If a woman wants to come talk to me as a professional, I’m all for it. I love it when women take initiative to come talk to me, and not in some creep way like people may think, but rather because it instantly makes me a lot less anxious. I can’t be readily accused of hitting on her if she came to me first.

However, I can probably count on one hand the number of times a woman has come up to me in my professional career to talk to me about anything of professional significance.

Every time I approach a woman first however, there’s always an anxiety that I’ll be perceived as a creep, trying to play a really long game of hooking up with her. I know women must think this, because I constantly hear their stories about the various ways men hit on them in nearly any situation, and there always seems to be a bit of an awkwardness that isn’t there when they approach me first.

And if the woman I approach happens to be attractive and younger than me? It looks real bad. Indeed, if someone could have any reasonable doubt that my professional conversation with a woman is anything more than platonic, I would be uncomfortable in that conversation. Men would look at this and think “Yea he’s probably trying to get with her”.

I do not get the same anxiety when talking to a woman with her husband or boyfriend, or a woman who is much older than me, or homosexual women.

The thing about standing by and saying this is “not my problem” is that it really isn’t my problem. My problem is completely different from yours, even though it’s in the same domain, and nobody helps me with it either. As a basic straight white male, I’m a dime a dozen and if I voice any kind of problem the response is to go fuck myself.

This has nothing to do with you being a woman, there are also men with problems that I do nothing for. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.