[watersb]

Thanks for the pointer to self-licensing. I am sure there are many such mistakes at play here.

(Also, in the context of gender issues, I felt weird when you referred to two Ph.D. students as "girls", because they probably are not children. I have lots of cognitive bias to work on, and so I try to be careful about words like that.)

[JesperRavn]

I don't go out of my way to modify my language (although I can see how without extra context, like the fact that I met these people at a social event not a professional event, you might object in this particular case) because I don't believe that cultural attitudes to gender are the primary cause of this sort of harassment, or are a big problem in general.

On the contrary, I think that men whose behavior is harassing or otherwise immoral, are primarily responsible as individuals for their actions. This is closely related to my original point. I think that another bias is that people, especially men, who attain positions of power tend to be likable, either because that's what got them there, or because people tend to like powerful people. Therefore people make excuses for these men, blaming the culture in general for actions that are really the fault of the individual.