While getting romantically involved with your superior at work is generally frowned upon—and for good reason given that it often ends up in personal and professional disaster. However, knowing that it’s such a bad idea doesn’t keep everyone from doing it—as a new study discovered, not only do people get the hots for their bosses, many of them even follow through on it.
A survey of over 1,000 people by resume building company Zety revealed that 40% of people have been attracted to their bosses in the past. That’s not necessarily hard to imagine—there’s something hot about people in positions of power, and it makes sense to be into someone who’s smart and ambitious, right? What may be a bit shocking to know is that 28% of people have actually followed through with having sex with their superiors. That number was pretty equal between male and female respondents. Crazy, right?
Incidentally, men were a whopping 32% more likely to think that sleeping with a superior is a-OK, and acceptability also varied depending on what industry the respondents worked in. For instance, those in construction, hotel/food service/hospitality, and tech were the most accepting of these types of liasons, while those in government and public admin, medical and healthcare, and wholesale and retail were the least cool with it.
Colleagues on more level ground were pretty chill about flirting in the office as well. Roughly 36% of people said they’ve been hit on by a coworker—31.2% of women and 23.7% of men, to be specific. Most people also didn’t care what their colleagues got up to, with 64.5% saying if they found out two of their coworkers were sleeping together, they wouldn’t do anything at all (of course, 16% would tell another coworker about it and 11.4% would actually send a message to HR about it).
Office dynamics are constantly changing, and with the #MeToo movement in full force, we have to hope that unwanted advances in the workplace can be put to a stop. Also, while sleeping with your boss isn’t the worst thing you could do, if there’s any coercion or abuse of power going on (and in many cases, it’d be impossible for that not to be the case), something MUST be done.
