About two months ago a man got sacked from his job for making ‘sexually-laden remarks’ about one of his female co-workers. I imagine that this happens every day, in every office, and mostly within the confinement of a few trustworthy colleagues. It’s probably less common for someone to send such remarks instantly to 1,200 colleagues by email – which is where things turned to custard for him. It was an accident, of course, but one that limited his career opportunities at his employer quite dramatically.

Apparently, in defending his actions before the firm’s partner-panel afterwards he declared that the woman to whom he referred in that fateful email typically dressed to provoke similar comments as he had made.

The sackable offence was not that he had made ‘sexually laden remarks’ but that those remarks had been transmitted, in writing, to just about any of his colleagues located in a 1,500 mile radius.

As it turned out, only three of twelve-hundred people had complained but this was nonetheless, according the partners, sufficient to cut the man’s career short immediately.

Their verdict rested on the principle that the firm was ‘an equal opportunity employer’ and that it ‘embraced equal-level peer relationships between female and male colleagues’.
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