#Nasa astronauts 2016 professional#

It is what writer Soraya Chemaly has described as “good old-fashioned sexism expressed in gendered socialization and a default cultural preference for institutionalized male domination of public life”. The same issues are at play when women find themselves being spoken over in the workplace, when a client directs every question to a junior male colleague or when a woman makes a suggestion in a meeting and is ignored, only for the same idea to be voiced by a male colleague, to loud agreement, moments later. They represent the same ingrained stereotypes that lead to women being less frequently promoted or hired for certain jobs.

#Nasa astronauts 2016 professional#

These interactions are the visible manifestation of societal assumptions about women’s inferiority in intellectual and professional situations.

The witty responses to such situations can raise a smile – such as the time one Twitter user tweeted about men explaining things to her, only to have a man respond with a classic mansplain.īut there is a serious underlying issue here. At the Everyday Sexism Project, we’ve heard from an IT worker whose less experienced male colleagues outline basic computer functions to her in meetings, an engineer who had a man try to explain solar panels to her and a woman who dealt with a customer slowly spelling out her own company policies to her while calling her “honey”. Photograph: Bryn Lennon/AFP/Getty Imagesīeing corrected by less qualified men is a phenomenon reported by many women, particularly those with expertise in a male-dominated area. Tweeter Martin Betancourt offered her this generous advice: “Frst lesson in bicycling, keep your bike steady … whether fast or slow.”ĭutch Olympian and champion cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten. Women in a wide variety of fields can encounter this problem, as Olympic cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten discovered when she had a serious crash during the women’s road race in Rio.

When Mack fired back with further proof of her credentials, another male tweeter stepped in to instruct her: “Katie, as much as its hilarious, let’s not entertain the trolls.” Because it would have been too much to let the incredibly intelligent and qualified astrophysicist choose her own method of dealing with the problem. The man, not knowing when to quit, delete his Twitter account and reconsider his life choices, replied: “Then you should ask for a refund because they failed to teach you the most basics of science”.

This came only a month after astrophysicist Katherine J Mack tweeted her distress about the damage being caused by climate change, only for a male blogger to suggest: “Maybe you should learn some actual SCIENCE then.” Luckily, Mack had the perfect response:īut even her excellent retort wasn’t allowed to go unchallenged. When former aviation operations specialist and US Marine Corps veteran Rachel Fredericks, who suffers from PTSD, asked Trump what action he would take to “stop 20 veterans a day from killing themselves”, Trump’s immediate response was: “Actually, it’s 22.” Fredericks was left shaking her head as Trump cited statistics less up to date than her own. In recent months, there has been a spate of men stepping up to foist their own, less informed perspectives on far more qualified women.Īt a rally last week, Donald Trump got in on the act.