Women in our culture, in case you haven’t noticed, are routinely reduced to purely sexual beings. We are routinely treated as if our brains, our talent, our imagination, our inspiration, are useless and trivial unless they’re applied to sex and sexual attractiveness. And the sexist treatment of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is legendary, and very thoroughly documented.
So doing an interview about your team’s big science achievement while wearing a shirt with scantily-clad pinup girls does not say, “Sex is awesome!” It says, “Women are for sex.” It says, “Every woman working on this project, every woman working on a similar project, every woman working in STEM, every woman aspiring to work in STEM — this is what I think of you. Every girl dreaming of working in STEM someday — this is what I’ll think of you when you’re grown up. Tits and ass. That’s what you are to me.” And every one of Taylor’s colleagues and bosses, every person on the TV crew, who saw that shirt and didn’t say, “Dude, not cool” — every one of them said to all those women and girls, “Yeah, this is the norm in this field. If you decide to work here, this is what you’ll be running into — day after day after day after day after day. Get used to it, or get the hell out.”