[Udo]

I don't know, it might be an American cultural convention though. Where I work I have a lot of Northern European and Asian colleages and the women here are by far worse than the men with forwarding explicit chain emails and questionable double entendres. Totally anecdotal, but it seems to me that soccer-mom characters are especially active in this area.

Never mind who is doing it, I find it increddibly annoying, but it's not harassment by any meaningful definition of the word.

My theory as to why it transcends annoyance and actually becomes a women's issue in America is probably because women there are expected to be asexual. So in that case it's only the men amongst themselves making these adolescent-type comments, and that in turn would make women uncomfortable because all of a sudden they have to deal with nasty group dynamics.

[klipt]

As I understand it, in Asia (and maybe Northern Europe too?) there is less of a stigma against women in science, so the gender ratio in these fields is more balanced.

In America though science is seen as 'nerdy' and most girls are discouraged from being nerds. So women in science are a minority who constantly feel defensive and overwhelmed by attention from men.

[Udo]

You're probably right. I remember when I was in med school in Germany, the gender ratio was something like 70-30 women, and in the hard sciences seminars it was also at least equal.