As a male engineer, should I keep my distance from women at work in order to avoid possible false allegations of sexual harassment?

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No. Please don’t avoid women to make your own position more secure. It’s a really shitty thing to do to women. And it’s not really necessary to protect yourself from spurious claims.

I’m going to take a realpolitik tack here. Please don’t hate me for being real, ladies. I want this state of affairs to go away just as much as you do.

Here’s the long and the short of it. You have male privilege to fall back on if your best intentions don’t work.

Look, let me tell what usually happens when women make a formal sexual harassment complaint. HR gets notified and the first thing they’re going to want to do is to keep this from spreading throughout the company, because this sort of thing is really bad for business.

So they’re going to call you and her into the HR office and try to talk you both off the ledge. They’re going to focus on her more because she’s the one that’s possibly motivated to wreck quarterly profits with a social media shitstorm. You’re basically going to get tapped, not even slapped on the wrist and asked to not do it again. She’s the threat to the company, not you.

This absolutely contributes to sexual harassment culture in the workplace. And feminists are hard at work trying to change how these sorts of incidents are handled. And the consequence of this is that yes, some incidents get magnified and politicized and that’s what you usually hear about on the news. But it’s still rare, and that’s precisely what makes it newsworthy.

It’s rare because women who take their sexual harassment complaints to social media are basically much less glamorous Edward Snowdens. They become unhirable. The world calls her a slut and shames the crap out of her for demanding to believe that she is a real human who deserves real respect.

No, what typically happens in most workplaces is that the ‘burden of proof’ is going to fall back on the female to show that her claim has merit. And even if she manages to do this, the HR department is going to take the most expedient route to fixing the problem, and this is going to necessarily involve a judgment call on who is more valuable to the company. Since most workplaces are still very sexist, you are going to be seen as the more valuable employee.

You’d have to do something really effing bad for male privilege to not protect you here. Like slap her ass and call her a slut or something. Or manage to get hit by lightning, oh I mean find the one in a million woman who will actually not take no for an answer from HR.

Because HR is wily. They’ll make her feel very very small and her complaint to be really really silly and stupid and not worth pursuing. Because they just want you both to get back to work and forget all about it. You, they’ll just expect the experience of being called into HR to bring you into line. Her, they have to deploy cloak-and-dagger psyops to make her come back to Jesus.

So no. You don’t have to avoid women. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that you aren’t actually interested in harassing women. But just so we’re clear, keep your hands to yourself and take no for an answer and you should be just fine. I went through this at my first corporate job and those two rules served me extremely well. Lots of guys can’t even manage that, so if you can actually follow them, you’re already doing better than 90% of men.