At the workplace, many women feel uncomfortable with the ``locker room atmosphere'', which includes pictures of nude or partially nude women on posters or computer screens and the telling of dirty jokes. Unlike the sexist remarks described above, however, there is disagreement among women on how inappropriate these actions are, with a significant number of women not personally offended by the behavior (although some of these women oppose it on the grounds that it upsets other women). This point is illustrated by the different reactions in the following examples:
One female computer science student explained one reason that some women are offended by sexual humor while others do not understand what the fuss is about:
I have noticed that how offended I am by [gender-related humor] depends very strongly about how comfortable it is to be female and in the present environment.When I first entered grad school in the CS [X] group at [Y], there were some women graduate students, but only a couple. A secretary deliberately placed me, when I arrived, sharing a desk with a male graduate student who was at that time desperately trying to find a woman (she was trying to be nice) --- a professor had a `funny' newspaper article about [a sexual topic] posted outside his door. Don't get me wrong, I found nearly no-one among the faculty and graduate students who was anti-women or took me or my work or my concerns any less seriously than any other first-year student. Still, the graduate students were 90 percent men, and they talked all the time about how hard it was to meet `available' women, and as a first year student trying to establish myself within their community, I found the `locker room' atmosphere oppressive and daunting. If someone had sent around [a sexist joke through email] that year, I think I would have hit the roof. In a world where I was struggling to find my place, it would have just helped to undermine it.
Today the graduate student population in CS [X] has quite a few more women, and is much more comfortable. Instead of the ``guys'' in school here, it's the `people' in school here.... In my current environment I might have easily [passed along the joke] to my [male] office-mate.
Some computer science graduate students and staff at Carnegie Mellon were sufficiently disturbed by the display of nude pictures as backgrounds on computer terminals that they got together and tried to change the situation by publicly appealing to the community. [CMU 1989] is a fascinating report describing their appeal and the friendly and hostile reactions. Their appeal included the following passage:
When a woman sees such a display on your workstation, is she likely to believe that you take her seriously as a fully contributing member of the department? Rather, she may feel that you could be a source of sexual harassment, and feel hostile towards you, or nervous about working with you. If so, that is a loss for you, for her, and for all of us. Among the visitors to the department, some of whom are prospective students, staff, or faculty, there are surely some who will view us as unprofessional if they see these displays, and this hurts us all, too. Conversely, an environment more hospitable to women --- specifically, one in which relations between women and men are less strained --- is of clear benefit to men as well.The appeal closed by making clear that they were not advocating banning such displays but were requesting that people voluntarily remove them out of sensitivity to others. Responses about the appropriateness of the displays and of the appeal were mixed and are categorized in the report. Negative reactions included the position that the writers were advocating censorship ``like the Nazis or the Ayatollah Khomeini,'' that people should not be asked to change their behavior merely because of what others might think, and that a public appeal was inappropriate but instead should have been made by individuals to individuals. Of those agreeing, the majority of responses said that the request was reasonable and not an attempt at censorship, that it prevented people from unintentionally giving offense, and that it was effective at raising consciousness. In response to the criticism that individuals should complain personally, several women wrote that ``[w]omen asking for changes in behavior individually are exposed to ridicule and abuse'' [CMU 1989, page 4,]. This point was echoed by a woman quoted in a paper about the ``Garden'', a laboratory in the MIT Media Lab:For some people, displays of naked women on workstations, or elsewhere in offices, remind them of the forces in our culture that view women as sexual playthings, not as men's peers. For others, such reactions do not occur. People who are offended will interpret such displays as derogatory, even if that is not your intent. We therefore ask you to refrain from using them out of respect for those who are offended, even if you believe the offended people are just overly sensitive [CMU 1989, page 2,].
[W]hen comments are made about the offensive nature of the music or movies, they are often ignored, or belittled, or are chortled at. Ironically, once you are labeled a feminist in the Garden, your comments are taken less seriously, because you are considered radical and your judgment less fair [Tidwell 1990, page 14,].Both the Carnegie-Mellon and Garden papers conclude that the attempts at changing people's behavior were somewhat, but not highly, successful.