Older women, younger men

Hollywood has a new favourite plot: an older woman, a much younger man, and a power imbalance that used to run the other way. This year alone, cinemas have served up a divorced gallerist falling for a boy-band star in "The Idea of You," a CEO navigating an increasingly complicated dynamic with her much younger intern in "Babygirl," and, in "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy," a widow drawn to her son's much younger science teacher. Reality TV has piled on with entire shows built around the same premise.

It's easy to file this under pop culture trivia. But for HR professionals, the trend is worth a second look – not because anyone's love life is the organisation's business, but because the underlying dynamic Hollywood keeps returning to (an older, more senior woman; a younger, more junior man; a blurred sense of who really holds the power) is increasingly playing out in real offices, too. And when it does, it tends to land on HR's desk, not the awards circuit.

Women are running more of the show

Start with the numbers. A record 55 women now run Fortune 500 companies, or 11 per cent of the list – the highest share in the ranking's 72-year history and the fourth straight year the figure has cleared double digits, according to Fortune.

That shift isn't confined to the corner office. Women have been climbing management ranks across industries for well over a decade, which means the odds of a workplace where the most senior person in the room is a woman, and some of her direct reports are younger men, have gone up considerably. It's the exact demographic pairing Hollywood keeps circling back to. The difference is that in an organisation, that pairing comes with an org chart, a performance review cycle, and, potentially, a formal complaint.

When the plot becomes a lawsuit

Just ask JPMorgan Chase. In April, a former vice-president in the bank's leveraged finance unit filed a lawsuit alleging a senior female colleague had coerced him into a non-consensual sexual relationship, drugged him, and threatened his career. The bank's own internal investigation found no evidence to support the claims, and the case took a series of unusual turns from there – including the plaintiff asking a New York judge to dismiss his own lawsuit and agreeing to cover some of the defendants' legal costs, only for his legal team to signal they plan to refile a bigger version of the case in federal court.

Whatever the facts turn out to be, the case became an instant flashpoint largely because it flipped the usual harassment script: senior woman, junior man. That reversal is happening more often, at least on paper, in the U.S., where the case originated. Data compiled from U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charge filings suggest the share of harassment complaints filed by men has climbed over the past two decades, from roughly 15% in the early 2000s (per a Cornell University summary of EEOC data) to close to 22 per cent of sexual harassment charges specifically between fiscal years 2018 and 2021, according to one law firm's analysis of EEOC figures.

These are approximate, aggregated numbers rather than a single official EEOC release, and the U.S. regulatory picture doesn't map neatly onto other markets, but the trend line is a useful signal: women still file the large majority of complaints, but the direction of travel is worth noting wherever you operate. A policy built entirely around the assumption that harassment flows from men to women is already a little out of date.

Power, not gender, is the real risk factor

Here's the part that should really get HR's attention: research on manager-subordinate relationships suggests the age or gender of the pair matters far less than the power imbalance itself.

A 30-year study of workplace couples in Finland – covering every cohabiting couple in the country where one partner supervised the other – found that while a relationship lasted, the subordinate's earnings rose by an average of 6%. But when the relationship ended, their earnings fell by 18 per cent, on average, and they were 13 percentage points more likely to leave the workforce altogether within a year, a decline that lasted at least four years, according to the researchers' own account in Fortune. Colleagues weren't spared either: staff turnover rose by roughly 14 per cent at firms once a boss-subordinate relationship became known, as co-workers lost confidence that pay and promotions were being handled fairly.

Notably, the study's authors found that the small number of men who dated their female managers actually saw larger pay bumps than women who dated male managers. In other words: when the senior partner is a woman and the junior one is a man, the same power distortions apply – they just run in the other direction

That's a big part of why organisations including McDonald's now flatly prohibit relationships across reporting lines. The policy is well known partly because it contributed to the 2019 ouster of then-CEO Steve Easterbrook over an undisclosed relationship with an employee

What this means for your policies

None of this means HR needs to start policing who's on whose dating app. But it's a good moment to check whether your organisation's approach to workplace relationships assumes a particular gender pairing, because the real-world data increasingly doesn't.

A few things worth revisiting:

• Make disclosure the default for any relationship that crosses a reporting line, regardless of who happens to be senior. Guidance on structuring these policies, including so-called "love contracts," is a useful starting point, and the same principles apply well beyond the US market that first popularised them.
• Build in independent reporting lines so neither partner has a say in the other's pay, performance review, or promotion. HR leaders in Australia have long argued for treating workplace relationships as a disclosable conflict of interest rather than a taboo subject, which holds up well under this newer data.
• Write the policy in gender-neutral language. A rule that reads as though it exists purely to protect women from men will feel irrelevant – or worse, exclusionary – to a workforce that increasingly includes senior women and junior men, too.
• Check in on how your workforce actually feels about it. A recent HRD reader poll found three in five respondents accept workplace relationships as long as neither person has a direct reporting line over the other, while only one in eight oppose them outright. Most employees aren't asking for a ban – just clear rules.

The last scene

Hollywood will keep making films about age-gap romances because audiences like watching power change hands. HR doesn't get to enjoy the trend from a safe distance, though.

Somewhere in most organisations, a more discreet version of that plot is already playing out on the org chart – and how it ends has less to do with who's older, and more to do with whether anyone was paying attention to the power dynamic in the first place.