Gender minorities in male-dominated workplaces hear sexualized comments repeatedly, leading them to feel reduced to sexual objects and question their safety. These remarks are often dismissed as exceptions rather than recognized as a pattern that perpetuates a hostile environment.
If you're a person of a gender that is a minority in the room, if you're 1 out of 10 in the room, the times you hear people talk about you or people who identify to look like you, it's sexualized. Do you start to think, when I walk into the workplace, this is all I'm seen as here, a sexual object? And then might you start to think, am I safe here? Is that a legitimate concern if this is your normal conversation around you potentially? We're able to call this out because we think it's the exception. The problem is if we're not speaking out to the exception, that's where we got trouble.
