I’m 34, and I’ve certainly experienced what you’re talking about. It wasn’t an everyday occurence, but it happened. I did get a lot of the business about appropriate roles for women from my parents. When I told them I was getting engaged, the first thing they asked me, after “Do you have the date set?” was “Are you going to stop working?” (“Uh, no.” “Well, how does *he *feel about that?”). But in addition to the “sit down and shut up” messages, there are also the “girls are dumb” messages that undermine girls’ confidence that they have anything worth standing up and saying in the first place.
For instance: In high school, I was one of a handful of sophomores taking a junior-level advanced algebra class. I had always enjoyed the puzzle-solving nature of math, and I didn’t like just memorizing a formula until I knew how it worked, and how it was derived. So when the teacher presented the quadratic formula as, “Here’s how you solve for x if you have an equation of the form ax2 + bx + c. Memorize it,” I asked him about it after class. He didn’t get what I was asking, and I probably wasn’t explaining myself well. He kept trying to walk me through the formula, plugging in values, to show me that it did indeed work, which was even more frustrating, because clearly, he thought I didn’t understand how to do it. I kept saying things like, “No, I know - but, let’s say I didn’t memorize it: how would I figure out the formula?” to which he’d reply, “You can’t - you just have to know it.” After much back and forth, he finally said, “Look, don’t get frustrated - girls sometimes have trouble with math.”
Then, there was my AP History teacher who made blonde jokes and comments about “ditzy girls”, both in general and toward specific students, myself included, even though I was consistently the best student in his class.
I’ve gotten similar comments from bosses at various jobs, even though I’m pretty smart and a hard worker.
And I hesitate to even say here “I’m smart” or “I was in an advanced class”, because while on the one hand, it demonstrates that these negative comments about my intelligence were patently absurd, on the other, it has the potential to imply that they would have been acceptable, or at least justified, if I weren’t smart. Indeed, when I would object to the teacher who made blonde jokes by pointing out that I was no dummy, he would say, “Well, obviously, you’re an exception.” I’ve heard that a lot, actually, from classmates, coworkers, and friends: they’re not saying I’m dumb, just, you know, women. In general.
(My precise topic of study has actually been developed by women, and almost all the important names in the field are women. The literature review sections are strikingly different for their lack of tearing down other people working on the same topic.) I don’t think it’s necessarily always fair to blame men for actively oppressing women, but I don’t see the need to stop discussing gender as a category - like wondering why women are less inclined to write and edit Wikipedia articles. And gender includes men, too, of course.