Have you ever MET a Harvey Mudd woman? Most spent a good portion of their years prior to Mudd in strongly male dominated science activities like FIRST Robotics and engineering camps. Trust me… they can hold their own, and they all know how to talk to males. My own kid had issues in HS with another student grabbing tools out of her hand when she was working on the part of their robot that she was assigned to maintain (he was not). She solved it by putting a wrist strap on the tool, and keeping it in her pocket when she wasn’t using it. When she goes to the coffee shop near our house with a Physics GRE book, man after man (mostly older, engineering types) come up and hit on her. She is very adept at turning them away. She is also adept at letting men assume she is not very smart or skilled in her major area; she happens to be very pretty, and the going in assumption of men seems to be that she is incompetent. She lets them prattle on for a moment, then drops a few pithy, knowledgeable statements that stop them dead. They reassess, then treat her more respectfully. I have watched her do it, and it is pretty great.
Mudd women know they are going into male dominated professions, too. They aren’t ignorant of this. My own kid is applying to Physics grad schools. Typically the schools she is applying to have 10% female faculty, and 10-20% of the new women PhD students last year were women.
And sleeping your way to the top? It has never worked as far as I have seen. I work as a consultant and at a lot of companies over the years, so I have seen a lot. Most commonly when a woman sleeps with a guy at work, she ends up leaving and he stays. I saw women get let go after relationships at work ended, and just last week learned that a women laid off in the IT dept I work in was essentially let go last month because she was sleeping with one of the male married directors. It has really never been a winning strategy to get promoted. Maybe a strategy to marry the boss (I"ve seen that done a couple of times). But not to get promoted within the company.
I am a successful woman in IT, and guess what? I don’t wear perfume, only take yoga because it helps my strength and balance, and have no tolerance for sexual innuendo. Competence and professionalism are my calling cards, and they work. Yesterday one of those male technical managers told me I am “swell to work with”. I’ve earned credibility with the “tech boys” at my clients, and didn’t need to snuggle up or bat my eyes at them to them to do it.