Sexism isn’t sexism because it only happens to women.
I mean, if a behavior is not related to being discriminated based on gender, it’s not sexism. It can be mobbing, it can be simply a toxic competitive environment, but that doesn’t make it sexism, that is my point. “IF” being the keyword.
Implicit bias is a thing
I totally agree, and this is why I do think that for someone shutting down a woman, because implicitly there is the though “this is a woman and therefore doesn’t know what she is talking about”, can be sexist, but that behavior is not inherently sexist. There are multiple (bad) reasons why people might do that. People might assume I am not competent, too young/too old to know better, too recent in the company, I went to the wrong university, and many other reason. This is not inherently linked to gender discrimination, that is my point. It can be ageism, hazing (hopefully the translation is accurate), classism or even racism, if not just the behavior of people who just want to gain advantages at expense of others (which is not a form of discrimination per se). All these exist in the workplace, and that’s why I was challenging your conclusion that this is sexism by definition. Now if in your experience you think sexism was the root cause, sure, whatever. But if we want to move the conversation to a more generic “tech” environment, I think it’s worth to expand the analysis.
Thanks for writing an entire essay trying to disprove my experiences though.
Well, with this I guess I understand you are in bad faith. I did not try to disprove your experiences (in fact, I explicitly wrote that for one specific instance), I challenged some of the arguments you made. Trying to imply that I tried to disprove your experiences is extremely dishonest.
Why is it so hard to just listen to women?
Are we not allowed to have different opinion? Do I exist in the workplace as well? Also, expressions such as “And men are just blessed with raises and promotions they didn’t even ask for” are hard to relate for me and for any other working class man who struggle in the workplace I know. I understand you were trying to get your point across, but if that’s your perspective, then we simply live in two different worlds (which is totally possible, given that we probably live in very different places and companies).
I listened (well…read), and I questioned some of your conclusions. If this for you means “not listening to women”, then I suppose we have different perspectives.