Sexism on America’s Front Lines

Laura Rosenberger remembers telling a senior State Department official that she was going on a beach vacation. He responded by saying how much he’d enjoy thinking about her wearing a bikini. With another senior official, it was always a “head squirm,” she remembered, “so he couldn’t succeed in kissing me on the lips.”

For Mieke Eoyang, it was a committee chairman on Capitol Hill, cornering her at a reception to brag about his “sexual endurance.” Or a male colleague looking at porn on his office computer, right where she could see it.

Loren DeJonge Schulman thinks about the Special Forces men who would walk around her Defense Department office in their underwear and talk about making a calendar of sexy women. “I thought that was just a cost of doing business in the Pentagon,” she recalled, and complaints were not welcomed. “The few times we ever did, we were effectively laughed out of the room, like, ‘This is just what Special Forces guys are like. Come on. Get over it. You’re lucky that they haven’t done worse than that.’”

Listen to the podcast here.