I have written about inappropriate female behaviors in the workplace in the past. Here is another behavior I have encountered a few times, i.e. women talking about their sexual availability. I work in an office environment. My area of work used to be male-dominated. Technically, it still is, but a lot of the men behave like women, and a lot of women are being shoved into this field for political reasons. They get cushy compensation packages despite a lack of qualifications. Suddenly, a six-week “coding bootcamp” is supposed to be the equivalent of a four-year degree from a good technical university, at least if you are a woman. The tide is slowly turning, though, with some companies shutting down their DEI departments, but there are a lot of these people still around.

When you have a meeting with male colleagues, you normally get straight to the point, and you end the meeting once you have resolved the issue. With women, this process is not nearly as straightforward. They often want to chit-chat or even do a cringe-worthy “icebreaker round” at the beginning. The situation is comical: you want to solve a technical or organizational problem but because some people do not know each other yet, everybody has to answer a question such as, “What is the most interesting movie you recently watched?” or even some downright nonsense like, “If you were a kind of dessert, what would you be and why?”

In a meeting I recently attended there was a woman I had seen before. I did not know that she recently got separated from her husband, though. Within two minutes, everybody in the room knew about it as she spent the first few minutes updating the room on her new relationship status, which was borderline inappropriate, considering that there were even some external attendees whom she had not met before. She told us that she is currently looking for a new apartment as she has to move out, and of course she has to move out because she had the bright idea of leaving her husband in her early-to-mid 30s. Nobody wanted to engage her in conversation, except some other woman who provided mental support.

There was a break in this meeting. Some guy spoke about his upcoming vacation and his travel plans. That is the kind of neutral office chat that is widely acceptable, at least if there is no tone-deaf executive in the room who goes on and on about his upcoming safari or his two-week stay in a rented villa in Southern France. This woman took over the conversation, talking about the travels she and her husband used to do, and then mentioning destinations she would like to travel to in the near future, and how difficult it would be to do that on one income. This was genuinely baffling. Her contribution to the conversation boiled down to telling us that she is looking for a man who has to be willing to pay for ski and hiking trips to Switzerland, Austria, and Italy, and in winter, she wants to lie on the beach of some tropical island.

I wish this woman luck in her search for a new partner. Yet, she is apparently not doing that well. Otherwise, why announce that you are looking for a man in the most inappropriate settings? Her reasoning was not entirely wrong though, because the men in the room, at least the unmarried ones, surely have plenty of disposable income. However, she could have been a bit smarter and just kept her husband who had already invested plenty of time, money, and emotions in the relationship. He apparently did quite well for himself, which was probably why he chose her when she was still young. There was a time when a woman’s family advised her on how to get and keep a man. Today, society encourages women to leave relationships on a whim, making them believe that they will be able to find someone better quickly, but this only very rarely, if ever, happens. With this particular woman, my suspicion is that she attempted to “monkeybranch” to a guy who makes more money than her husband but he was not interested in anything more than a quick pump-and-dump, if at all. Nonetheless, she likely was so sure about being able to move on to this guy that she got out of her current relationship, and now she cannot go back. The path forward for her is uncertain and most likely leads to misery. Thus, she resorts to desperate measures such as openly announcing that she is looking for a man.