Every women who has ever had to bring their car into a mechanic has experienced a variation on this scenario: "Hey little lady, do you want me to call your dad or your husband to tell them all about what needs to be fixed on your car?" Frequently, I say, "No, why don't you tell me what's wrong with my car and if I don't understand, I'll let you know."
Thankfully, these well-meaning encounters are getting less frequent in my own experiences but I still am shocked when I have a "soft sexism" encounter in my daily life.
If sexism is valuing one gender (usually men) above the other, then soft sexism is putting this into practice in a well-meaning way. For example, if I were to say, "Women are more stupid than men," this would be sexist (and wrong). If a couple who were mortgage shopping had a meeting with an advisor who spoke to the man the entire time about variable rates and capped options and then benevolently patted the women on the back and told her, "you'll probably be more comfortable with this safe option," that would be soft sexism.
This older man meant well. He wasn't trying to be offensive to the woman by implying that she wanted the safe options. He genuinely believed that the man knew more about amortization than the woman. We did not use this mortgage advisor and we did not go with the safest option.
Soft sexism is a slippery thing to prove. If, as a women, you are offended by only being complimented on your appearance at work rather than your performance, you look like a whiner. Most women, when complimented by their boss, just say "thank you" and move on. How many men are complimented on their attire at work? As a young woman working at one of the pulp mills in town, I was called "Little Girl" for an entire summer by an old man who probably wasn't trying to insult me. I let it go for a month and then I called him on it where I very calmly told him, "I have a name you know."
"What is it?" he asked me. I had worked with him for a month and he hadn't bothered to learn my name. After that point, he called me by my given name for about half the time which I found a vast improvement to my working environment.
Soft sexism goes both ways. If you assume that a man knows (or cares) about the insides of cars then you are also practicing soft sexism. The same goes for "providing for the household."
Who wants sole responsibility of working and paying for all of the bills for an entire family? I don't.
Neither does my husband. So we share the responsibility for our house and family.
Are we a fully forward, gender neutral family? No. We still have blue jobs and pink jobs around the house. They just might not be a fully traditional split. The blue jobs in our house include doing most of the cooking, mowing the lawn, car things and getting items off of the top shelf. The pink jobs include plumbing related items, laundry, gardening, cleaning the bathrooms and any disgusting kid messes.
This split in house tasks came from our personal strengths. My husband is an exceptional cook whereas I am capable, but anxious, in the kitchen. I can clean up horribly disastrous bathroom incidents without dry-heaving, so those tasks typically fall to me.
Soft sexism exists everywhere and is a subtle beast. It's the assumption that I myself made in high school that only the "going-nowhere" boys went into the skilled trades. I was wrong.
All of those boys are now men making at least three times as much money as I do now with my undergraduate degree. Who's the dummy now?
Assumptions are always tricky.
Assumptions that you don't even realize that you are making are even more dangerous.
