A viral Reddit thread asking women to share the strangest things male coworkers have said to them has struck a nerve. The post has pulled in nearly 3,000 upvotes and more than 1,400 comments on r/AskReddit since it was posted 19 hours ago.
The original poster kept the question open-ended, and the responses that followed ranged from workplace theories to outright harassment.
One of the most-upvoted replies, posted 18 hours ago and sitting at over 9,000 upvotes, described a coworker who believed he could smell when women in the office were menstruating and avoided them during what he assumed was "that week" each month.
The commenter said she wasn't even on her period, thanks to birth control, but he kept tracking her and every other woman in the office anyway. "He was never rude or really discriminatory exactly," she added in a follow-up reply, "he just had this odd belief about how women worked and no one ever managed to talk him out of it."
Another widely shared comment, posted 15 hours ago under the username Aggressive_Moose3189, described a coworker who asked, "how tall are you?" before following up with, "I just wanted to see if you'd fit in my trunk hahaha."
A third commenter recalled a one-liner from a coworker: "Are you wearing a bra today?"
Elsewhere in the thread, one woman, in a comment said a colleague's son commented on her pregnancy by warning her that his own wife was "never tight again" after childbirth, telling her to "enjoy it while you can." She said she didn't report it, partly because she knew he'd face no real consequences and partly because she was already counting down the days to her maternity leave.
Another user said a board member told her, while she was preparing for maternity leave, that she could use him to "practice breastfeeding" if she needed to.
A separate commenter said she was written up by HR for "insufficient outrage" after a male coworker made a blonde joke at her expense — she hadn't reacted, but a colleague in a different part of the building reported the moment on her behalf, and management determined her response wasn't upset enough.
A fourth story, shared 15 hours ago, described an internship supervisor who casually told interns the best way to learn a foreign language was to marry a "long-haired dictionary," openly questioned whether a 40-year-old coworker was too old to adopt a child, and gave real estate advice based on the racial makeup of neighborhoods.
According to the commenter, the interns eventually escalated the pattern of behavior to HR, and the situation reportedly ended in his forced retirement.
