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

[JeanneDeMontbaston]

I was just wondering about the impact of casual sexism. I don't mean sustained, serious, shocking things - I mean the off-the-cuff remarks that didn't seem important at the time, but that really stayed with you.

I remember really clearly, overhearing my teacher saying to another teacher: 'A lot of them are really ladylike, and then there's [myname]!'

It is a little bit funny, I know - and I know exactly what they meant - but I was thinking about the way I remember this once chance comment twenty years on. I thought of it because one of my mates just mentioned her lecturer (female) turned to her calmly and say 'Jenny, do you ever stop to let the boys get a word in edgewise?!' Not, 'the other students' but 'the boys'.

What about you?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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'.

I'm not convinced single-sex education is always better. I'm sure it can be.

My school was single-sex and a lot of the sexism was subtle stuff - I was always too loud, too messy, too argumentative. And then I got out into the real world and realied they'd done me a huge disservice by making me feel I had to apologize all the time, that I shouldn't argue my case (I've got over that one, have you noticed? ), and that I should be quieter and not too clever.

Actually, a big one was not being too clever. We were taught not to apply for universities where we might get rejected, ostensibly because it would upset us too much, but I think there was a strong undercurrent of 'don't be arrogant and think you're better than you are'.

I'm not bitter, I don't think - I have a lot of fond memories - but I am finding it really interesting to read this thread and see the patterns. I really do think that these small comments have much more of an impact than we generally admit.

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. :(

When I was about 14 my male R.E teacher took a liking to me, he scared me quite a lot. He made me sit on his lap once which now I realise is awful, but I remember someone saying "how come she never has to do >whatever they thought I wasn't doing

RedHair, do you know if he is still teaching? Would you consider reporting it?

I am wondering if grimbletart and I went to the same school. Our (nun) headteacher once started a speech to my class when we were about 15: "When you are teachers and nurses, nuns and housewives..." My super cool friend interrupted with "but I'm going to be a pathologist!" She was sent out of the room. She's now a surgeon.

Same Head also had a standard speech before summer holidays telling us not to "get interfered with" by boys during the break. And once accused a group of us wearing highly fashionable at the time patent brogues of wanting boys to see our knickers in the reflection I was 12. It had never occurred to any of us, and she must have had a very twisted brain to have thought of it! I never wore them again though.

I didn't have any of this - single sex school late 60s to mid 70s.

Of course, all our teachers, bar one, were female too. So I was taught physics, chemistry and double maths by able, intelligent women, who presumably had had to overcome significant barriers to their own success.

Nothing wrong with you, ageing: you're just pleasantly plump (I hate that term...arggh...).

A teacher of Geography couldn't resist referring to landscape features as "undulating hills" without looking pointedly at the chest of a very well-endowed girl in the class....

Some of these are truly, truly awful. I think I just gravitated towards strong, opinionated women at school and ignored the other teachers.

For my A-levels, I went to a private boys' school which had recently started admitting girls into the sixth form. There were 24 girls for 150 boys in the sixth form, and about 700 boys overall. Only four of the teachers (but all of the catering and nursing staff and cleaners) were women. The girls' A-level grades were, universally, much worse than expected. It was a real eye-opener.

The most glaringly sexist teacher was an 'eccentric' history master who also ran the girls' boarding house. He gave all the pupils in the class nicknames; the four girls in my year were 'The little mermaid', 'Miss Gorgeous', 'Squidge' and 'Ma belle' (me). For one test where all the girls had done badly, he chose to mark us for our beauty rather than our brains. Thereafter he addressed us as "the brainless beauties" and told us not to bother our "pretty little heads" with revision, as it was futile. Strangely none of us objected or complained. I think we realised it truly would have been futile.

One of the girls did complain to a male teacher that the girls' swimming sports heats were set to take place in the school's outdoor pool at a time when many of the boys were able to stand on a staircase and watch. She was told she had "nothing to worry about" as she looked "fine in a swimsuit".

I was told by a female office studies teacher that if I didn't improve my typing speed I'd never get a good job as a secretary.

Luckily my mother brought up well (and I was a gobby 16 yo), and simply replied that I wasn't going to be a secretary, I was going to have a secretary.

I was right

None. I was in an all girls' school until 16.

Girls school, early 2000s, we were told that our skirts were too short and as we were walking to and from school we looked like whores! And that we couldn't be surprised if men got the 'wrong idea' about what we wanted. The only positive is that even at the age we were, we all thought the (female) teacher who said that was sexist and it was a ridiculous thing to say.

In mostly male sixth form, told by an ex-army male biology teacher that after women have had children they have no purpose any more, that's why they start getting osteoporosis and other health problems. Although I suppose technically he was correct in an evolutionary sense, quite why he thought it was a sensible thing to say to a class in a very male environment with only a small number of girls I don't know.

In fact I seem to remember his exact words were 'they start to crumble away...'

Women in history didn't do anything? I think Elizabeth the first, Marie Curie, Boadecea, Florence Nightengale, Joan of Arc, and the list goes on, would agree there.

At school in the early 80s, John and I came joint top in a Computing Studies test and both did well in German. John was allowed to continue with computing studies, I had to drop it (against my preference) and do German because computers are for boys. Guess which of us is an IT professional?

At university in the early 90s, I wrote an essay in which I criticised a Channel advert from a (slightly) feminist perspective and saying that some of the target audience may find the caged, fetishistic images off-putting. The male tutor told me that there was no way woman would be unsettled by the ad and gave me really low grade. No discussion, no debate, I was just wrong.