"mansplaining"

[lookingouttosea]

I never thought this was an actual thing. My feminist friends said it was and I just assumed it was miscommunication and that people are generally well meaning. But...since entering the world of academia recently I find myself in situations where men who I'm working with sort of take what I've said and make it their own, or make a statement about something I've just been saying or that I've just written like it's something new. Hard to really put into words. Now, it could be a title/rank thing (they're more qualified/superior/etc) but I don't get this as much from female colleagues (I work with more men though so also could be a numbers game). I've found myself saying on several occasions ("yes, like I've just said..."). Its just I feel like I'm not being taken seriously, or seriously enough. It could be an age thing (I'm younger - but not that young, late 30's!), a gender thing (I'm female), a rank thing (I'm new), a "mummy" thing (I have just had a baby). Has anyone experienced this?

Absolutely. A couple of years ago, I was a senior leader in a school with a brand new female headteacher. She brought with her from her old school a male teacher who entered the school at the same rank as me. In team meetings she would shout at me if I expressed an opinion that did not chime with what she already thought, but if (as very frequently happened) my male counterpart repeated what I had said later in the meeting, she would accept it. It got to the point where I had to prime the bloke with the key points I wanted to make - just friendly, chatty conversations by the kettle and so on - a few days before team meetings. I would share information from my research with him and tell him the things I was interested in. He would then rock up to team meetings with print outs of material I had showed him, put forward ideas I had planted discussed with him and reap all the credit. I got things done that I wanted done but it was bloody soul destroying. I'm in a different job now and I've never come across it again.

This happens to me all the time. Fortunatly my manager is great and now has the sentence 'CMOT is responsible for decisions on this and I have copied her in' on a virtual post it as he has to say it so many times a day when people bypass me, or ignore what I've said. Last week we were at a conference and some bloke kept turning and asking him the questions when a) I am the technical expert on this and b) had been answering all the questions.
My best ever was when someone came and asked to talk to 'an expert' on . Yep, I can help you with that. No, I need to talk to someone technical. Yes, that would be me. And this went on for a while until a customer who had worked with me to bring this thing from academia to market and had been wetting himself listening came over to tell this bloke that 'oh, he was in the right hands'. Then he listened to me...

Academia attracts egos which leads to this kind of behaviour.

OMG yes. When I started my current role, I received two unconnected yet very similar emails from male colleagues in entirely different fields to mine - both essentially telling me what I needed to read to do my job. Don't want to entirely out myself here, but it was roughly akin to advising someone making an omelette to crack the egg