Strictly speaking consent is about whether you make a decision freely and without any duress. If you are being told, "if you don't sleep with me, you won't get the promotion", even if you do agree to sleep with someone that is not necessarily freely giving consent due to the circumstances.
If this is systematic and there is an expectation of this within the entire culture of an industry and a woman wouldn't touch a particular man with a barge pole under other circumstances then its a coercive culture. In other words, where the entire culture is regarded as like that, any woman sleeping with a man because she was under the impression that she had to for what ever reason, potentially does have a legal case retrospectively.
Under the law the statutory definition of consent is as follows:
Section 74 defines consent as 'if he agrees by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice'. Prosecutors should consider this in two stages. They are:
Whether a complainant had the capacity (i.e. the age and understanding) to make a choice about whether or not to take part in the sexual activity at the time in question.
Whether he or she was in a position to make that choice freely, and was not constrained in any way. Assuming that the complainant had both the freedom and capacity to consent, the crucial question is whether the complainant agrees to the activity by choice.
The law also states that the other person has to have a reasonable belief that consent has been properly and freely given.
This may or may not be upheld if it goes to court, as its down to the individual circumstances of exactly what happened and because its down to the burden of proof and the evidence given.
So, yes, 10 years after the fact the woman could come to realisation that she was compelled to sleep with someone because of the culture or the situation she was put in. Where the man has a defence is in whether he had reasonable belief that she was acting freely.
If a man is going around and blacklisting women or saying he'll blacklist them, he knows what he's doing, even if the woman doesn't initially believe that there is a problem with the situation. His actions are to impose power over the woman to coerce her to sleep with him, in a way that is not free. That's exactly why he is making those actions in the first place. And he knows it.
Just because society might have changed in a way that makes the woman realise she was not consenting freely, does not mean that 10 or 20 years ago, a crime was not committed. If a man set up a particular situation which exerted influence over the woman, the intent of doing that and knowing how that could affect how a woman and might react and reduce her 'resistance' knowingly was a problem at the time of the event. It reduces his defence of saying that he had reasonable grounds to believe that the woman did consent freely and without constraint.
Lots of out of court settlements might be a bit of a clue that there is an issue and that people need stop behaving in a certain way too. Hollywood has had a LOT of these. Why was there no code of conduct like there exists in other professions? The studios were all aware of these cases. Its was a bit of a hint there was an issue.
Anyone who has a powerful position, might be wise not to offer incentives to people they fancy or to chase people they work with. Hence why a lecturer sleeping with a student or a doctor sleeping with a patient are things which are frowned upon because of the power imbalance.