Ground Floor: Faria Alam lost her claim for sexual harassment against the English FA last week and she's probably the only one who's disappointed by the ruling. She certainly won't be surprised because her publicist, Max Clifford, advised her against taking the case.

She should have listened to him but apparently wanted people to know "what she went through". Somehow, I feel that in selling her story in newspaper deals worth £300,000 (€445,000), she had ensured that plenty of people knew rather more of what she went through than we'd like.

Sex in the city stories tend to generate a lot of interest because many people can relate to the situations if not the outcomes. Of course in this case, football made the mix irresistible.

My female friends who are still out there in the office workplace have more or less decided that Faria has managed to brand them all as gold-digging women who regard sleeping with the boss as a passport to fame and fortune.

My male friends simply groaned about the fact that you only have to pay a compliment to a woman in the workplace these days to open yourself up to the possibility of a sexual harassment charge.

I empathised with the women and told the men that they were exaggerating. But they have a point. There's no doubt that the rules of etiquette in the office needed to be rewritten and that women have been, without doubt, the recipients of unwanted attention from male colleagues.

But as with so much of our lives these days, there's a tendency for us to rush to the law for recourse rather than using a bit of common sense.

The area of sexual harassment in the workplace is dealt with in Ireland through the Employment Equality Act 1998, amended by the Equality Act 2004. The Act defines sexual harassment as any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical contact of a sexual nature. Included as unwanted contact are offensive gestures or facial expressions, unwelcome and offensive calendars, e-mails, screen savers or other offensive material.

Sexual harassment can be caused by a colleague, superior, client, customer or business contact. An employer may also be held responsible if the harassment takes place during the course of employment but outside the workplace, causing a person to be treated differently at work because she (or he) accepted or rejected the harassment.

The key element is that the conduct has to be unwelcome. It's pointless, for example, to allow your boss to kiss you goodnight for two months and then complain afterwards that you didn't like it. It wouldn't have mattered in Faria Alam's case that she was already having affairs with two members of staff when she claimed that the alleged advances of David Davies were unwanted, but e-mails and texts to friends read out at the tribunal didn't indicate that they were.

If she really wanted to be taken seriously, she should have thought twice before two-timing two bosses! The law tends to take a moment in time out of context and deals with it outside the realm of everything else that has gone on in a person's life, but the reality is that certain behaviour sends out certain signals.

Generally, the advice to someone who feels that they are the victim of sexual harassment is to tell the person concerned that they find the behaviour offensive straight away. In the majority of cases that works. It is always difficult if the person trying to make unwanted advances is your boss, but in most instances reminding him of his family obligations - or of your long-term happy relationship, even if it doesn't exist - will get things back on a more acceptable footing.

Although many women believe that there is a double standard attached to the behaviour of men and women when it comes to their love lives, that is not the case in the office.

A man who tries to bed a selection box of female colleagues is not granted a special "stud" status. Most women will, in fact, consider him pitiful and will avoid him at the office party.

This also implies a different standard - women who sleep with more than one boss are not usually considered pitiful.

Supporters of Faria point to the fact that the men concerned were stupid if they didn't realise what she was up to and deserved all they got, and that certainly is a double standard.

We don't consider that women deserve it if they truly are the victims of harassment. We shouldn't think men deserve it either if they're just plain delusional.

It had been thought that two former female FA employees, both secretaries of Davies, would corroborate Faria's story, but they emphatically denied that he'd "tried anything on" with them and said that Faria was a liar.

The bottom line is that it's usually not a good career move to sleep with the boss no matter how well you get on with each other.

It doesn't matter that you might actually be spending more time in each other's company than with your respective partners.

It doesn't matter if you've previously had a flirty relationship with each other without anything happening. In 99 per cent of cases once you cross the line, it's probably all going to end horribly wrong.

Most people won't read about it in the tabloids when it happens, but most people won't get a £300,000 payoff from them to ease the pain either.