In this day and age! A thread for unbelievably obvious examples of sexism.

Yes, hernias for men. I've always been very careful with my back when lifting, but was less aware of the pelvic floor issues, mine used to be very good from doing Pilates, but I got out of the habit after the DCs were born.

Anyway, I like a pint too. Luckily the prolapse nurse says to lift nothing heavier than a half full kettle for a few weeks, I reckon a pint will fit the bill nicely.

I always drink pints.
except when it's wine (i'm not that hardcore! )

I knwo what you mean about prolapse and pelvic floor WhoKnows
I spend a long time making sure that i've tightened all the relevant muscles before I lift anything since DD (i'm sure it happened automatically before!)
thankfully, I do belly dancing too, and am very aware of muscle movement when manual handling (who'd've thought dancing and manual handling were related!)

LRD - is it hernia? I know that one, don't know of any others. but I think women can have hernias too.

It's not just lifting with your knees, but making sure that you control the weight with not just your knees, arms, but with your whole abdomen. It's kind of tensing everything, but not really tensing. Taking the strain, I suppose

a conversation with my PIL to be about previous jobs i have done.

Me- I ran a security team in a nightclub for 2 years.

FIL- What you ticked people of lists and stuff, not chucking them out

Me- Well it was me that ran the teams so i had to do everything, I had 15-20 staff

MIL- But you would have got the men to chuck people out (laughing) do you know self defence (more laughing)

Me- It would depend on who got their first and yes im trained in various methods of restraint and have done martial arts and boxing

PIL-

I remember a story here where the poster tried to book a room for her and Dh, they were both doctors. There was quite a confusion - so you need 3 rooms, for Dr Smith, other Dr Smith and yourself?
-no, two, for Dr Smith and Dr Smith

• but where will you sleep then?

Tamoo - talking to a neighbour about going to the pub and having a pint of beer - her daughter (about 14 at the time) open-mouthed said 'girls don't drink beer! I was a bit as she came from an all-female-adults household

DH is always handed the credit card back because it has my title on it - Professor - and therefore because he is both male and older than me this is assumed to be him. I have even had waiters assuming I am trying to muscle in and take over 'his' card when I put my hand out for the machine to put the PIN in. Tutting that I know 'his' PIN.

My favourite was turning up to a bed and breakfast that I had booked using my title - I was at a conference. The owner of the b&b (a woman) was very confused at my appearance and finally confessed that 'since I was supposed to be a man she had decided to give me a double room because men needed bigger beds'. I assured her that this was not a problem and moved into my big man-sized bed!

My friend's husband won't order pints for women. He reckons it "looks bad" and "women shouldn't drink pints".

Haven't been out with them for a long while.

No, I've heard that. You can do something nasty if you're a bloke, too, but I forget what it is - you end up having to wear a support bandage thingy, though.

My GP pointed this out to my dad because he insists on lifting heavy stuff to show he is stronger than his wife and children, and sadly now we are grown up this is no longer true!

But good warning ... lift with your knees not your back; split into smaller loads if you can, etc. etc.

I get called "miss" by my students, despite the fact that I tell them at the start they can either address me by my first name or by Dr Lastname. My male colleagues are all addressed as Dr superior-male-person.

Yes Uptoapoint this happened to me as well. It was one of the most demoralising things about my job and persisted no matter what I said.

Along with lots of other similar factors (male lecturers getting to teach interesting classes for which I was orders of magnitude better qualified, while I was stuck with 'biology for dullards' term after term), it contributed to my resignation.

I know we can lift heavy weights, and I too hate asking for help. However there is one "women's problem" with lifting things that I have learnt about recently to my cost (I'm in for surgery next week) and that is the effect on the pelvic floor. So although I am all in favour of equality, I would just say watch your pelvic floor, there are a lot of people on the prolapse threads who like me have been merrily shifting heavy furniture, boxes, bags of compost etc but will be unable to do so ever again and it is more common than you think because people are reluctant to talk about it. Sorry, slight thread hijack, but it is important to be aware.

The physical strenght is a funny thing. Yes, on average men are stronger, but that does not mean all men are stronger than all women.
I teach Bodypump classes as a hobby. I can handle more weight than most men. So you have new (male) participants coming - I always try to explain that this class is very different, even if they go to the gym and lift weights, we don't do 3x15 reps, we do 800; they should go easy, just take light weights for the first class etc etc.

Do they believe me? Ha. "Silly woman", I can almost hear them thinking, "what do you know". So they will load the bar up with my weights and usually die after a minute. Obviously I won't yell "told you so!" but I am tempted..

black - oh, that's nice to know. Good for "switzerland".

nickel - oh, god, nothing funnier than watching someone who doesn't know how books weigh trying to lift them!

I felt like I had to say "I can't lift because I'm pregnant" just in case they thought I felt "i can't lift because i'm a feeble little girlie"

nickeldaisical - me too, people often didn't realise I was pg with DS1, ask me ot lift something and quickly back track when they realised. I found being pg a bugger for lifting mainly because of the bump getting in the way.

at loading.
i'm a bookseller, so do a lot of heavy lifting.
and it makes me laugh when a man of the same build assumes i can't lift the boxes, when they're clearly not booksellers, so don't have the experience.

having said that, the need to challenge these stereotypes made it very difficult for me to make other people lift when i was pregnant.

I have been guilty of sexist assumptions - to my utter mortification, having been on the receiving end many times.

My nadir was some years ago saying to my new American neighbour, "Oh, have you moved here because of your husband's job?"

"No," she replied, "I'm the UK Finance Director Of Coca Cola!"

Coca Cola FD 1, me 0!

I'm another 'heavy lifting' one. Happens all the time (I'm short and fairly slim). I was at a garden centre last year with DD in a sling on my back. I had loaded bags of compost onto a trolley, paid and was loading them into the car boot. An older man came rushing over to help as he 'couldn't possibly stand by and watch me struggle' (I wasn't) and insisted on doing it, huffing and puffing with effort, despite my perfectly polite 'thanks but no thanks'. How he thought I'd managed to get them on the trolley etc I don't know.
It was the same when I worked in a garden centre (a few years ago) = I was skinny and had very short hair and people always assumed I was a 14yo boy when they asked me to lift stuff then tried to stop me when they realised I was female.

More recently I was helping a friend move house and another friend was moving boxes the end of the truck one he announced was a two man or three woman job. I unloaded and moved it on my own.

I think most women are stronger than they and most other people give credit for.

I used to work in an old-boys network type of government department.... we had to sit an old fashioned promotion board - I was in computing and the only woman to sit the board....

colleagues responses:

"Never mind - if you don't pass you can always go down the other route"
"other route?!?!"
"Yep go home and have babies"

"They have quotas you know, so you're bound to pass"

"You can always sleep with the board members"

"remember to bat your eyelashes"

damned if I passed and damned if I didn't.... I did pass (and THEN I went home and had babies ;p )

Tandems seem to have become really popular recently and I have never seen one with a woman on the front and a man on the back. The same is true of pillion passengers on motorbikes.

In a previous job, I was asked to cover reception for an hour, as the person who worked there was off sick. I was usually happy to do this, and had already done it many times. On this particular day, however, my office was short-staffed, and I was extremely busy, so I asked if a temp from another office could do it. I was in my early 30s, had a degree and a reasonable amount of experience. The temp was about eighteen, no degree, very little experience, but he was male. I was told, "Dont be silly, we can't put a man on reception!" and was given this look

It's the same with babies. I read an report of an experiment that showed that people were offended if you mistook their boy for a girl- but notthe other way round. So it's safer to say "he" if you're not sure.

It's all about male being the norm, and female being the abberation.

I get called "miss" by my students, despite the fact that I tell them at the start they can either address me by my first name or by Dr Lastname. My male colleagues are all addressed as Dr superior-male-person.

That's so annoying.

But then, when I had a job where I sent out a lot of emails to people whose gender I didn't know, my (male) boss told me men will be offended if referred to as 'Dear Mr/Ms Smith' but women won't mind 'Mr Smith', so better to go with that option. I had blanked that out of my memory until you mentioned similar, but I assume someone somewhere is peddling this as 'etiquette' or something.