Often, men make sexist or sexual remarks in attempts at humor. As the following examples show, this happens in classrooms, computer magazines, and at conferences. In most of these cases, the speaker probably means no harm. However, the behavior makes some women feel uncomfortable. In order to highlight the effect such statements have on women, their reactions have been included where available.
[A professor] in the introductory part of a guest lecture on robotics to the graduate core AI class: (approximate quote) `Pretty soon we'll have robots that are sophisticated enough to wander around in shopping malls and pick up girls.' I didn't listen to the rest of the lecture, so I don't know what else he had to say.
When I was in graduate school, the professor in automata theory introduced the topic of decomposition by saying: `Machines are a lot like women --- many forms for the same function (wink wink).' As the only woman in the class, you can imagine that I felt terrific. And all of a sudden the guys sitting next to me sort of tensed up --- instead of a fellow student, his remark had made them see me as something else, something kinda dirty.
[A]t a conference in France, a male speaker (French), who was speaking about the importance of testing, showed an overhead slide of a naked woman with a caption of the sort --- `Would you buy this product without testing it first?' There were only 2 or 3 women in the audience (of about 150), but I had fleeting feelings of having accidentally walked into a stag party and wondering if he had either not expected any women to be there or had discounted the importance of directing his remarks to the women in the audience.