I’m 27 and I have had a little experience with sexism in the workplace, mostly when I was doing receptionist/administrative positions in a male-dominated environment. The worst was when I was working as a receptionist at a car dealership during the beginning of graduate school; initially, I brought in fun reading to do as the semester hadn’t started yet and most of the salesmen were astonished that I was literate, let alone interested in reading. Then came the conversations with me wherein one salesman tried to set me up on a date with another salesman (I was engaged at that point with a noticeable ring), which only stopped after my husband showed up a few times during my shift to “say hi” to me. I wasn’t trusted to carry anything heavy, and after a while I’d have salesguys leaning on my desk, talking with each other in another language (which I understood but didn’t speak) about me, the female customers and what they’d be like in bed. This was all interspersed with sports, food, and car talk, but it was still a regular occurrence.
In my last job, we’d occasionally get the guy who’d be struggling to carry a box of books for donation and refuse to give me the box to move to our back room for sorting. I had to request a few times in a row with “I can handle it” and would eventually get him to give up control over the box; I’d wander off with greater ease in carrying the box, and thank him for donating. Because I don’t do a lot of heavy lifting in my current job, I’m treated like most of the other ladies, who feign inability to lift anything heavier than a single ream of paper. It’s a little silly, but is the nature of the environment.
I work in a fairly female-dominated field - medical laboratory technology. There are only 6 or 7 men working in the lab, and most of them are on the night shift or are part-time, so the lab is pretty much always full of women. We definitely make the few men suffer with our TMI conversations, the poor dears.
A couple of the guys I work with often are general smartasses and will make jokes about everyone all the time, and some of them are definitely sexist in nature, but it’s a two-way street because everyone’s making fun of everyone else, so I’m not usually offended. They tell me to go back to the kitchen and bake them a pie, and I tell them they should get a back wax before they’re kidnapped by a circus needing a trained bear. If anyone ever crosses a line, we say so, and apologies ensue and we’re all fine afterwards. We all know we’re just screwing around to make a stressful job more fun, and there’s nothing misogynistic about their smartassery.
There was one time when one of the other guys made an appreciative comment about my boobs, and that pissed me off, but I can’t say I’ve ever experienced any professional sexism from my colleagues or managers, like being held back from promotions or denied projects or anything like that. Sometimes I get friction from outside the lab - I’ve noticed that when I call a nursing supervisor about a problem (a suspected mislabeled specimen, for example) I often get a lot of defensiveness and resistance, whereas if one of my male colleagues makes the call, it’s over more quickly and the nursing supervisor will accept something must be wrong. We’ve all noticed that happening, but I’m not entirely sure it’s because I’m female. I might just not have the right approach and tone going into the conversation. Hard to say.
And there’s always the random patient encounter in the hall when I’m in my lab coat. I usually get tagged as “nurse”, but never “doctor”. But I don’t care, since I’m neither!
I was getting out of a car and a coworker slapped my ass. I showed him my knife and threatened to gut him (not my finest hour). We apologized to each other and I enjoyed working with him the rest of the summer.
The second guy was more of an ongoing thing. We did a lot of fieldwork together and he would spend a lot of the time asking really inappropriate questions about my orientation and what I enjoyed sexually.
I tried really hard to shut him down verbally with very little success. I spent most of that construction season really, really pissed off. He was a dick but I know he was just winding me up, to this day I’m mad that I let him get to me.
Oddly enough, he stopped with the sexist bullshit and turned into a pretty nice guy. I don’t hate him any more and we get along really well - go figure.
I meant the same store I worked at (with the female auto/hardware manager). It was a discount department store, not a proper department stores. Think Kmart or smaller version of Walmart (without the groceries).