[spriggan3]

> Men and women need to learn to interact at work

I disagree, there is something called respect and politeness, if you need to learn it at work ,then your parents did a bad job raising you.

Calling a woman "a milf" is inappropriate, period. I'm black, if a colleague called me "n__gger", would he need training so he can learn to interact at work with black people ? that's not serious.

If the male employee was just a bit pushy and insistant, while it is inexcusable, I would give him a warning and training. But you can't make up excuses for someone who call a female employee "a milf". There is no training that can fix that. That's not being "insensitive", that's being straight out macho in a professional context.

[ted12345]

Is calling a black person "nigger" really equivalent to calling a woman "milf"?

Somehow I think that analogy just confuses the issue.

[mjolk]

I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but I think he's stating that there's lines in the sand that once you cross, sitting with HR and watching some dumb training videos and reading some policy documents is no longer sufficient recourse.

> Over the weekend... He asked to take the conversation off Slack (moved to Whatsapp) and asked if they could hang out (she said, "sure as friends in work context"), referred to her as a milf (ugh...), and asked if he could tell her a secret (she refused)[0]

In the context of the original post, I believe this is one of those cases. To tie this into the analogy to which you're responding, if one of my employees asked another to move off work-chat so he/she could assail him/her and was acting genuinely sleazy, I'd pack up the offending employee's desk, lock down accounts and access on Sunday night, and make sure I was there first on Monday to escort him/her out of the building.

The language that my team uses would make a drunk sailor blush, but I think this is a pretty clear case of justified firing. It's damn hard to hire a great team and nothing will destroy it faster than interpersonal issues.

0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857

[belorn]

Lets compare to a similar situation but without this being about men vs women. Two co-workers go to a bar, and gets into a physical fight. During the fight, one of them call the other something really inappropriate like n__gger or s_ut.

Do you fire both instantly the next day? Physical fights and insults are both unprofessional, and as a zero tolerance policy, that means they need to be let go instantly. Do you only fire the insult throwing employee? Do you talk to either one of them before issuing the boot?

[mjolk]

Going into another anecdote just confuses the matter. Like most interpersonal issues, the specific context and actions are important.

I will say that the scenario that you've created is markedly different.

[kelukelugames]

Calling someone a MILF is at best socially awkward. Using it on a coworker is grossly inappropriate. Plus if someone is problematic this early then they will likely continue to cause problems.

With that said, I worked with very stupid people. Great programmers but under-socialized. These people have no idea how much harm they are causing but will snap out of it if reproached by HR or management. I know that doesn't sound fair but there are a lot of dumbasses in our industry.