(I read at the end of such a testimony recently a phrase I had to read a few times to decipher it: “a-women, a-men!”.)

I will underscore the fact that this is not limited to men. I had a woman once ask if she could get a second opinion (about her iPod) “you know, from one of the guys?”. Luckily my guy-coworkers are awesome and, as I said in my best plastered grin, “Awesome Coworker Who’s Male, could please help this woman?”, he gave me a side long glance & said to her, “She’s the one who knows all the stuff about these things. If she told you it, it’s true.”

I wonder how often Danica Patrick‘s been told things about cars by people who don’t know her from Eve.

Thankfully, I’m an uppity-enough woman that I often call these dudes (not all men, of course, but more than enough of them) on the condescension (no idea if that’s spelled correctly). And, as was described in the link, they do sometimes turn ashen. Or their faces fall like a child told that they have to return all the Christmas gifts that they’ve just opened.

Puts me in mind of the time when I was party to a discussion about communications satellites (goodness only knows how the topic came up) when I was attending community college many years ago. One of the males in the conversation said something about geosynchronous orbits, then turned to me and started to explain, like he was talking to a five-year-old, what that was. When I said that it was fine, that I knew what a ge0synchronous orbit was, the poor man’s face fell and he said, “Oh.” I almost felt bad about taking the wind out of his sails, he seemed so disappointed. Almost.

But some men know that we know what we are talking about. I was engaged in an argument (can’t even remember the issue now) with another man in the same venue as the above conversation…it was the campus newspaper office where I was on staff. This time it was an older man, one of the photographers for the student paper. He kept talking over me, not letting me get a word in at all. I finally lost my temper a bit and told him he needed to at least let me get a full sentence out. His answer: “No. If I let you say anything, you’ll win the argument.”