For perhaps the fifteenth time, while sitting together in the kitchen for breakfast, I let my wife know that I was going to go have a beer in the afternoon with some guy who might be a great attendee, or maybe a good sponsor, for the conference I host annually in March.

She said to me in response: “When are you going to go have a drink with a woman?”

As an event organizer, I’m almost always thinking about gender balance. I suppose it’s another post entirely, but one of the things my co-founder and I always look at when someone is pitching themselves as a speaker is how adding them to the lineup would affect the balance on stage. It’s not an insignificant thing; among many benefits, having a good number of women as presenters affects how welcome women feel at the event, and provides exposure to different approaches and perspectives (of course).

The truth is, at our event we make a considerable effort to find women both as speakers and as attendees, and I think we do a pretty good job. As I write this, our speakers page features 11 awesome speakers, 7 of whom are women.

“I never offered to grab a drink with them in the afternoon, like I tended to do with other men.”

But when I stopped to think about my wife’s question, the answer was a bit embarrassing. I did see plenty of women at parties, meetups, and events that I went to, and sure, I invited them to our conference in Sun Valley, but I never offered to grab a drink with them in the afternoon, like I tended to do with other men.

The fact that I haven’t been doing this suggests a problem in the way we do business networking: it’s not socially “safe” for a man to go have a drink alone with a woman, even if it’s just for work.

Why is that?

There are no doubt plenty of reasons why men seem to prefer one-on-one meetings with other men, but one I haven’t read about yet is that happily married, faithful men like myself need an excuse (or at the least permission) to have a drink with another woman, because the default relationship “over drinks” is romantic.

Picture my wife and I back at the kitchen table.

Me, eyebrows arched mischievously, “So you want me to have drinks with other women?”

Her, deadpan: “Yes.”

I can’t remember the last TV show or movie I watched that didn’t feature a marriage with infidelity or divorce. That has to be sitting somewhere in the back of my head every time I’m out with women.

A recent court case sucked two weeks out of my life as a juror, and in it the plaintiff made a sexual harassment claim. One of the cited acts of sexual harassment? A male co-worker asked her out for a drink to celebrate a new project they’d just landed.

Regardless of whether or not you think that’s harassment, it’s definitely a reminder that “getting a drink” is so close to “having a date” that it’s charged with all kinds of social and romantic meaning, and those meanings are different for everyone. It can be a minefield, and at least subconsciously it was preventing me from asking women to meet over a drink.

At a private event in Seattle, I heard from a Senior Vice President at PayScale — a site that tracks, via survey, a wide variety of salary, career, and compensation data—that according to their data, when men and women doing the same job have similar “factors” to compensation (e.g. years of experience, degree, etc), there is practically no difference in salary.

The reason we have such disparity in compensation is that women just aren’t in the jobs that pay the highest salaries. Most notably, these are engineering and computer science jobs.

I wonder if that’s because the networks aren’t as open as they should be?

I’m not a big believer in social conspiracy theories, or the idea that any one group “orchestrates” the rules of society. But I do think that millions of individual attitudes can change a norm pretty quickly (e.g. the faith-in-humanity restoring rapid growth in acceptance of gay marriage).

So what I would ask is this: if you’re the type of person who takes business meetings over a drink, try to cross the gender divide with your next invitation.

As for me, I need to make up for lost booze. My goal is to have one networky meeting per week with a woman through the end of the year (Thanksgiving and Christmas excluded).

I’m working to fill the calendar already, but I’d also love some help. So if you’re female, in Seattle, and doing something cool, hit me up for a drink: jason@dentthefuture.com. I promise not to file suit.

Obligatory: If you enjoyed this article, or at least agree with it, please hit “recommend” so other folks can see it, too. If you think Dent sounds kind of cool, please click here to check it out. If you want an invitation, shoot me an email (jason@dentthefuture.com) and mention this post.