[rustynails77]

Look... up until a few years ago, I would never^ have had an issue with a 1:1 meeting, i'd had plenty of them. However, in recent years, the media has become so one sided about sex discrimination that I know an accusation could end my career (that's all it takes). Places like Ars Technica, the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald (and a host of others) paint a very one sided picture of sex discrimination (as do some of the comments in this thread that should have been modded down to oblivion but weren't). It's no accident that it's one sided and it has little bearing on reality#.

It doesn't matter if it's issues like domestic violence# or inappropriate behaviour in the workplace (eg. Marissa Mayer and her significantly under reported and alleged sacking of most of the male staff at Yahoo), the media continually present a one sided story to the point that we now almost solely accuse men of sexism. We've even had an Australian politician from Queensland try to legislate crimes by gender, with almost no criticism from the media. She's still in office because the media gloss over her sexist attitudes. If it were a man, he'd be out of government within a week. This has been going on for years.

So, I understand people becoming extremely wary. If the media wasn't so consistently prejudiced, the picture might be a little different.

^ Having said never (above), it's not quite true. I have been sexually harassed (physically and verbally in the work place). I was terrified to report it because one reverse accusation could have finished me. Thankfully, one of my bosses saw how stressed I was and this woman had a history of harassing male colleagues. Nobody would touch her for fear of recrimination, but, my boss ensured the opportunity of sexual harassment toward me was avoided.

# Perform a search on domestic violence using Google. Look at the imagery. You will see almost only white adult females as victims and white males as perpetrators (across thousands and thousands of images). The same one sided dialog is given in the articles linked to those images. Compare this one-sidedness to the actual stats and the story is very different (30-50% of the aggressors of domestic violence are female [1][2][3][4]). This is just one of the more extreme issues (ie. ignoring domestic violence females across the media) that underlies how imbalanced (and consistently imbalanced) the majority of western media are. There are many other examples of this one-sidedness other than this one topic. However, it's good to illustrate how easily people are blinkered to a topic as fundamental as victims of violence.

Stats to support my domestic violence comments are from government sites (where possible) because they are the most credible. [1] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/... [2] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-224-x/2010000/t002-eng.htm [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_Unite... [4] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...