Have you read your security bulletins lately? If you have, you know that first term there was a sexual assault outside Bridge on an undergrad woman who'd just handed in her physics homework. Just a few weeks ago there was an assault on a woman on the fifth floor of Millikan. And if you have much experience with the way things work in real life, you know that not nearly all assaults are ever reported.

If youve spent more than a week on campus, you know what glomming is. If youve walked through most of the houses, you know that theres porn and crude sex jokes off the Internet up on many hallway walls. But its a tech school, and its mostly male, and boys will be boys, and people here dont all have a lot of social skills, and its not like people actually are trying to be hurtful, or actually believe the stuff they put on their walls... So whats the big deal? Putting up pictures of breasts and attacking women are totally different, right?

Actually, both contribute to an atmosphere that makes many women uncomfortable. Even if those who put up porn have no evil intent themselves, the fact that it is so widely displayed can give the impression that disrespect toward women is accepted. "Dont take it so seriously" is often the response that men give when people complain about small issues like offensive wall decorations. But they are serious. Glomming makes everyday life difficult. Harassment by TAs and professors makes academic life difficult. Pornography in public places gives women the sneaking suspicion, around all the time, that theyre not respected. And joking attacks on women hit a little too close to home to be comfortable.

In addition, if such small issues are trivialized, what will happen when larger issues are brought forth? Many times the same dismissive attitude is put forward. In the recent past, when one woman was being glommed, she was told by a person in authority that she was flirting with her harassers and should just accept it. This attitude gives rise to a culture of inaction among the undergraduate female population, as appeal to authority leads nowhere.

The problem goes beyond just glomming. A woman who had been approached sexually by a TA decided to make an informal report about the incident. No one had filed an official complaint before, but when discussing the situation with some friends she found that this TA had made advances towards many undergraduates, both in his section and outside of it. Even though the name of this TA was becoming common knowledge among the women of Caltech, and the administration had been apprised of the situation, the TA was not removed. However, most of us dont need to read anecdotes to see that sexual harassment is a problem on campus.

Many men at Tech dont realize that they can be part of the problem of a hostile climate on campus, even without knowing it, and sometimes get defensive when this is pointed out. It is not true that men here are too smart to be sexist--sexism is a cultural problem, a problem that exists for everyone raised in the society we live in. To make things more difficult, women at Tech are often afraid or reluctant to speak up about things that make them uncomfortable, or even events that are unlawful, because this is such a small campus, and nothing can truly be done anonymously. The ratio of men to women and the resulting fragmentation of the female student body doesnt help women often dont have a support system that would help them speak up and still keep a social life.

The administration does have a clear policy on sexual harassment. However, it does not seem to be very effective at preventing problems. Some women have found that pursuing the process of complaining formally is too stressful or too disruptive to be worth the results. The difficulty of staying anonymous on this campus is also a big deterrent to bringing formal complaints. And sometimes the Caltech administration seems more bent on protecting its image than protecting its students. After all, two years ago when there was an accident and a student got severely burned the administration went to extreme measures to avoid having such accidents again. However, after the first assault this year none of the freshman were told of the incident. Many of us only know of the second event because some RAs thought people might be interested. Why is this sort of important information not disseminated to all students immediately?

Many people realize that theres a problem on this campus, and no one wants the climate at Caltech to be bad for women. What can be done? A few things to do are think about how your actions and words affect others in the community, try to see things from others point of view, and try to make a point of speaking out when you see things that you feel are wrong. In addition to this, the Caltech Progressive Coalition is putting up an anonymous form on its website (http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~progresss), asking people who have experienced problems within the Caltech community to describe them. Wed like to collect preliminary data on the issue, with the aim of finding out exactly what the problems at Caltech are. Then we can begin to work to fix them.

Here are several websites related to the problems women face in academia today:

• http://www.its.caltech.edu/~wcenter/
• http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf99338/start.htm
• http://scicentral.com/W-02womi.html