It’s true that people who try to minimize what women are capable of look far more like distasteful cultural dinosaurs than they would have decades ago, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t subtle ways that biases against women still persist in today’s society.
And in some cases, these biases can have serious consequences as woman can miss out on opportunities for refusing to let others put their bodies under a microscope. And in even worse cases, their lives can be threatened when doctors dismiss their symptoms.
But even when the effects of these “traditional” attitudes are more annoying than they are perilous, that doesn’t mean they need to continue.
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And when a woman in the U.K. called out one of the problems she faced, she found herself dealing with another one in the form of what is commonly called mansplaining .
But as we’re about to see, the guy who thought he knew more than her simply ended up embarrassed.
On March 8, a woman named Lucy Greenwood described her brush with the common assumption among school staff that they specifically need to contact the mother whenever something is wrong.
And as we can see from her tweet, that bias persisted even after her daughter explicitly told them to call her dad because her mom was in the middle of a trial.
Although some commenters said that this only happens because the mother tends to be listed as the primary contact, other shared personal stories that suggested there isn’t always such harmony between how things are supposed to work and how they actually work.
In the midst of this discussion, one overly confident man said he always just answers his phone in situations like this and asked why she couldn’t do the same.
And he wasn’t so keen to listen when others said that just because that’s how it works at his job, that doesn’t mean lawyers can just interrupt a hearing to take a call.
After all, most courtrooms don’t allow cell phone use both due to the potential for interruptions and for unauthorized recordings.
But this man apparently didn’t want to let that fact get in the way of feeling right, so he doubled down.
As he put it, “Lawyers can ask judge for time and then call back.”
But whether he just dealt with an unusually lenient judge or he was just imagining how the world works, he soon met responses like this that further tried to explain he didn’t know what he was talking about.
But while none of these replies deterred him, Greenwood replied with a simple statement that quickly quieted him down.
Yes, it turned that she’s an arbitrator, which meant that she would be the equivalent of the judge during the hearing her daughter warned her school about.
Of course, he could’ve found that out himself if he looked at her bio, but I suppose it’s hard to do that when you’ve already decided you’re right.
As one user said , “Admirer of your impeccable timing Ms Greenwood. All he had to do was look up ‘arbitrator’ in his kid’s dictionary.”
