> They should be able to seek out relationships in their comfort zone without risk of formal censure. I assume there are a lot of women in a similar position.

> They should be able to seek out relationships in their comfort zone without risk of formal censure. I assume there are a lot of women in a similar position. People should not seek out relationships with those over whom they wield significant power professionally. That's a pretty decent and obvious rule most people live by. While there are exceptions, if someone doesn't intuitively understand the reasons for the rule they should seriously consider dating outside of their professional environment. This is especially true for people who are likely to make such advances to those under them through sheer ignorance of social norms. The set of people who make advances and badger others usually do so in bad faith and have practiced ways to hedge, mislead, and leverage the people around them to remain safely tolerated. That leaves the decent, socially inept people wide open to be made examples of by HR because they never thought to use their power or influence to threaten others. (Or, out of desperation they start to use that influence to save face.) That may sound unfair to the socially inept. But the point is that there is no way to separate the wheat from the chaff-- people acting in bad faith who get caught almost always claim social ignorance, or harmless intentions, mis-communication, etc. There is no credible way to signal to an underling that a sexual advance comes without the threat of badgering or other more subtle repercussions. (And esp. no way to explain one's actions as harmless after the fact.) And that's not even to mention situations where an underling says yes to an ostensibly "non-badgering" advance because a) they confused the wheat with the chaff and b) the power imbalance makes them think they have little choice. If the person making the advance is not particularly socially aware then it greatly increases the chances that they take the lack of error reporting as consent. Meanwhile, the underling is convinced that reporting an error would result in immediate or eventual termination. Not a particularly sound system for exploring romance IMO. Anyway, those are just a few reasons why most people believe strongly in the rule I stated above. It's a field of social land mines. If one is socially inept then an entire class of problems vanishes simply by following the rule. (Besides, widely-available web dating services do exist.)