A woman started a now-viral Twitter thread by asking, “What’s the most obvious thing you’ve ever been mansplained about?” Lots of women joined in, tweeting their own personal experiences and some of them are unbelievable. One comes from scientist Dr. Jessica McCarty, who shares that she was speaking at a NASA Earth meeting when a male postdoctoral researcher tried to mansplain her own published work to her.
This guy had no idea who she was or that she has impressive credentials, but he stopped her presentation to tell her she didn’t understand the subject and that she definitely “needed to read McCarty et al.” She tweets that she looked him in the eye, pulled her hair back so he could read her name tag and then told him, “I’m McCarty et al.”
And lots of other highly accomplished female professionals in science, academia and other fields who have been patronized like this shared their frustrating stories.
- One woman tweets that she has a degree in chemistry and was the supervisor of an industrial lab where an engineer tried to explain pH to her. But he got it wrong and had copied a bunch of people on the email, so they all knew.
- Another woman tweets, “When I was in labor, my husband was watching contractions on the monitor and told me one of them wasn’t so bad.”
- “I was once having a date with an actor and he was bragging about how he auditioned for a production a few years earlier, but turned down the role,” tweets user Cween Christine. “I was the director of that production. He did not audition. He was not offered a role.”
- And Sommer Tothill tweets that when she was telling her ex-husband about the emerging term called “mansplaining,” he interrupted to argue about what it really meant … after literally hearing it for the first time. He mansplained mansplaining!
Source: Unilad