It is not at all uncommon for women to be sexist. We grow up in a sexist society and are just as likely to be socialised into sexist ways of thinking as men are. It can be hard to recognize in yourself and even when you do, still hard to stop yourself from doing it. it’s highly unlikely that anyone has managed to get through life without ever being sexist, even if unintentionally.
Some ways women are frequently sexist that I’ve encountered
- Believing/trusting a man’s statement/opinion especially on subjects like science, mechanics, politics more than a woman’s.
- Assuming a man’s work is more important than a woman’s.
-Assuming a woman is responsible for the upkeep of the house, is the default parent, is responsible for hosting at home and for ensuring birthdays, etc. are remembered.
-Thinking that women liking sex, especially with non-serious partners, is somehow “bad”, but that it’s just kind of natural for men.
The list goes on. To some extent these are patterns we fall into because our experience makes them seem most likely (e.g. women often are the ones responsible for the upkeep of the home, often are the default parent and this was even more the case decades ago) and as our experience changes our opinions and assumptions might too. But there is more to it than this. For instance, with gendered knowledge, while it’s true that men are more likely to study, say, physics, and there is also a tendency to default to believing/trusting women on “female” things, like childcare, there is still a tendency to see men as more trustworthy - if a man can show him self to be an expert in childcare, he will be trusted and believed above similarly qualified women, whereas a woman who is an expert in physics will have to constantly grapple with having lesser colleagues elevated above her. Our society has running through it a theme that men are better, that they are the apex, and it’s hard not to incorporate that into our lives in unconscious ways.
It’s a social pressure. A collective value. And we probably don’t notice it when we do it. We may not notice, for instance, that when a male friend/colleague/professional does something without smiling and being nice we think nothing of it and when a female friend/colleague/professional does similar we slightly mark her down in our esteem. But studies show us that people do do this. And enough of us do it consistently enough that there is a burden on women to be nice, to smile, to soothe ruffled feathers, to be likable that men do not bear.
It’s impossible for any of us to say whether these sorts of sexist expectations colour your relationships with your children. But there’s certainly a reasonable chance that they do to some extent and if you’re being told this by more than one of them it seems fairly likely. Of course if you favour your son it probably isn’t just because of his sex. One of the reason sexism is so hard to root out is because it often operates as only one lever in complex dynamics and it’s easy to find something else to use as a reason for any particular interaction or exchange.
It’s hard to overcome years of social conditioning, especially when the conditioning is still all around you. I think the most effective method, especially at first, is simply to be open to the possibility and try to be aware of that possibility when you talk with your kids or think about them. Then look back on interactions and see if you can imagine how the interaction would have gone with one of the others. See if you can recognise how their sex might have influenced how you’ve treated them.