There was an interesting thread on here a few days ago about the pluses and minuses of being a single parent. A few posters said they felt stigmatised for it. I don't, personally, but it got me thinking about the sorts of low-level discrimination and disadvantage which single parents experience and what can be done to change it.
Rather than direct stigma, which I'm very lucky not to suffer from, the worst thing for me is the way men in particular who do domestic jobs for you try to take advantage of you being a single woman to overcharge you and generally pull the wool over your eyes.
I had a bloke the other day who I asked to do some work on my garden and he tried to charge me an absolutely extortionate amount of money basically for some garden clearance. I'd told him what my budget was, he went over it half way through the job with some very implausible excuse, tried to mansplain to me why he couldn't get the job done to time and budget and then demanded cash upfront half way through it (on a Sunday when I was going on holiday in half an hour).
Apart from being expensive and irritating, the worst thing about it was my being absolutely certain if I'd either been a bloke or been married or had a bloke living with me there's no way he'd have had the nerve to try this on.
I think quite a lot of people (mainly men) who do jobs like building, maintenance, decorating, anything to do with care etc, see single women as sitting targets for this sort of thing. There's an unspoken expectation that if you're daft enough not to have a bloke around to deal with then you've got it coming.
Curious to hear if others have got other examples of this. Not necessarily breaking Equal Ops legislation levels of discrimination, just low level shittiness.