have to put out for her sleazy boss without any guarantee of job security, she’d also have to labor under the Damoclean sword of the Coolidge Effect. Sooner or later he’d get tired of her, and then what? Would he let her keep the job and stop pestering her for sex, or (as seems much more likely) would he begin to find fault with her, sabotage her efforts so she gets bad performance reviews, write her up for bullshit infractions, and the like so he could fire her and bring in a new honey in her place? Only a desperate woman would accept such a crappy arrangement, and because Western society now recognizes just how exploitative sex-for-job deals are, any man who would still propose one would have to be a total fool who deserved everything he got.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
[…] Source: Lopsided Deal […]
I LOVE this article! As someone familiar with the corp world this stuff is all too common.
When you listed the statistic about the small percentage (around 1% if I recall) of women who were prostitutes I looked to your supporting links and realize that it’s openly declared prostitutes. Like you have touched on in your earlier article about the party/sugarbaby/hostess scene, there are a whole lot more whores than just 1%.
I have a hunch that the Pareto Principle applies here where 20% of women have used their sexuality to extract favors/gifts/cash from a man in their lifetime and of that 20%, 80% are halfway whores who use their sexuality as a supplement to their income semi-regularly with the other 20% being business minded whores.
I find there’s a lot more halfway whores than america would like to admit and unfortunately honesty is penalized in areas where prostitution is criminalized. I think this piece is required reading for the young woman getting her feet wet on the corporate career ladder.
Thank you again for such a well timed piece. 🙂
I would wager that the percentage of women who have intentionally used their sexuality to gain favors/gifts/cash is dramatically higher than 20%. I suspect that 80% would be a conservative estimate.
I can only recommend to never, ever accept this type of deal (other variants exist and men can be the subordinate too). It makes professional work impossible and it makes meaningful professional advancement very difficult, because you cannot advance on merit anymore (regardless whether it is there or not) because the performance review etc. cannot be the same as for the others anymore.
I see one exception: If this is a husband-and-wive team (or equivalent). But then the deal is very different from the situation under discussion.
I have to call a person that accepts such a deal (in non-desperate circumstances) a fool in both roles: As a professional in the target-job, because he/she is not competing on merit and as a sex-worker because he/she does not insist on cash upfront.
I think the biggest problem with this sort of deal is that it implies that there is something less valuable about professional contribitions that come from a person who is sexually attractive- since they will be expected to perform the job the same as an employee that is not sexually attractive to the supervisor, that attractiveness now becomes a flaw that must be made up for by putting out.
That is horrible, and it is especially harmful in the case of a male supervisor and female employee because of the cultural and historical sexism that has and still does purvade the workplace, especially in a field like engineering.
I disagree on your last statement. I have been in engineering for more then 2 decades and while there is the occasional sexism, I have never found it to any significant extent or as a “culture” and neither have any female co-workers that I asked. In fact, there seems to be considerably less sexism than in the rest of society. I have given up asking, because it did not produce anything different from what I observed. Sure, this is mostly limited to CS, EE and Math, but are other STEM fields really that different?
One notable exception: I have heard very negative sexist comments from several female (and only female) students back at university about other female students that did not work hard. Most of these others did not graduate, so that went away.
I am an engineer myself, and most of the sexism I have encountered was of the soft variety (like, assuming I need help lifting something when I don’t, or references to me not counting as a girl girl (for context, I am a fit skirts and curls and eye makeup person), but I have heard from others references to girls “not knowing about mechanical stuff” or girls being asked if they are “on the rag” whenever they are grumpy.
Then there is the issue with a lack of mentors. All of the older engineers I have encountered in my field are dudes, and the only ones able to mentor me have daughter’s my age. If they don’t have a daughter, no dice, they are just too uncomfortable.
But I guess its true that sexism is dying in STEM fields, but thats mostly due to a generation gap- a troubling majority of people in many STEM fields are either entering retirement or are millenials (and millenials are generally not sexist, in my experience)
Hmm. I am a working engineer and an engineering masters student, and I’m a woman, and my experience has been that sexism is rampant, at least in my particular subfield. I receive sexual comments and suggestions in class (from peers, from professors), in job interviews, and at work with moderate frequency, physical gestures and approaches occasionally, and am *routinely* present while my male peers discuss other women colleagues in lewd and offensive terms. I also get a lot of comments a long the lines of, “What do you do?” / “I’m an engineer” / “Gosh, that must be really hard for you, doesn’t that have a lot of math?” from men who aren’t engineers but think geek girls are hot on probably a bimonthly basis.
Yes, it’s possible that it’s just a matter of your specific subfield of engineering versus my specific subfield of engineering, but what feels vastly more likely to me is that there is sexism around you that you don’t happen to see, especially if you’re male (implied but not certain from your wording).
And, re: those woman coworkers… sometimes women lie about sexual harassment because living with it is exhausting and grinding and rote and we just don’t want to deal with it for more hours of our day. Sometimes we lie because it feels like in that conversation itself, we’re being trapped into an interaction that will itself become sexual harassment. And full disclosure: if a male coworker says to me, “You’ve never encountered sexism in the workplace, have you?” and there are other coworkers around? Even if the question-asker himself is the best guy in the world, the odds are good that I will not feel safe, because the odds are good that I have been sexually harassed by *someone else in that room*. And if I do not feel safe, damn straight I am going to lie, because that’s what I need to do to not get cornered in elevators or followed out to my car late at night.
Please trust me to know how to ask this type of question. It is not something I did to make myself feel better, it is something I asked because I wanted to know. The thing is, _all_ of the women I asked would need to have been lying about it to me and I consider that highly unlikely. What may be in here is cultural differences between different geographical locations (my experiences are not in the US, but Europe).
What I do detect in general is a level of misunderstanding and oversensitivity leading to seeing things that are not there. For example, you were just blatant sexist in implying that because I am male, I am likely blind to sexism happening around me. That is a statement of incompetence based on gender. Was that intended as a sexist insult? (It certainly qualifies with the right attitude.) I don’t think so, I think it was just you pointing out a potential mechanism. But that it can be interpreted both ways illustrates my point nicely.
“I think the biggest problem with this sort of deal is that it implies that there is something less valuable about professional contribitions that come from a person who is sexually attractive”
No it doesn’t. It does rather strongly imply that there is something deficient with the contributions of that particular person. It is basic economics. Either you have the professional skills that make you seem like the best candidate for the job or you don’t. if you don’t, you have to have something else to bridge the gap or you don’t get the job.
That is why attractive people that seem to advance beyond reason get the accusation of sleeping their way to the top. Unattractive ones are generally thought to have blackmail instead.
About the only places where you can see ‘extras’ extracted from others on a regular basis are positions that are either highly desired combined with relatively low skill requirements, or places that tolerate essentially superfluous employees. Doesn’t mean that there won’t be the occasional attempt at an arrangement outside of those places, just that it won’t be common.
Maggie, I love you but you are being baited.
(To answer to the question as asked:
This is not prostitution, but extortion.
She will not be paid a dollar for lifting her skirt.)
“Should I work for an unscrupulous and abusive man for money and prestige?”
The proposition assumes that the candidate is both foolish and unprincipled.
Such would never have made the interview in the first place.
I think she knows that. One way to deal with it other than ignoring the question is taking great care to answer it as if it was serious. I think she did that quite well. And it has the added benefit that if the question was actually serious (people get the strangest ideas…) that strategy is superior to ignoring it.
I am the writer of the question. I presented it in an email to her privately, as a question I had not seen covered.
Maggie chose to include it in her website, elaborating on her answer, which is quite fine with me.
As to the “strangeness” of it, recall the old adage that “truth (or reality in this case) is stranger than fiction.
I had thought of joining in with the conversation of couple of times, but as my motivations are being judged by complete strangers, I shall decline.
Not that I feel entirely compelled to tell anyone at this point other than to clear the air, I wanted to hear a professional sex worker’s take on this which I did. And I thank Maggie for taking the time to do that.
I could never imagine this happening in connection with a job that requires as much brains as engineering. On the other hand, “sexretaries” used to be quite common.
I believe such a deal ought to be as legal and acceptable as any other form of sex work, so long as it’s made clear in advance that sex work is a requirement of the job. (On the other hand, if the boss receiving the favors is not the sole owner of the business, the other owners may, and should, very well balk at his misuse of his authority to obtain this kind of fringe benefit.)
The “sexual harassment” law needs to be discarded entirely, along with the rest of the so-called Social Justice movement of which it is a part.
And contrary to those who believed I was “baiting”, this is where I was going with this question.
In reading Maggie’s Blog, I come away with the sense of honesty and openness with sexual relations. But if the work situation is not couched in forthright terms in the beginning, that is where the rat in Denmark starts to smell.
And think about it for a moment: wouldn’t a geek dude be all the more turned on by a female math whiz who looks like Boticelli’s Venus to boot?!
I appreciate all the various replies: fascinating the different perspectives here.