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Not that men who treat tech conferences like speed dating *care* about ethics, so I'm preaching to the choir here, but this made me think about a Jewish legal principle about stealing people's time--that you can't ask a shopkeeper "how much?" if you have no intent to buy.
Because to ask a shopkeeper to spend time telling you about a product you actually have no intention of buying is to steal their time. (Here's the reference: sefaria.org/Mishnah_Bava_M…)
This is actually kind of a hard one, but probably a more important than ever one, in modern society because online shopping, with low prices that small businesses can't compete with, is so alluring to customers.
And yeah, it 100% makes sense to go to a local shop to look at TVs and see what they ACTUALLY look like in person and ask salespeople questions about them and then go buy them for less online.
(Ooops, sorry, reference above links to the paragraph right under the one I'm talking about--here's a better link: sefaria.org/Mishnah_Bava_M…)
But to get back to tech networking events: people attend them with the expectation that they will make connections for the purpose of advancing their careers. If you meet someone there and want to date them and can't or have no intention of helping them with their career...
...the moment you realize you can't or aren't interested in helping them--the moment you WOULD have moved on if you weren't sexually attracted to them--the ethical thing to do is to move on.
Or at the very least, to make explicit, to say straight out, that there isn't anything you can do or are willing to do for them career-wise, and now you're just flirting.
Because if you keep the conversation going because you want to flirt and/or are hoping to get a date out of it, and you're not going to fulfill the point of the event, which is actual *networking,* you're getting them to spend their time under false pretenses.
And that's time they could be spending networking with someone else whose intentions are actually in line with the intentions of the event. You're stealing that time from them.
But wait, what if they're enjoying the flirting? What if they're flirting back? What if this is mutual? Well, here's the thing: our society being what it is, if there's a power differential--if you're senior to them, or if they're female and you're male--you can't know for sure.
Women will flirt back, or at least not tell men to stop flirting, because for a million reasons, we can't risk not doing so. Maybe you'll get weird and follow us to our car when we leave. Maybe you'll badmouth us to people who are hiring. We often can't afford to piss you off.
So it's on you to be clear that a conversation is purely about flirting for you, and not about career help. But more to the point, it's still potentially under false pretenses.
There's a chance, when you pick someone's pocket, that if you'd asked, they would have given you the cash. That doesn't mean it's not stealing. Same with stealing someone's time.
So if you meet someone at a networking event, and you can't help them, but want to get drinks, *be upfront about that.*
