I’ve experienced the most sexism from parents, who always seem skeptical of young female teachers. At least, I did in the past, when I was still fresh out of college. I’m still pretty young (28) but I’ve been teaching for 7-8 years at this point, so I suppose I project more confidence.
:dubious: 8=============3
Thanks for stopping by, ladies. 
- Only worked in medicine/scientific research. Never experienced it.
I’m 38, so I’m not in your requested age range, but I’ve certainly encountered sexism. I worked at a place where the general manager changed the dress code to require that all the women wear skirts and pantyhose. Same guy sent out an email to everyone and said that the “ladies” would be in charge of cleaning the breakroom. This was in 2003, so not that long ago. I’ve told this story before on the boards, but at a real estate office where I worked, I was called into the boss’ office. He was arguing with one of the agents about whether she should have a breast enlargement in order to increase her sales. She was adamant she would not be getting one and he was trying to convince her to do so. He was hoping I’d be on his side.
Those were the most blatant occurrences, but not the only ones.
25-year-old journalist here. Every manager I’ve had (three jobs, including my current one) has been a woman and in two of them, there have been roughly equal numbers of men and women across the publication/brand.
The third (not my current job) had an incredibly uncomfortable misogynist environment. It was at a major business newspaper (one of the top three in the world) and my manager and I were the only women on the desk. The men made “jokes” nearly every day (no, this is not an exaggeration) about rape, Elizabeth Smart’s abduction and similar cases, and other high-profile reports of sexual violence and sexualised murder of women. They would laugh and say how great it would be to be able to get away with that, and (conversely) get angry at women in the news reported as pressing rape charges, because everyone knows women only take rape to court if they’re lying and looking for revenge for bad sex or being spurned or something. :rolleyes:
I had heard the newspaper was a bit of an old boys’ club, but I was really shocked at how pervasive and non-stop the misogyny was. I started looking for a new job about a month after I got that one, and gave notice as soon as I found one, three months in. My manager was cross at me for leaving so quickly but it was a really horrifying environment. My new job pays about £3k less than that one, but it’s definitely worth it. So I suppose you could say I lost £3k a year and the prestige of working for a major global brand because it was so unpleasant to have this non-stop barrage of “isn’t rape great?”/“I hate those lying whores who press charges” going on around me every day.
[QUOTE=SecondJudith]
My manager was cross at me for leaving so quickly but it was a really horrifying environmen
[/QUOTE]
Just curious - did you let her know why you left? Telling her that she’s losing good talent because of the attitudes in the work place might be a bit of a wake-up call; plus, it would be a subtle warning to her not to give a bad reference, since it could trigger a lot of ugliness in response.
My manager and I didn’t have the best of relationships – we started out getting along very well, but about three weeks into the job I was off sick for four days from a bad allergic reaction to antibiotics, and I think (although I’m not sure) she thought I was making it up to get out of work. At least, she asked me a lot of doubtful questions and her attitude towards me really changed after that week, which is another reason I started looking for another job. She started to both micromanage me (telling me to keep my to-do list by hand on a notebook instead of in an Excel spreadsheet) and undermanage me (giving me an unclear list of instructions with no advice about priorities, and ask why I hadn’t finished #7 half an hour later). I think it was her first time managing someone.
I did mention these issues (the constant sexual assault comments and my manager’s odd behaviour) to my union rep and to the occupational health adviser I saw after I came back to work, so there’s some documentation of them somewhere. But it was such a messy environment, and I felt I was treated so poorly, that I was just glad to be out of there. I have an HR rep for the paper as my reference, and HR doesn’t do anything but confirm dates of employment, so even if my manager did want to give me a bad reference, she wouldn’t be able to. And I still get to put Giant Prestigious Brand on my CV. 
I’m 28, encountered a fair bit of sexism. Most notably training up a new team when the contract for the office I worked in was re-tendered, only to find those guys all were on more money than me. I asked my boss twice to sort the discrepancy, he didn’t, so I walked. This was when I was 22 - if it happened now I’d fight rather than walk.
I get quite a lot of it even now, effectively working in the care industry. My male boss makes sexist and inappropriate comments(yes, I am taking action on this) and there is a gender pay gap in my organisation, favouring men. I also find that any woman at my level(middle management) or above who is assertive is almost always referred to as ‘scary’ or a ‘ball-breaker’ which is a personal bugbear.
In my other profession as a therapist, gender roles are always getting talked about. Always. A lot of male therapists seem to think that their maleness has been deconstructed to the point of being destroyed. I say, is maleness exempt from deconstruction? We deconstruct every other bloody thing.
I’m 26 and the only times I’ve personally encountered sexism came from customers, not co-workers or management. I worked for several years in an industry that was physically demanding and required mechanical knowledge and some of the men (the older they were the more common the attitude) couldn’t wrap their heads around a young woman being good at it.
Now I work in an office environment with mostly women and many of my co-workers take advantage of the token male in the department. Once he joined us with his rippling biceps some of the “ladies” forgot how to do things like carry paper or change out a 5 gallon water jug. One of these days my eyes will roll so hard they’ll fall out. 
I’m 31, and sure, but not all that much. Working in technology, I tend to get a lot of guys for whom sexist comments are pretty much a part of the daily landscape, but they aren’t often directed at me. I’m guessing it’s because I’m not much of a girly girl. My current workplace is probably the least sexist I’ve been in, and I can say that the occasional sexist comments from my co-worker are in genuine good spirit, and that I definitely retort with equally sexist/offensive comments from the female side.
What I encounter most often is a sort of protectionism from friendly guys. You’re not exactly an equal because guys feel more defensive about you, in a ‘defending your honor’ sort of way. It’s not bad, and it doesn’t make me bristle, but it does indicate the change of perceptions.
The only real problems I’ve encountered with co-workers in recent memory are with people from other cultures. In technology, you encounter a lot of men from India, and while it’s not the aggressive kind of sexism, it’s definitely the ‘not taking you all that seriously’ kind. I have one Indian co-worker now where I get that vibe very strongly, and it’s not just me; other co-workers have brought it up that they observe it, too. Fortunately, he’s in no position of power and very, very unlikely to be, and is not very influential in his opinion, so it really has no effect on me.
The most negative sexism I encounter is from outside customers. I’m the tech support manager for my (small) company, and on a fairly routine basis, I’ll get a suspicious “Is this technical support?” after I answer the phone, which in my experience generally means a sexist. Most of these people I can win over by being pretty good at my job and ‘talking the talk’ – especially the technically savvy people, who can usually figure out that I know what I’m talking about quickly – but I’ll get the occasional person who just won’t listen, and believes I don’t know what I’m talking about if I don’t give them the answer that they want. The few others I usually get through to by explaining, look, this isn’t a call center, it’s a small company. I have the most technical support experience in the building, and I work with the developers every day and every single member of our staff. I help to plan and design the products and I’m the one who logs all the bugs we get from the field. I do a lot of QA work as well and I know the products’ functionality practically as well as anybody. If I’m not the best person to help you, I’ll let you know – there are those vanishingly small number of truly unprecedented questions, and I’ll take it to our dev team if I’m completely lost – but believe me, you want to talk to me. A developer has no real-world troubleshooting experience and will not be able to help you with installer problems; that is not their job. It is mine. Please listen.
I’m considerably over 30, and I haven’t experienced much sexism personally, but one of the things I really disliked at my last job (as an executive assistant at an investment management firm) was that women who were hired as administrative assistants were expected to perform the function of administrative assistants, whereas when men were hired as assistants, it was simply understood that if they just spent a year half-assing their way through it, they’d be promoted to analyst.
Plenty of women were also promoted to analysts of course, but none of them got there on day 366 by treating their admin job as so beneath them that it wasn’t worth even pretending to do it competently, which is what routinely happened with the men.
I’m 42 and have encountered it in unacceptable fashions few enough times to remember them.
For me, a guy who’s old enough to be my father calling me “girl” and “cutie” isn’t sexist, not is a calendar of bikini-clad chicks on a workshop’s wall sexist - “sexy” is not the same as “sexist” (knowing those guys, I’m sure they wouldn’t have minded if a gay man or straight woman had joined their team and stuck some beefcake on that same wall). That same guy called guys young enough to be his sons “boy” and “pretty thing” - and it was as clear and evident that he was not hitting on them as that he was not hitting on me; he was also perfectly able to use the same words as filler one day and twist them into an insult at another time when he was angry at you.
Some of the cases I’ve encountered weren’t even sexism per se. Going to a job interview, being met by the nice HR guy, then having the Production manager come in and exclaim “but it’s a girl! How are we going to get a girl into Production?” while the HR guy makes a clear and evident effort to refrain from inserting the telephone into the manager’s mouth - that manager was sexist and probably ageist. That woman who informed me that “the position is for an ingeniero… in-ge-nieeee-rOOOOOOOOOOO” was both sexist and a moron. But that guy who hated engineers, women, foreigners, Catholics and anybody he didn’t consider white enough? He was just one bitter, bitter loser.
It’s definitely getting better all the time.
That seems irrelevant to me. I am interested in subjective impressions.
Incidentally, the reason I specified under-30 is that I was wondering about changes in perception as to what is sexist behavior and what is not. But I’m glad to have plus-30s answering too, so the above should not be taken as a complaint.
This is inappropriate, MOIDALIZE; an unfunny joke. Please try to maintain a modicum of decorum.
Ellen Cherry
IMHO Moderator
No, not in a professional setting. I’ve heard of it happening in my profession (veterinarian), but not personally. While I was in school, the deans told us over and over again of a study done in the late 90’s/early 00’s about veterinary economics. It seemed, even when everything else was the same, men still had a higher starting salary than women. This usually translates to higher salaries down the road, btw. Since the majority of the class at this point was female (less than 20 men in a 80-something class), the deans wanted to stress this so as to make us better negotiators.
It is a bit hard to be overtly sexist in my current position. I mean, there are only 2 male pathologists in the whole department (out of a dozen or so). Still, one of the guys is the boss, and he can be sort of sexist. He has never been to me, but has acted that way to other coworkers… it seems he expects more of females than of males. But if you “prove” yourself as a female, he has nothing but encouragement and good recommendations for you. So it is not he won’t recognize it, but he expects more.
And also expects females to make do with lower wages than males. Our fundings come from different places, and one female was applying for a grant that would substantially increase her salary. He said he wouldn’t help her get the grant, and mentioned something like “isn’t that salary too high?”. Meanwhile, a guy in our department got his position paid by an outside funding that pays following NIH scale, and thus makes more than all of us, and even more than what my coworker had asked in her grant (and got, eventually).
I don’t get it–what was it even supposed to mean?
Anatomy, my dear Freudian.
I’ve heard plenty of lame, kinda sexist, pick-up lines and comments over the years, though, referring to my job. As in “Aww, you’re a vet/vet student? Is that because you want to see and interact with cuddly little fluffy puppies and kittens? And fat little ponies?” Bah…
I don’t understand it either, Ms. Holmes. Can you PM your interpretation, assuming you judge it too indecorous for the board?
Penis ensued.