I mean an expereince in person, not online.

38 comments

  1. My boss telling me that he has several applications from women but wants to wait for a man because men are tougher and won’t get pregnant.

    There were more instances, but this one was the most black and white and in-your-face incident.

  2. I manage a law office and one of my paralegals has been doing this job for a lot longer than me. I’ve noticed a lot of our clients specifically ask to speak with me despite my coworker actually being the one assigned to their cases. I would say that I have better client relation skills than her, but I think a lot of it is that they want to talk to the “man in charge.”

  3. I was becoming fast friends with a new classmate and we’re walking down the street, see a woman driver do something badly. He just goes “that’s why women shouldn’t be allowed to have licenses”. I thought he was joking but he was dead serious…

  4. Honestly just higher ups at my job directing questions at me when my manager who was a woman was more knowledgeable and should’ve been the person they were talking to.

  6. In 2012, I (m) was up for a promotion against a woman who’d been there 6 months, who I’d trained. Mind you, this was on a trading floor for a bank, and our current job was sitting cheek by jowl with the traders. I’d been there for 2 years. I knew everybody on the trading floor, they all liked me, we all got along because I was good at my job, and they agreed to go to bat for me to help me break into the business. The director of the trading floor went, “Yeah, we’ll absolutely do everything we can to get you here. You’re not a shit-head, you already know how the business works, so all we’d need to do is train you how to trade.”

    Due to hiring policies at the time, because they wanted diversity on the trading floor, and there was a big push to move women into higher roles with the bank, guess who got the job? And I know this for a fact, because I was told it as part of my exit interview. Management went over the director’s head and he was told to hire her, regardless of what he wanted.

  7. The horror stories from women who’s word I trust about being sexually harrassed or outright assaulted at work. Seems to be almost a universal experience for girls

  8. When my 6th grade science teacher punished boys in the class collectively but punished girls individually.

  9. I worked with the court systems in Ottawa around 2013-2016 and was asked to go to a week long domestic violence workshop with other court staff. I was the only male in the workshop and was absolutely floored by what I was hearing. I had never met misandrists before and honestly didn’t even know if they existed until I did this course. The highlight for me was when one of the women in the audience asked (after going over all the women’s shelters and resources they had available to them) “but what happens when it’s the man that’s the victim, what resources does he have available” and the instructor said “… ahhhh, prison?” And the room erupted in laughter so hard they had to wait for the room to die down before continuing with that there isn’t any.

    Edit: during an exercise one of the social workers told me she liked the workshop because it was pretty fair and that she found her feminist course in university to be “a little to extreme” which blew my socks off because I thought it was already extreme.

  10. idk if this is sexism, but this one time my gf’s family ordered catering and they got the wrong items delivered. I was the only guy there and they gave me the phone to yell at the place they got the catering from.

    I just talked to the guy plainly and asked them if they could send us the right order, which they did without issue.

    To this day I don’t know why my gf’s cousin thought it was appropriate for me to yell at someone who didn’t wrong me particularly.

  11. I worked at a STEM based summer camp, teaching lots of woodworking, animation, and engineering skills to middle schoolers. I worked full time as a teacher and was just seasonal help. The camp was in a school building but I was the only man working on the first floor. The woman who was in charge was about the same age as me, but had a background in carpentry. She was way handier than me and was actually a full time employee of the program. If you took 5min to observe you’d see she had a way better grasp on everything going on, but I would say 80% of parents, male or female, came directly to me to ask questions about the camp or their kid.

  12. When I, who had been working with toddlers for a decade in the church I grew up in, was one day told that they’d changed the rules and only women can take kids to the bathroom. Because for a man it’s too tempting to stand outside the door and make sure nothing goes wrong, but obviously a woman would never do anything inappropriate.

  13. Against Women:
    My first job out of school, I was in a new grad program with like 30+ other new grads. One of the girls had an interview with a prospective manager, which was solely of said manager simply showing her pictures of his kids for an hour.

    Against Men: One of my high school English teachers had a pretty unfavorable view of boys, and would tend to mark boys down more and cut us a lot less slack than girls in her class.

  14. I was always aware of it as a thing that happened but what really stuck with me and made me conscious of it in the world around me was walking home from high school with a group of my friends, all of whom were girls, and being there when a bunch of adult men catcalled them. Watching them just shrink up and get quiet and suddenly be in fight or flight mode really left an impression on me.

  15. One that sticks out is back in highschool seeing all the girls take home education, cooking, and all the guys taking more “masculine” courses like autobody or woodshop, and the people who stepped out of the mold were looked at a little funny

  16. I have a sister and it was always “Don’t hit girls, I don’t care how much she provoked you or hit you first.” while at the same time “Oh she stabbed you? Well she says you provoked her, you’re grounded.” I even got in trouble once because she hurt her foot stomping on my toys.

  17. When an ex-friend said to me, “Men are better than women at programing. If women were good at it, I’d see more in the workplace. So when looking through resumes, I only interview men.”

    Nice self-fulfilling prophecy you got going there, buddy. That was actually the last time I spoke with him.

  18. On a smaller scale but when I worked at Best Buy in the media department, my supervisor knew her shit and if she didn’t she’d let them know and figure it out if she could, same thing I did. When she helped customers I lost count on how many times she accurately answered their question only for them to turn around and ask me the very same question to which I would answer “exactly everything she just said” and point to her.

    Also as a math major in college, I always studied with this one girl in my upper level classes that was an engineering major, she was smart as hell and I saw she was acing every test so I asked her for help. One of the other guys in my class would see us studying and talking a lot outside of class and he was “wow that’s so nice of you to help her out in this class”. I was like dude shes probably the smartest one in this class, she’s helping me out.

  19. My experience is of a more subtle sort than most of the other examples here, but something opened my eyes to a broader set of gender stereotypes that women and girls are subjected to from a very young age:

    I am a father. One evening I was reading bed-time stories to my daughters, and I was reading a book called “Bed time stories, for young princesses” (or something like that) that someone had gifted them. EVERY SINGLE story in the book had the same template: Girl or princess is sad. Girl shows very little agency or depth of character. Girl meets prince that makes her life complete. The end. The book ended up in the trash that same evening.

    Even though this was a particularly grotesque example of how girls are often described as two-dimensional and dependent on her prince for her happy ending, it opened my eyes to how girls are often presented in fiction and made me actively seek out better female role models for my daughters.

    I want my daughters to aspire to inventors, entrepreneur, female leaders, explorers, artists, scientists – and not be told that they exist just to be props in the stories of men.

  20. I worked in an auto-parts store as a student job. Didn’t know a thing about cars or parts, but I was paid minimum wage. I worked with a women who was a car maniac finishing her mecanics degree. Old guys would completely ignore her and ask me overly complicated questions that I had no answer for just for her to pass by and help me. They would leave and thank me while completely ignoring her. The first time was a bit odd and I thought we hit a special kind of client. The 10th time was just sad. We would place bets on older guys coming in trying to guess if they had that vibe.

  21. Although lower ranking in the military, I was often around high ranking individuals due to some high visibility jobs I was assigned.

    Anytime high ranking women were out of earshot, the men would talk poorly about them. Rolling their eyes and discussing their leadership capabilities, general “women” insults in, I was floored. Completely unprofessional. And I was far too low ranking to say a word.

    In my experience, I had 2 commanders who were women, and they both earned every bit of that position and rank. They had to work even harder to get there with such opinions among their peers. Both took good care of me and fellow lower enlisted. They were better than many I dealt with.

  22. **First time I noticed it:** I was in the Army:

    * Misogyny
    * Pregnant females were treated poorly by male soldiers.
    * Females were taken less seriously, easily talked over.
    * Males were normally assumed to have TIG (Time in Grade) seniority
    * Good ‘ol boy club
    * Misandry
    * Males were normally chosen to do labor duties (police call, motor pool, Connex cleanout, post beautification).
    * Males were shamed for seeking help for physical/mental issues.
    * non-judicial punishment was always more harsh for male soldiers (labor, extra duty, etc).
    * Females had easier/lax standards, especially for weight and the PT test. 19 pushups as a female was worth more than 40 as a male. Females less hounded about weight.

    **First time I truly experienced it:** I was in a Marshall’s with my then 1 year old son. I kept running into the same group of women in the store that gave me the stink eye. They glared at me. Eventually a manager and a security officer came over to check on me. Apparently the women assumed that I was trying to kidnap my son…because a man shouldn’t be alone with a child. It made me feel lots of feelings: anger, despair, violation. I was just a dad out looking for new decorations for his son’s room and next thing you know I’m being harassed and accused of a crime.

  23. I worked for a major software manufacturer. One day, a friend put in a suggestion to improve a feature we, as a team, were working on. Nothing was said of it. She texted me, asking me to suggest the same thing again. I did so, which prompted an immediate discussion and prompted a decision to expand the timeline to add the idea. Guess who was the male and who was the female? /s [Edit added the sarcasm tag to be clear]

  24. I work at multinational healthcare organization that spans several states and has locations in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

    By our own accounting, 75% of of over 100k employees are female, not to mention our CEO and 2 out of our 3 regional IT Vice Presidents. We are actively recruiting more women into our IT programs, which if successful, will make us at least an 80% women employed company.

    And our HR department will still send out emails that talk about how men can do better by not “mansplaining” or “he-peating” and we need to make sure that women have a safe space to have their ideas heard.

    and no one seems to notice the slightest hint of irony.

  25. A quick, recent one I remember when visiting my American bf. I place my card on the table to pay at a restaurant, server takes it without seeing I put it down, server then hands it back to my bf. He proceeds to hand it back to me. Every. Single. Time.

  26. We had just bought our house this past June, and we’ve had several of these security system representatives show up and try to sell their product to us. One day I pulled up after picking my son up from the babysitters, and there was another representative in our driveway. She was about to leave until I showed up. She quickly got out of the car and was trying to get me to pay for their product/service. I told her I would talk the whole service/product over with my wife. She then looked in the back of my car and saw my son. She then said “Aw he’s cute, I guess Dad’s babysitting until Mom gets home.”

    Instantly, I didn’t want to purchase anything from her anymore. Like, no, I’m a father. I’m parenting my kid, not babysitting him. I remember reading stories of this happening to other guys, and now that it’s happened to me, I can understand the frustration.

  27. When people find out I (F31) am the manager of my establishment and go “oh YOURE the manager? Wowwww” the wow gets me every time, but I do look younger than I am admittedly

  28. When I was in the corporate world (about 20 years) I worked for a company that had a great mix of genders, races, sexual orientations and religions at every level. There was no active policy to hire from specific groups, it just kind of happened that way. I always thought that was the norm until we did some exchange visits to other companies in the area. A lot of the other companies had a lot less mixing of those groups the higher up you went.

    I left the corporate world to become a freelancer and that meant attending lots of networking events. The men to women ratio at these events was approaching 10:1 and it wasn’t hard to find out why. Women were constantly being hit on and it wasn’t unusual to find small groups of men rating the women. It was only a small group of men doing this but it was easy to see why women were put off and set up their own networking groups.

  29. Idk if this is more sexism or abuse of power.

    But I used to work at a company, and one day, one of the big bosses (male) and the manager under him(female) both didn’t come in. Word quickly got around that they got caught fucking in the office, and were suspended, pending other discipline. It seemed plausible, cause once the woman came back, she had been demoted, her demeanor was a lot more quiet, and kinda embarassed-like, kinda like “I know that y’all know what happened”.

    But anyway. She got demoted, and was essentially ostracized, and I noticed the man was suspended for less time, maintained his position, and got to move around the company as if nothing happened, and he was “The man”. Shit pissed me off to witness.

  30. My grandma will *always* call out “women drivers”, and use “woman driver” as an excuse when she makes poor decisions on the road

  31. I had a lesbian coworker once tell me she’d never vote for a woman president cause women were too emotional, especially during their periods. I didn’t quite know what to make of that one

  32. last year of college: the college had a lopsided ratio of maybe 4:1 men to women, so they decided to up the enrollment by admitting a lot more women regardless of merit. the graduating senior women were pissed, as that devalued their degree that they earned honestly.

    so, against women, i would suppose

  33. A lady I work with made a lot of good points in meetings and was consistently ignored. We talked about it a bit, and she asked if I would listen for her points then bring them up myself if they were glossed over or ignored.

    So, next meeting, and quite a few meetings after, when she would bring something up and get ignored, I would shortly after say something like “as [lady] said, it would probably be helpful if…” and immediately the point got traction. I always refered back to her by name in some way to make sure she was (hopefully) getting credit for the idea.

    We made a game of it and mostly laughed about it, and her ideas did get more traction and she did get credit for them. But it was ridiculous that I essentially had to speak for her for a very long time to get her ideas noticed. Also, for extra fun, although our duties were the same, she technically outranked me… she was a senior in the role, and I was not.

    Also worth noting, I’m typically quiet, shy, and easily ignored. She is loud, boisterous, and commonly not ignored outside work. But at work, despite me being quiet and her assertive, it was the opposite. It was so incredibly weird and surreal to notice it once she pointed it out and I started paying attention.

  35. Seeing the “Husband can’t handle being alone with the kids” trope in movies, shows, and commercials.

  36. When my wife and I go places, I usually hang back a bit to let her do the talking for us because I’m deaf. It amazes me how many men (and some women) will look right past my wife and talk directly to me, even after I tell them I’m deaf, please talk to her

  37. When I was 14 , My girlfriends mother, got me very drunk on alcopops and “took advantage of me” sexually ,while my gf was upstairs sleeping.

    The reactions from the people I told ranged from “lucky boy” to “you probably started it”.I was actively laughed at by the police , who advised me not to take it further.

    I experienced a similar thing later in life when trying to get help with my physically abusive ex wife – she would regularly hit me with/throw household objects at me – including her at one point stabbing me and at another knocking out one of my teeth after hitting me with an object when I was sleeping.

    I’m a big dude and could have easily defended myself – but she would threaten to call the police and blame everything on me if I ever did.

    Every attempt I made to get help with the situation was met with ether disbelief and/or accusations that it was my fault or that I must be the aggressor , as I was/am much bigger than her and went to the gym a lot.

    I got away from her in the end , with help from family – But the sheer lack of support for men in these situations and even accusations that they are are the one at fault , is astounding.

    (she is currently jobless and lives with her parents at 35 – Which gives me a small measure of satisfaction, I wont lie.)

  38. My best friend is a girl. Some people assume we’re dating. I had this conversation with a guy I met at a gym. He said he noticed that I was hanging out with her a lot and said something about us having sex. I said she doesn’t like me “that way,” and I accepted that, and we’re fine just being friends. He laughed and said, “Women like a man who won’t take no for an answer. Just go right onto her.” He was dead serious. He suggested I rape my friend. That’s when I realized he’s the type of man women are afraid of. They do exist, and they are scary as hell

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