In my early twenties I worked in the main office for a company that staffed medical imaging personnel (e.g., x-ray techs and sonographers) to local facilities. It was an office full of ladies and only one guy, and this guy was a jerk. His job was to handle the scheduling for the techs. He had been a daytrader on Wall Street but couldn’t handle the stress, so I guess he was slumming it with us for a while. He was a very intense dude with no chill, and he clearly had a pretty low opinion of women in general.

Anyway. One of our ultrasound techs was heavily pregnant and feeling unwell, so she called out sick one morning. And this douchebag went on a huge angry rant about how being pregnant isn’t a sickness, it’s not an excuse to miss work, his wife never took a sick day during her pregnancy, and how the tech was creating more work for him to have to scramble to find someone to replace her at the last minute. And nobody said anything - all of the other ladies in the office were just silent. And I guess my New Jersey came out, because I told him the fuck off. Told him that he has no goddamn idea what it’s like to be pregnant, and no right to judge her for taking a sick day, and he’s in an office full of women, so he should be respectful and keep his sexist tirade to himself because nobody wanted to hear it.

I was so sure I was going to get reprimanded for that, but a bunch of the women in the office thanked me for saying something. I was really surprised! Even my boss said something like “yeah, you probably shouldn’t have done that, but I’m glad you did.”

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.

Old manager I had a few years ago. Always ranting on about how men’s rights were being taken away, and when you asked him how he’d talk about men being accused of sexual assault cos of “things that happened years ago”. Was horrible about his wife who he said controlled him, for example by taking him out for dinner that she paid for (???). Everything was the fault of feminists, and he was adamant that there’s no underrepresentation of women in high level management. Unsurprisingly he wasn’t a good manager.

I’ve been lucky not to work with any outright misogynists. Bit there’s a lot of subtle stuff that men aren’t even aware they are doing (interrupting women in meetings, dismissing ideas when first presented by a woman, etc.).

One of my closest colleagues at work believes women are biologically suited to manage the home. He also believes any portrayal of women as having qualities traditionally attributed to men (as physically strong, as leaders, as warriors or soldiers, etc.) is misogyny - he argues it devalues femininity by implying women have to be masculine to be valuable or equal to men.

I used to be a misogynist but after learning more and educating myself I stopped being misogynistic and became a misanthrope.

I actually haven’t had one yet. Granted I’ve only been of working age for 2 years…

have had a customer make a comment or two, but I’ve also had customers with dementia so bad theyll put a shopping basket down at my feet while I’m standing right in front of them like they’re a character in the Sims