Susan B. Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist. Her new podcast, The Global Politico, comes out Mondays. Subscribe here. Follow her on Twitter @sbg1.

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Laura Rosenberger remembers telling a senior State Department official that she was going on a beach vacation. He responded by saying how much he’d enjoy thinking about her wearing a bikini. With another senior official, it was always a “head squirm,” she remembered, “so he couldn’t succeed in kissing me on the lips.”


For Mieke Eoyang, it was a committee chairman on Capitol Hill, cornering her at a reception to brag about his “sexual endurance.” Or a male colleague looking at porn on his office computer, right where she could see it.

Loren DeJonge Schulman thinks about the Special Forces men who would walk around her Defense Department office in their underwear and talk about making a calendar of sexy women. “I thought that was just a cost of doing business in the Pentagon,” she recalled, and complaints were not welcomed. “The few times we ever did, we were effectively laughed out of the room, like, ‘This is just what Special Forces guys are like. Come on. Get over it. You’re lucky that they haven’t done worse than that.’”

All three are accomplished national security hands in Washington, and until now none has spoken publicly about these experiences—and the broader culture of everyday sexual harassment and sexism that is still rampant in the national security world. They chose to do so now amid a rising national clamor over sexual harassment, for a special episode of The Global Politico podcast dedicated to the specific challenges faced by the very outnumbered women who help shape America’s place in the world but still routinely confront offenses that would stir outrage elsewhere.

Women in national security face one of most male-dominated professions there is, which is why we brought together Rosenberger, Shulman, Eoyang and several other veterans of high-ranking jobs in the White House National Security Council, Pentagon, State Department and Capitol Hill last week for a frank, thoughtful and at times deeply disturbing conversation.

Each has played a role in many of the key foreign policy debates of the past decade, from helping steer U.S. policy toward Russia or North Korea to overseeing the Pentagon’s strategic plans. These women have got the nuclear triad down cold, and they have taught me a lot over the years about what really goes on in the NSC or the Pentagon when a crisis hits. All of them said they see themselves as wonky Washington experts first, not feminist activists, but the explosion of sexual harassment stories in recent weeks has led each to think again about the unique problems of a national security world that remains very much in denial about how much sex—and sexism—still shapes the Washington workplace.

Many described a sense of guilt as they have wracked their brains, excavating long-buried memories amid the new wave of revelations about harassment by Hollywood celebrities, political reporters, editors and even the British defense minister: Had they inadvertently made it worse for other women by not reporting misbehavior? Had they rationalized and explained away bad things that happened to them because there was no recourse?

“My instinct was always just to ignore it and push it to some recess of my brain,” said Rosenberger, who worked at the State Department for a decade, then at the NSC during President Barack Obama’s presidency before becoming a foreign policy adviser to the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.

“For the longest time, I have more or less ignored a lot of those kind of behaviors,” said Schulman, who started in the Pentagon a decade ago as special assistant to Defense Secretary Bob Gates and served in several roles at the Pentagon and NSC, including as senior adviser to Obama’s last national security adviser, Susan Rice. Now, she said, “as they come back to me, I think, ‘Wow. Why on Earth did I not say anything at that point in time to somebody who would actually have the authority and power to do something about it? And how many women that were my peers where something worse did happen to them? … That has been a kind of terrifying moment for me. Like, what did I accidentally walk by and what did I not report that I could have possibly prevented something?”

In general, I found the conversation to be a sort of alternate-reality version of the workplace, and one that many men in Washington might be surprised to hear. Many described a world where, at the early stages of their careers, they were just desperately hoping to avoid any overtly predatory male behavior by colleagues—even to the extent of changing how they dress and how they wear their hair. One woman recently told me that a senior male official in the White House commented so lewdly when she wore boots, she never wore them to the office again.

Rosenberger called it, in effect, the Pantsuit Rule. “We ‘androgynize’ ourselves,” she said, as women also take the responsibility on themselves. “It’s like, ‘Well, did he think that was OK because of what I was wearing?’ It’s all this continuum of somehow did we do something, in fact, to invite this behavior … This idea that women are somehow sexualized bodies first and people second is kind of underpinning all of this, whether it’s sexism, whether it’s harassment, whether it’s abuse.”

When she first came to Washington to teach at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Evelyn Farkas said, “I dressed in olive, beige, black, gray. I put my hair up.”

Farkas, a Ph.D. who was most recently deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, spent the early part of her career overseas. She told the group she will never forget one moment when a colleague crossed the line. “When I was sexually harassed, it was literally somebody grabbing my hand, so it wasn’t so overt as if grabbing another part of my body. But the jarring sensation … like this person wanted to take a professional engagement, encounter, a dinner, and all of a sudden make it into something else. I was 21 years old and I wasn’t expecting it. It was so shocking that I never forgot it to this day. And that person is still alive. I know where they are. I never forgot it.”

What is it about the national security world that makes this sort of thing so common?

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Kathleen Hicks, who worked in the Pentagon for nearly two decades, ending up as the principal deputy undersecretary for policy, said it’s partly because women are still so underrepresented. “Many women in these circumstances, in this community, particularly in a place like the Pentagon, they are the only women often in their entire workspace,” Hicks said. She often fielded complaints from women both about a hostile work environment and allegations of misbehavior that included sexual assault.

“Things progressed pretty much as you would expect, which is an all-male workplace with a woman who makes a complaint,” said Hicks, who is now senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “A lot of disbelief that that’s going on, a lot of explaining away the circumstances.”

Given that history, all the women said they welcomed the newly public scrutiny of male misbehavior in professional settings—and hoped it would lead to a new level of accountability. But throughout our conversation many of the women said they have very mixed feelings about the national raised consciousness about sexual harassment. Professional women, they worried, could even find themselves losing out once again as a result.

This is especially a concern in Washington, a city of appearances and signal-sending, and one where women are already so marginalized and excluded from inner circles of power, especially in the realm of national security. What if the Pence Rule—Vice President Mike Pence’s reported policy of never meeting alone with a female staffer—is now applied more broadly?

“I worry about how talking about the harassment might exacerbate the sexism,” Farkas said. She and Eoyang both worked on Capitol Hill, and they both recalled instances in which male members of Congress were reluctant to travel internationally with a professional staff member who was female—and happened to be the committee’s main expert. In the world of national security, advancement requires representing the U.S. internationally; no trips equal professional disaster. “We want to be in the room,” Farkas said. “We want to be on the trips.”

Besides, the women said, such a debate only reinforces how women are still perceived as sex objects, even in professional settings. And just talking about the national wave of scandals can reinforce how outnumbered and uncomfortable women feel.

“You just feel so creeped out by it,” Eoyang said. “Like, what do you do when someone’s talking to you about the news, but it also feels like an HR violation?”

Then again, the problem—at least until recently—has tended to be not too much scrutiny but far too little.

Julianne Smith, a Pentagon veteran who served as deputy national security adviser for Vice President Joe Biden, is today director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. When she and Schulman wanted to start a program to address women in national security, she found male colleagues she respected telling her, in effect, don’t “worry your pretty little head about it.” Smith had assumed such sexism was a generational problem, but no longer. “My goodness, we have a lot of work to do,” she told the group. “There are too many men out there in their 30s and 40s that believe that this is a wrap,” and sexism will somehow die out along with the dinosaurs of a different era. No chance of that, said Smith. “For me it’s just been this shell shock” listening to what male colleagues have had to say.

Still, even several of the women in the group said they feared they too had fallen into the trap of prematurely declaring victory when it came to their acceptance in the national security world.

“When people ask me what’s being a woman in national security like, my answer is often, ‘The remarkable thing is that it’s unremarkable,’” Rosenberger said. “I think I kind of sold myself this story, and part of me really does believe that, except I’ve forgotten or compartmentalized or just had to plow through all of the crap that no man ever has to deal with in order to just do your job.”

When she said that, five other heads around the table nodded.