this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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It is a very real thing and it happens at every level of organization. Talk to pretty much any woman engineer or manager and you’ll be able to get very many stories of men explaining the woman’s area of expertise to them. I’ve seen it happening everywhere from office stand up meetings to academic conferences where people have specializations as narrow as evolutionary models of pro-social behaviors in apes.
Yes, many of us are enthusiastic about our areas of expertise. I can go on for paragraphs about the evolution of sociality. That’s a completely different thing than trying to explain what misogyny actually means when talking to a person with a PhD in Women’s Studies.
A co-worker once explained to an attractive lady who ran a cake shop how to make cheese cake. In great detail.
He'd just eaten a piece of excellent cheese cake that she'd made.
I have some knowledge in a specialized area of manufacturing products, for ease we will call this "machining" but I do reference something specific for this post (more specific than the typical "general" usage of the word."machining.")
People who do not work in my industry constantly tell me how to do my job, incorrectly I might add. I also happen to be a cis male. I'm not convinced this is a gender specific thing, I'm very certain of mine, and "mansplaining" as described by you happens to me, when supposedly it should not due to my gender.
So I suppose I ask, does it go from simply "confidently incorrect" to "sexist asshole" simply because the person was talking to a woman? Is it then misandrist when the explainer is a woman and the explainee is a male? "Confidently incorrect" can then only be accurately applied if both parties identify as the same gender, otherwise it is [gendered prefix]-splaining?