My career-related content is now open-source on GitHub.
Mansplaining, like menstruating, is a regular, unpleasant and even infuriating aspect of b...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Its not a gender thing though... Everyone can be arrogant, condescending, or a know-it-all. Women too. What matters is to what extent you're willing to betray yourself, to be part of "the club". Maybe that's generally easier for most men, but I don't have enough examples (yet) of majority women teams in tech, to draw any conclusions. If we treat everyone as individuals i'm sure everything will be alright. Sadly that goes against human nature I guess 😕
Btw, a lot of times if someone is "mansplaining" something, they don't mean to be condescending at all and they genuinely don't realize you already know what they're explaining... 9/10 if you reply with: "yes, I know that", they'll just move on to explain the next thing.
Did you just mansplain mansplaining?
I'm not a woman, but he was good illustration of my paragraph The strength of mansplaining.
For those who wonder:
Nobody claims that there is a binary distribution of being condescending. Because those making the claim are not stupid.
The claim is that the distribution is bimodal.
Which means it happens much more often from men to women.
That doesn't mean there is no other factor of people being condescending.
That means it would be quite dumb to not see that gender is an obviously important factor, just as it is for height.
Correlation is not the same as causation though. For example, you don't want to start drawing conclusions based on prevalence of a particular race of people in jail. You want to look at the actual cause why someone is in jail, or why someone feels the need to be condescending. If you look at the setting in which mansplaining or condescending behavior usually happens, that tells us a lot about the reasons behind it: a means to assert dominance, to improve ones perceived position within a group. Take the group away and some people's personalities will change 180 degrees. Knowing the cause also brings us closer to a solution (if there is one), instead of creating a larger divide between sexes.
The cause is that boys are educated to dismiss what girls say and they don't even notice it
Being tall is not a gender thing either.
I have a male friend who is 1m60.
And when I lived in Berlin, I have seen 1m80 women.
(That's 5"2 and 5"11 respectively in freedom units).
Tallness is mostly an inherited factor though. Behavior is mostly taught, so it depends a lot on what someone experiences in their life.
I think the important question then is how would I know if I'm guilty of mansplaining, or not explaining enough?
I've been in a situation before where I've suggested an alternative way to approach a situation. My colleague nods and says yes. I notice a while later that they continued to do things as before. When I asked (gently) about it, they exclaimed in an outburst that they didn't know how to do it.
I assumed from the initial response that they knew, and that any further explanation or questioning would be come off badly. However, in that instance they genuinely didn't know.
The thing to understand is that it's not about you, it's about them.
Imagine a situation when you feel infuriated, and imaging how square infuriated you would be if someone told you that you being infuriated is not valid
It's not a big deal if you make a mistake. I did one just two weeks ago.
What matters is how you react to it.
If they feel infuriated, give them space and try to understand why.
It's not about being guilty.
Nobody is guilty of the education they received. But it's good to grow from that when that education it doesn't help.