Love is in the air in the corner office these days, and that’s not a good thing.
Over the weekend, Steve Easterbrook of McDonald’s became the fifth US chief executive to step down over a consensual relationship since June 2018 when Intel boss Brian Krzanich lost his job, according to data collected by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The cluster of departures is the first of its kind since the outplacement firm began keeping records.
But companies have been struggling with office romances for more than a century. Early factories were deliberately segregated by sex to limit heterosexual relationships, writes historian Jane Humphries. Until the 1970s, many companies forced women to quit when they married. This had the dual purpose of limiting the possibilities for romance and making it clear that women would pay the price if Cupid struck.