Casual sexist remarks at school/college that stayed with you?

I am an atheist from a family if atheists. In the course of lunchtime conversation, it somehow came up that I expected to marry in a registry office, not a church. Headmaster's response? 'Oh, you'll change your mind about that.' For the frock, of course. :(

IHeart, your Julius Caesar story is giving me the rage on your behalf...

I went to a very rough all girls convent school where sexism manifested itself primarily in terms of low expectations and an insistence on female sexual purity, but I still remember a male teacher (an admittedly unpleasant human being) saying, after I had won a debate in religion class, that I would need to learn to become 'less aggressive' because 'it didn't look well on girls'.

School pe. Girl? You get wiffle or foam balls, plastic bats and ladylike sports. Boy??? Cricket balls, leather balls, wooden bats of multiple variety, and get to actually get dirty during pe.

She says nowadays everyone should learn (including men) but she made the decision not to because she knew too many bright women who ended up as secretaries to men less intelligent than them.

Countess: never heard of that autobiography. Must catch up with it. Personally I think it is better to learn but never ever tell anyone until you are senior enough for it not to matter. That is even more true of shorthand although that is pretty well obsolete now in most jobs.

Slug: I fitted shorthand and typing lessons into free periods while I was taking my A levels because I was going into journalism. This was long before computers became common. Incredibly useful for my work but I never let on when I left journalism for a related career where I was often the only woman in otherwise all male meetings. Otherwise guess who would have been assumed to take the minutes when there wasn't a secretary present?

Deviating slightly from topic, touch typing is incredibly useful. It is painful to see men (and sometimes women) prodding away at keyboards with two or three fingers and not being able to look away. Oddly, if you asked me to read out the layout of a Qwerty keyboard I simply can't do it. My fingers know exactly where the keys are but my head doesn't. I, too, enjoy having conversations while continuing to type

Slug, did you know that Dame Margaret Joan Anstee, who was undersecretary general of the United Nations, called her autobiography, 'Never learn to type'?

EBearHug. My school, to it's credit, did teach everyone one term of typing. The problem was, once I hit the workplace, I had to hide the fact that I could type because as soon as it was known that I could, that was the only work I was ever given. This was in the early 80's, long before computers were regular items in offices. Now days, I have stopped hiding the fact that I can type and instead freak people out with my ability to type one thing while simultaneously having a conversation with them about something completely different .

However, none of the boys ever had a secretarial course suggested to them, even the ones that were better at typing than me. Funny that.

Nothing like any of this at my school. It was a girls' school which only appointed its first full time male teacher the year I started.
Hurrah for single sex education.

Fortunately most of my school role models were better, even if maths teaching was crap. The head of Physics was female and told us that times had definitely changed since she studied physics at university in the late 60s - she had been the only woman out of 300 students and never had to buy her own lunch.
Now (early 90s), there would be about a dozen women and you will have to buy your own lunch! She made it clear that this was actually a good thing, though being skint at the time I never realised why until recently.

On a school trip when ai was about 14/15 a boy I didn't know and, as far as I can remember, had little interaction with wrote on my souvenir leaflet thing (it was a week long residential trip and we were all writing on each others, like a yearbook) that if I was a boy he'd 'punch me in the face'.

Still no idea why he said that, why he felt the need to write it down so everyone else would see it, but I spent far too long afterwards worrying about how annoying I must have been and what other boys thought of me and moderating my behaviour around them.

Prat!

Mind you, it was a school that had major issues with aspiration anyway. The Head of Upper School's 'inspirational' speech was about how much she looked forward to 'seeing the girls with their babies in prams in a few years'. This was in about 1997. Not long ago, really.

Similarly in about 1996 my headmaster (of a girls' school - the rank and file teachers were women but the head and most of the department heads were men...) said at our leaving party that he was "looking forward to having some young ladies like you to push me around in my bath-chair when I'm older". Lovely And the head of modern languages liked to loudly remark: "Get in shape for pushing those prams, girls!"

Mind you I work in a very male-dominated workplace and those are nothing compared to the sexist crap I've heard there.

When I asked our history teacher why women were never mentioned in history he replied "well unfortunately they didn't actually do anything. They just looked after the children "

I should consider doing a secretarial course "as a backup".

Whereas I was told, "girls of your calibre won't be secretaries," when I signed up for typing as a 6th form elective class. If they'd really thought it through, they'd have made everyone learn typing, because it can save you a fortune (in time or money) in typing up dissertations and theses. Of course, they probably hadn't quite seen the future which meant that within 5-10 years, everyone would be using keyboards and sending emails and so on anyway - as a result, having learnt touch-typing was one of the most useful things I did at school.

Not at school, but as a Guide, would have been about 10/11. Our group was quite progressive ( considering late 70s/early 80s) and one evening we were taken to local Fire Station for a talk about the Fire Brigade and their work.
The man giving the talk was keen to impress on us that women could join the service, all good up until the point he told us that there was a minimum chest measurement (due to breathing apparatus) for women joining and that they all wanted to be the one that gets to check it. Made me feel grubby at the time, and has stayed with me all these years.

Iheartkingthistle it is a sexist comment when she doesn't say this to any of the fathers that work similar hours, it is an assumption on her part that I should be at home looking after my boys instead of working overtime.

I was taught higher physics by a sexist dinosaur. I was the only girl in the class (there were only 9 of us, presumably because they didn't trust him with a full class; the other teachers had full higher physics classes).

He absolutely refused to teach me properly He'd act like I wasn't there as he explained things to the boys. If forced to engage with me he'd mansplain things in a very slow voice like I was an idiot. If he was demonstrating an experiment to the boys, he'd ask me to hold things and refer to me as 'his lovely assistant'.

The really annoying thing was that I was by far the best at physics in the class. I was the only one who got an A; the next best grade in the class was a C. I got the best higher results in my whole school and the teachers knew I wasn't a lobotomised fool. Yet this teacher treated me like one because I was female.

I hated him. He did the same to friends who had him for standard grade physics and they were relieved to get a different teacher for higher.

I remember my Design and Technology teacher running his finger over a thick edge of plastic I had spent ages filing down and said "that's very good....for a girl ". It made me so angry at the time (and still does now actually).

We had one consultation with the careers advice tutor when we were in the 6th form. I was told (top student, regularly outdid all the boys in exams, heading straight for university to study science etc) that I should consider doing a secretarial course "as a backup". I remember looking the guy in the eye and asking him if he advised the boys to do the same thing before flouncing out.

I honestly don't remember any at all. And I studied maths and physics. I honestly think all the teachers and lecturers were on best behaviour to encourage the girl :)
Either that or I was too thick skinned to notice??

That isn't sexist is it twosteps? I am more than capable of looking after my DC but they still miss DH when he works away. I don't think I would have take offence at that.

When my boys were young I worked part time in the week and all day Saturday and overtime all day on a Sunday and bank holiday Monday (paid double time). One member of staff (mid 50's no children) commented that did my boys miss me whilst I worked all weekend? I replied that their dad was more than capable looking after them and I'm sure that they like the 2 weeks abroad that I can pay for each year.