It could be as simple as "Wow, Joe reported Bob for sexual harassment, but Bob didn't do anything wrong - I was there. Now I have to be extra-careful around Joe to avoid getting reported myself!"
And there you go - Joe is now suffering from "retaliation" and being treated special for speaking up.
Male professors avoid being alone with female students. Male colleagues refuse to work with or to a lesser extent, refuse to be friendly on any sort of casual level with female colleagues entirely just because of the small risk that an accusation could cost them their job/career. This fear actively harms both genders.
Further investigation confirmed my counter-claims that she wanted my job and the next promotion after it. Instead of outperforming me, she decided to simultaneously create situations where I looked unfit and sexist with rumors and a clique of buddies backing it up. They'd benefit if she was promoted. She never got fired like the guys do in similar situations in that company but did back-off and quit after upward-movement was cut off.
I agree it harms both genders. Work was never fun during any of these situations as people started practicing self-censorship. Not just me or the men. It's why I fight such non-sense and Codes of Conduct that facilitate it, too. Fortunately, each event was taken care of, people became themselves again, and work went back to productive and fun. Cuz real people are more interesting than fake ones. :)
So, such policies reduce liability but probably have a cost to society. I thought about surveillance cameras as a solution. Then, a headline popped into mind: "voyeuristic professor discovered to have..." Just can't win when the threat is peoples' imagination and desire to find a negative. :)
MILF is borderline a bad way to talk to someone, yet, everyone here is saying: FIRE HIM or FIRE THEM.
It would be harassment if he continued after she said stop, it would be harassment if he groped her, it would be harassment if he talked clearly obscenely about her, MILF is borderline, and yet, everyone is saying, FIRE HIM.
Guys, just give the benefit of the doubt, make it a clear statement that you on the workplace are clearly against any kind of advance that might happen between employees, and that's it.
Read your HR policies - if you don't, I suspect you'll be in trouble like this someday, based on your attitude towards this.
Asking someone on a date when it is apparent that they aren't interested is harassment.
> Having autism is harassment.
How would you know if you don't ask?
Wow. No, it's not. Not for normal people, anyway.
Normal person A: "Hey, what do you say you and I have dinner one of these nights."
Normal person B: "Thanks, but no." [TOTALLY OPTIONAL: "I don't think my girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband/... would like that."/"I have a strict no-relationships-with-coworkers/vendors/customers/people-I-meet-in-the-gym/... policy."/"That's very kind of you but I'm afraid I'm not interested."/"Please don't ask again and we shall never speak of this."]
Normal person A: "No problem! So, about that [situation-appropriate topic of discussion..]"
A asked B on a date. B was not interested. No harassment was involved.
To be very clear, the above dialogue could have gone (and unfortunately all too often does go) differently. Had A persisted after a clear refusal, that could very easily veer into the territory of harassment. Furthermore (and I know this will be more controversial), B could have messed the above dialogue up too, for example by failing to give a clear and unambiguous "no." Does this place a certain burden on B merely as a consequence of A's unrequited interest? Yes, but part of being an adult is being able to say "no" to reasonable requests from other adults.
Strive be a normal person like A and B and it should be possible to ask someone on a date, or be asked on a date, regardless of context without fear or discomfiture. (Note: situations of extreme power imbalance, e.g. professor/student, boss/subordinate, need to be navigated with extreme care. Normal people refrain entirely, in such situations, from romantic overtures unless and until the mutual interest (it does happen sometimes) is blindingly obvious, and they then scrupulously avoid even the appearance of impropriety, e.g. by waiting until the end of the term, or transferring to a different department, or something.)
>Calling someone a MILF is definitely harassment.
I'm not going to argue there. It's extremely offensive, at the very least. Normal people don't address other normal people, with whom they don't have an intimate relationship, using sexual terms.
For what it's worth, it sounds to me like the female employee in this case was a model Normal Person ("sure as friends in work context" is about as unambiguous as you can get!). If the sum total of the communication had been
A: Could we hang out? B: Sure, as friends in a work context A: May I tell you a secret? B: No, sorry.
I would regard A as a Normal Person as well, and the dialogue as innocuous. But I'm assuming A was inappropriately persistent/insistent (not to mention the MILF part, which is inappropriate in itself) and the dialogue, no doubt, goes on from there. So, yes, fire his ass.
As for me, for the moment I'm bitter against the promotion game, I've founded my own company and I'm voting against any progress of women.
I'm not sure you're going to establish a moral high ground by explicitly opposing the progress of equality... I understand you have concerns and you may feel you've been wronged by "gender aware" policies/attitudes, but I don't think it's very controversial to say that women are historically disadvantaged and we need to work that out in some way, however that may be.