Not Just in the Locker Room

So, the male candidate for president is caught on tape making sexually vile comments about women. He dismisses the episode as "locker room talk". This response implies that this is the sort of language that you can expect when a couple of guys are comfortably talking to each other while wearing nothing but towels around their waists after a friendly football game.
Well, I don't know if that is what happens in a locker room. I've never been in one. But I do know one thing, I have heard this sort of talk in other places: at work, at a restaurant, at a conference... Just a few examples:

• Stepping down from the podium after I gave an excellent presentation for an NIH site visit, a colleague said to me: "You were so good Luz, you could have had any man in the room".
• At a restaurant with a group of colleagues, most of them male, the conversation got so crude that the only other woman there and I left without finishing our meals.
• Overhearing a comment by a male colleague referring to a female researcher: "Those legs would look better wrapped around a pole than in the lab".
• A male friend told me that a professor who I admired had asked him if: "he had tapped that", referring to me.
• A female student came to me crying because her supervisor had said that: "she was too pretty to be taken seriously as a scientist".

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