Seven Studies That Prove Mansplaining Exists

Myra and David Sadker, not Mary. Their research was SO important!

Personally, my favorite thing about the word "mansplaining" is that -- finally! -- some of the intent behind the dismissive term "hysteria" has reached the 21st century and gone equal opportunity. My second favorite thing is the irony of that.

<p>It's great that this article proved itself in a sense. I'm an active member of the glbt community and don't see this harsh of backlash when someone posts an article, complete w citations. That's what gets me the most, people saying she's nit-picking, or making a mountain out of a more hill. We reject anything new and uncomfortable as a species, especially when we're told we're doing something wrong or that power must be shared. My favorite? "Yeah, Fox News was bad, BUT! This woman is obviously hating on men!"
Grow up. The world is changing and women are waking up.</p>

The article is 100% correct on the problems that are addressed, even the "surprise" twitter retweeting concern. While many of these I'm sure are done "innocently" (that is, not intending to exclude) it's indicative of a larger problem. Given the... colourful... discussions in the comments, I figured I'd at least do some clarification here. Or, at least what I would consider clarification about the whole "men can never interrupt a woman" thing some people seem to be saying here.

Disclosure: Yes, I am a guy... attempting to explain something, and yes I can see the irony in this.

First up, this applies to interrupting men and women, by both men and women. There are ways this can be done in a positive manner. This depends on what kind of interaction you are having, be it either a conversation, an (intellectual) discussion, or a period of instruction.

Conversations:

Don't interrupt to demean what the other person is saying.
Wait your turn before you reply. This is done through a natural break in the conversation (usually a brief pause). Bring up any points you have at this time.
If you must interrupt, it had better be for something important based on what was just said or just experienced.
If something requires explanation, do not treat your conversation partner as an idiot.

In short, during a conversation there is really no need to interrupt.

Instruction:

If someone is explaining something to you, either by way of expected instruction (such as a classroom, a speech, or a debate) or because of a question you asked, there is never a reason to interrupt until they are done. Save followup questions until after unless expressly permitted by the person speaking to ask at any time. If there is an issue related to time left, then interrupt but be respectful about it. This includes interviews. If the speaker is going off on a tangent, then interrupting to bring them back to the topic is also permitted, but again be respectful about it.

Again, there really is no need to interrupt here.

Intellectual Discussion:

This is the most lenient of the three. During a lively discussion, interruptions happen frequently as ideas are introduced and addressed. This does not give you free reign to talk about anything, and the person must still be permitted to continue the topic they were discussing, or address any problems introduced by said interruption. You must still be respectful and not demeaning to the individual.

If you must interrupt, take the "foot note" approach. If the comment you have to make would not fit in an appropriate-length foot note, then save the interruption until it is your turn to speak when you can address your concern in full.

Note that there is a difference between actively (as is the case from time to time, aggressively) disagreeing with someone says and being demeaning about what a person says.

Interruptions don't always have to be a disrespectful attack, but more often than not they are.

Nice hypothesis.

The explanation could be that men have more testosterone and will therefore interrupt more often. And men will have lower social skills because of the testosterone and therefore again interrupt more often. While men will be a bit more careful in interrupting other men as they could become angry and hurt them. And women will interrupt men less often for the same reason.

I know that this is a magazine. But the theory behind this could have been included in the articled anyway. I think your readers would appreciate and understand it.

As commonly used, "mansplaining" doesn't mean "interrupting," but "a man explaining."

It is a pejorative label used for a man explaining something so a woman can label it and dismiss it out of hand.

The next time a woman tries to explain something to me, I'm just going to dismiss it as "womansplaining" and watch her turn furious.

Excellent.

I can only agree with the comments that laud this article (and the comments) as a helpful experiment in and of itself.
Meaning that, despite doing little more than calmly citing empirical evidence of the maneuvers and micropower that men (however subconsciously, however innocently) use to gain greater voice than women, there are still male commenters unnecessarily rushing to men's "defense." Men: this is not an attack. The article, and the research it cites, goes to great length to show that this is largely the way we are socialized, and to help make us aware of our our behaviors. Nowhere does it say that men cannot voice their opinion; only that perhaps women should be able to as well in equal share.

Nor is this article or research "against men." It seems that, in general, always listening to the opinions and advice of the most brazen and socially-oblivious has not historically worked out in our favor. The tactics, it seems to me, work as well on all blowhards (of which the majority happen to be men, as research indicates). The research helps us question why we allow aggression to be prioritize our attention (men and women) in the first place.

I am guilty... It is interesting how deep the conditioning goes. I am really self-conscious even ashamed of how much I talk. All my life I have been hassled for it, punished and teased at school and by family, and ever since just ask workmates are culprits too but likes teasing me about it. Yet I continue to interrupt others, and sadly I think it is true that I do it to women. I find myself doing it by reflex, then feeling ashamed and guilty after. The feeling overwhelms my natural desire and values to consider others. I feel my ideas, point of view build up (very quickly before I can think of the other) then I'll be talking away, then after or at some point during it'll hit me that I've been over talking, performing, dominating, not considering the other person then I'll apologise. My practice through my whole life is to collect interesting facts and stories so that I can appear intelligent, interesting. As I grow older I'm more conscious of how deeply ingrained this is, and often feel helpless. My beautiful partner says it is her pet hate, gladly it hasn't grown to the point where the hate has tranferred to me. She is great at letting me know when I'm doing it with her, and occasionally with others. She is very good with the words mentioned in this article - "please don't interrupt me." "I haven't finished speaking" and "I do understand, no need to explain." I feel sometime hurt and ashamed when first interrupts me my interruption to assert her right to finish her point, but I adjust and settle a bit. I don't know all the sources of the impulses (and to go into them here would take too long and I have already don't ne of the essay some tease me about) but I can say that at least some of them come down to trying to prove my worth as a person because I don't feel valuable, I do feel deepy insecure pretending I'm smart is one way of warding off the feeling. I hope that slowly I'm learning to get over this. I give others their due respect.

Generally speaking, I agree with this and I also try not to interrupt people (men or women). But study #1 is not really a good study to support your idea of "mansplaining". Yes, women are interrupted more than men. But according to the numbers, women interrupt women more than men interrupt women. When men spoke, they interrupted other men almost as often as they interrupted women, making then nearly equal opportunity interrupters. (2 vs 2.6 is like a 30% increase) Men may have interrupted more people but it was not significantly biased against women. Whereas, when women spoke, they interrupted other women almost 3 times more often than they interrupted a man making then significantly more biased against women. (1 vs 2.8 is like a 180% increase) But some how this is only an issue about evil men mansplaining stuff to women? I don't see how that supports anything of the sort. It doesn't belong here.

The author, in the process of listing studies that say a lot of "what" without validating "conversation domination" as the why, entirely misses the confounding parts of everything she cites. It's totally possible that the reason women aren't retweeted as often on Twitter isn't because men are "given" anything, so much as that girls are retweeting guys but not retweeting girls. There's a handful of other explanations that make sense. What's more, bringing up little boys leaping out of their seats points to the role of gender nature. We can pull studies about neutral-raised kids picking blue trucks or pink dolls, but do we really believe that impulsivity is only acculturated (rather than somewhat inherent) in boys? Psychology suggests an interplay between the two. Is it mansplaining if a man is legitimately correcting a girl? What if she is uptalking? What if the problem is that girls aren't being confident enough in business meetings? Sure, that could be acculturated. But at what point shoukd we stop using ten confrontational, victim-posturing words to "keep [men] in check" and start simply explaining what we know and listening when others do the same? My point is this: men aren't actively keeping you from talking. This buzzfeed article makes a mountain out of a molehill, and in the process, obscures better types of feminism.

I'm not sure how boys voluntary speaking more often in a class room environment is relevant to this topic. Its definitely interesting, but nobody is really at fault. its not interrupting to participate in a classroom discussion (interrupting could happen within this, but the act of being involved isn't interruption itself.) The solution is for female students to ask more questions, not for male students to ask less. And if the gender of the tutor is a related factor, i'm not really sure how that can be tackled, other than with genderless robots.

Let's not get nasty and have an actual discussion. It seems to me that the first statistics (women interrupt men 1 time, men interrupt women 2.6 times, women interrupt women 2.8 times) are saying that people tend to interrupt a little less then 3 times per conversation. Clearly, there's a disparity when it's a man and a woman in conversation, but it doesn't necessarily mean men are "mansplaining." (it might, but not neccessarily).

The second "proof" seems like it assumes a little much to me, but doesn't seem contradictory, so I can accept that.

The third seems bogus. In professional meetings, don't men take up about 2/3 to 3/4 of the decision-making sector? I could be wrong, but if this is true, then they are interrupting as much as one would expect (75% or 3/4 of the time). Also, whenever anyone isn't involved in a conversation they will be less likely to be listened to because they weren't there.

The fourth "proof" seems to indicate a same-gender (or same sex, it's unclear where the correlation lies) preference. 150% more likely is about 4x as much. if the writer meant as likely, that would be 3x. Males definitely speak more often and for longer periods, but I'm willing to bet that controlling for the gender bias would make the stat way less striking (though potentially still weakly correlated).

The fifth just confirms the first proof. female doctors are twice as likely to be interrupted than males. (women interrupt men 1 time, men interrupt women 2.6 times, women interrupt women 2.8 times), meaning they are interrupted on average a little less then they would in normal conversation. Doctors are the experts, so it follows that they would be interrupted less then in average conversation, but people seem to interrupt one way or another.

The same argument for the third proof potentially applies to the sixth proof. Men are more likely to write for journals, so they get more space. Again, there's a definite hierarchy here, but I doubt it's due to "mansplaining." Could also relate to sex (or gender) disparity in the field.

The final "proof" seems at least reasonably acceptable, but based off the other "proofs," I doubt the legitimacy of it. Just my opinion.

There's a lot of real disparity in our world, I feel like this article is reaching (and stretching quite a bit) to find a disparity where it exists mildly at best.

Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this article and your collection of studies. I've have been interrupted on more than one occasion and have found that I have a gut reaction to "be polite" and ignore it and yet I feel bad about not sticking up for myself later on. I haven't read much about this topic so this was a really informative read. Thanks!

It seems that most of these studies seem to explainable with the hypothesis that men are selected for reproduction by expressing dominance, and that, while a generally desirable feature for security, can have drawbacks in other venues, such as intergender communication.

If mansplaining is a product of dominance, then perhaps it will remain until dominance is no longer a desirable feature.