Amidst an intense cross-examination in the San Diego Superior Court House, Madeline Poncey (12) impeached a witness, essentially pointing out something that was inconsistent from their affidavit.
Feeling proud of the hours of work she put in just to perfect every line, she walked away with the rest of the team who was congratulating her on a job well done. Poncey said that she felt confident. Then, a male attorney coach from the opposing team gave some undue criticism.
“He told me that my tone was completely unprofessional and that he thought that I was way too emotional,” she said. “He also said that I wasn’t going to score well in the competition if I was too emotional. So I just took the criticism, I smiled and waved.”
The scoring attorneys, however, didn’t feel the same way as the male attorney coach; they gave her a perfect score for her performance.
Mansplaining is a phenomenon that Poncey, and women alike, encounter in their day-to-day life.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the act of men explaining something to a woman, in a condescending manner, often unsolicited and without credibility, is colloquially referred to as “mansplaining.”
Chelsie Smith, a PhD Candidate at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University stated in the paper: “‘Well, actually’: investigating mansplaining in the modern workplace,” that more than 95% of their female respondents reported having experienced at least some form of mansplaining in their workplace.
Dr. Nicole Dular, an assistant professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame of Maryland University, said that when men mansplain something to a woman, it is a way of limiting the woman’s power in society as a result of cultural tendency and gender roles.
“The heart of [mansplaining] is knowledge,” she said. “Knowledge is a form of social and political power, so [when men] deny women of roads to knowledge, it is treating them as though they do not know things, which lowers their credibility in a lot of ways, and if we as women need credibility in order to move about the world in practical ways, mansplaining is really detrimental.”
For Lana Pham-Ngyuen (12), being ASB president came with its fair share of unwarranted and unappreciated comments from her male counterparts.
When planning Homecoming, Pham-Ngyuen said that she couldn’t shake some of the intrusive opinions from her younger male peers. Often, she found that they would attempt to explain how best to plan, despite her three years of experience in ASB.
“[I appreciate when] people take initiative, but when this happened, I had already been in ASB for three years, so I had experienced [planning] quite a few Homecomings and larger events,” she said. “So the constant trying to tell me what to do and trying to get me to do things their way, even though they’ve never actually experienced [planning] a Homecoming, felt like a constant nagging feeling and it was making me second guess myself at the same time.”
Not only did Pham-Ngyuen find herself second guessing her ideas, she also said she felt silenced in a room where student voices mattered the most. She said that as a female, she sometimes allowed herself to remain silent in deference to the males in the room.
“I wouldn’t voice my opinion because I felt like I had to let the guys say it because they were the ones that were supposed to be right,” she said. “Since the loudest voice wins, most of the time I felt like I had to be quiet so that it wouldn’t look like I was repeating what they were saying and not creating an original idea.”
Similar to Pham-Nyguen, Julia Smith (12) has experienced this, being on the Robotics team: where girls are the minority. She said during one of their meetings was the first time she noticed how harmful the problem of mansplaining was.
“My first year on the Robotics team I was trying to drive the robot with my code that I just uploaded and I think there were like a gazillion errors,” she said. “This guy came up and pushed me to the side and kept pointing out all the different errors, and I was like, ‘well duh, there’s obviously errors because I can read the problems in the code.’ It’s one thing if they try to come up to help you, but in that instance, when he physically put his arm out in front of me and took control over my code, it put me in a mindset that maybe I can’t solve this problem or I really will need help when I don’t.”
Smith said that instances like these caused her to doubt herself and not trust her skills and intuition.
“[Mansplaining] affirms the fact that you don’t know something, and it puts you in this perpetual state where if you’re looking at a future project or challenges, you think that ‘maybe I do need help, maybe I do need support to figure out this problem, and maybe I should go back to that person because they’ll tell me how to do it correctly,’” she said. “But, anything that is research-based, and especially in robotics, you need to kind of try things out yourself and it’s important to be independent and learn from your own mistakes in that way. When somebody mansplains something to you, when they point out the obvious in something, it perpetuates that idea that you can’t do something without someone else’s support.”
Despite the general idea that mansplaining is annoying, it can have its most adverse effects when looked at in women’s status later on in their careers. In a Michigan State University paper, “MSU experiment explains mansplaining and its impact,” video footage was described to depict that after being spoken to condescendingly by a man, women spoke fewer words, whereas the men were unaffected.
Chelsie Smith said that what can start as condescending explaining in high school, can translate to harm in the workplace. She said that we as a society should take the phenomenon of mansplaining more seriously as it can cause serious harm to women, more so than just silencing their ideas.
“The overall impact of our findings is that we want workplaces – employers, executives, managers, and human resources teams – to take incidents of rudeness like mansplaining seriously,” she said. “Because the term has become popular, and kind of flippant, in its everyday usage, there’s a real danger that the powers that be within organizations won’t take it seriously. If they don’t take it seriously, then nothing will get done about it and it will continue, even if it is causing harm. The harm doesn’t stop just because bosses don’t believe it exists.”
Not only does she say that institutions should take mansplaining more seriously, but also that it pushes women out of spaces and perpetuates the idea that they need help from men, even when they might know more.
“Mansplaining silences women and tells them that their contributions and opinions aren’t welcome,” she said. “If women believe that their presence, thoughts, and ideas aren’t welcome in particular environments, then only men will occupy those environments. Mansplaining is a form of reinforcing the self-doubt and self-limitation in women that can keep them from speaking up when their voices and contributions really are necessary. It’s a form of social discipline that maintains the social and cultural capital that men have over women.”
Furthermore, Dr. Dular said that the act of mansplaining can limit knowledge from the larger society because women don’t feel as if they have a voice.
“Especially when a man has demonstrated this kind of pernicious or willful ignorance about the fact that a woman is more knowledgeable about something, it [breeds the idea that] if nobody’s gonna listen to you, why talk in the first place?” she said. “That can be bad if you zoom out on a kind of communal level, because then we’re really missing out on communal knowledge. Knowledge that women have is not going to be spread across the community because they don’t want to be speaking up because it’s a waste of their time because no one’s going to listen.”
However Dr. Dular suggests that a technique called echoing is a good way to limit the effect of mansplaining. Echoing is when others reiterate what a woman has said. For example, when a man tries to mansplain to a woman, others who are privy to this conversation would say things like “she already said that.”
“Before we tell women that this phenomenon of mansplaining is their fault, and it would be fixed if they were just more assertive, echoing is one thing that we really need to think about building solidarity,” she said. “I know that there are some men who want to be allies and help with this kind of phenomenon so the solution there is not to put all of the onus on the woman who’s being mansplained to and to speak up for herself, but it’s to build this community of resounding support. If you’re taking it seriously and you want to be an ally and work towards not being a mansplainer, you should assume that women actually know more than you.”
Being at the top of their games in Mock Trial, ASB, and Robotics, Poncey, Pham-Ngyuen and Smith are not strangers to the not-so-silent battle of having to defend their worth in the face of a man who thinks he knows more. As such, they have found ways to combat the phenomenon of mansplaining.
That idea of a resounding community – a community that recognizes mansplaining as a problem – manifests itself specifically with how Pham-Ngyuen approaches mansplainers.
“I look towards the other female figures in my class and specifically those very vocal individuals,” she said. “Lucy Sullivan (’23), in particular, wasn’t afraid to state her opinion and when she knew something needed to be changed, she knew that what she had to say deserved to be heard as well. So being able to see other girls being confident while also understanding that I don’t have to fit myself into a certain box just so that these other people’s opinions can be heard, was what helped.”
Smith said that she found it hard to ask questions in the Robotics setting, in fear of being explained something in a condescending way. So finding an empowering community, grounded in confident women, was a solution to the problem of mansplaining for her.
“The Society of Women Engineers helps women to be able to engage in STEM with their peers, female mentors, and build up their own confidence so they can tackle mansplaining down the road and gain that strength,” Smith said. “We need to empower women and their voices and girls at a young age so when they come across these experiences, it doesn’t knock them down. Mansplaining is going to happen, they’re going to experience guys telling them that there’s things that they can’t do, but we just have to make that support system for them so that they can grow and reach their fullest potential.”
Although Smith said that she found that the comments from her female peers tended to be more constructive than her male peers, the problem of mansplaining has been less frequent due to more consciousness on the harms of the topic.
“Girls feel like they want to help you with this issue, and that’s just what I’ve had as a general experience,” she said. Personally, I feel like over the years, the guys on the team have become more supportive and they’ve recognized these issues a lot more, so I don’t think these problems are as frequent. We have a very supportive team, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that these are still issues that happen, especially with girls doing engineering.”
In Poncey’s case, she looks to her attorney coach for mock trial, Scott Taylor, who urges her to stay fervent in her cross-examinations.
“I told him all about the explanations that I had been receiving, and he said ‘that is not based in reality and the way that you’re cross-examining is totally fine,’” Poncey said. “It’s the way it needs to be done and he [urged me to] continue and have confidence. I don’t think he even gave me the chance to lose confidence because if I didn’t do a good cross-examination, he would just spend the next day being like, ‘hey, why didn’t you destroy that witness on cross? I know you have it in you.’ He taught us to not hold any punches, specifically when you’re being pressured to do so, and specifically when you’re a female attorney.”