WomensStuff

Open misogyny has been rare among coworkers. Even though I worked in tech (in marketing, not the actual tech side), most of the guys in tech were socially awkward nerds that held a certain charm for me. The closest I got to an open misogynist was from that sector of the tech types (this predates the modern day techbrodude thing) who were day traders and convinced they were going to strike it rich. You know the kind: buy (second hand) sports cars, dress in flashy clothes, etc. and think they're God's Gift to Women because they flash around a few bills (though it's funny when you observe that most of the bills in their wad are blue fivers, with just a small sandwiching of twenties on each side). They tended to have regressive, but not openly misogynistic, attitudes toward women.

No, what I tended to encounter was far more subtle and thus harder to fight. An open misogynist I can cut apart verbally like I'm a surgery professor teaching anatomy by cutting open a cadaver to show what's inside. And if it comes to an HR intervention, I'll have plenty of people (plus my own recording) of the incident to show that I was not the aggressor. What's harder to fight is the little microaggressions. (And for the record I don't consider holding the door open a microaggression.) Things like the "of course" when first introduced to a new employee as being in marketing. Or how the women techies tended to get relegated to testing. Or the "jokes" about how they'd have a joke to tell, but they're in mixed company. That sort of thing. That's far more difficult to fight without coming across as shrill.