OPINION: One of the weird things about being a mother is witnessing the casual sexism of the schoolyard – and how it can somehow become a marker of your own uncoolness when you snort at it.

First there were the "your mum" or "yo mama" jokes which are still a mark of social currency in our neighbourhood. Like, "Your mum's so stupid she puts lipstick on her forehead to make up her mind. Your mum's so stupid, she stared at a carton of apple juice for 12 hours because it said concentrate."

Women who’ve spent decades crawling towards equality are now being slurred as 'Karen' because they speak up.

Hahahaha wut?

The prefix mum before anything, of course, instead of meaning Mighty Provider, means lame, dumb, socially unacceptable. Nothing new there. But this "Karen" thing really made me laugh. This, apparently, is what Gen Z has branded Gen X – the Karen Generation – and it means the kind of woman who calls the cops on neighbours. Now as a child of the 70s, I'd like to say – hey, thanks for noticing us!

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Finally, we have a moniker to slot in between boomers and snowflakes. But as a Gen X'er I also cannot help but be struck by the irony. Because isn't it a bit funny that women who've spent decades crawling towards equality are now being slurred as women who make their dissatisfaction known? Who question authority?

When I type the word Karen into a search engine, the first definition is: "Karen is a mocking slang for an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman." In the illustration alongside, Karen has no face: simply a blonde bob with these words written on her face: "Can I speak to the manager?"

Yeah, I get that this type of character is annoying. I get that white entitlement deserves to be repeatedly lampooned, punctured, eroded. When privilege is twinned with ignorance – say with anti-vaxxers or climate deniers, the homophobic, sexist, racist, it can be particularly heinous. I also know what it can be like to work in service industries and deal with ridiculous requests and

complaints. But where is Ken? Why, as with slut, whore, bimbo, is there no real male equivalent?

According to the top definition of Urban Dictionary, Karen gives raisins to kids on Halloween (admittedly poor form), drives an SUV to car-pool kids to soccer (seems a minor crime, especially since Ken is probably off at work) and posts workout selfies (don't blokes do this?). She drinks wine with other mothers at book club (ummm). She apparently talks to the manager at Burger King when they forget a ketchup packet (yes, this lacks proportion).

Illustration by Simon Letch

So let's talk about this manager thing for a moment. It's a funny stereotype, but after spending a couple of decades studying how loath we have been historically to recognise women's authority, how reluctant we have been to appoint them to positions of power, how often patriarchal mores can cast legitimate complaints and concerns as shrill whining and trivial when aired by women, this part of the Karen meme sticks in my craw: she is a woman who challenges authority.

First of all, there is abundant evidence that women don't complain enough – especially when it comes to sexual assault, rape, domestic violence, harassment, discrimination, and now we want to parody those who do? (Only one in four women complain to employers after being sexually harassed in the US).

My Millennial colleagues tell me there is a "spectrum of Karens" and not all complaints are Karen-ish, but a woman who has been ignored in the workplace, and pawed in the streets may not take kindly to being ripped off in a shop either. It can take years for some women to find their voice. To be able to calmly challenge authority, to be comfortable expressing a righteous anger, to protest piggish behaviour and poor treatment, to desire power to shape their lives. The lead character in Rachel Cusk's Transit, for example, found a determination to stop being so passive suddenly emerge when she began renovating her house, insulating her floor boards in an attempt to stop hostile downstairs neighbours thumping them with brooms.

She writes: "I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal story teller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage."

Women are told to resign, not to rage. To be compliant; defiance is not the norm. So to parody women who complain only adds to the sense they'd be foolish to speak up.

The fact that Ken is absent as an entitled stereotype is even odder when you consider men often complain more than women. An Ecuadorean study found female consumers were less likely to complain than male. (One Swedish study found women make more complaints than men when it came to medical malpractice, but they also had more complaints upheld than men.) Research by

Qudini, a London "customer experience management platform", found that while women were more likely to have poor in-store experiences – far worse experiences with "rude or unhelpful staff" – men are more likely to complain directly to a staff member and on social media, while women complain to friends.

And, here we go – more men than women requested to speak to a manager. But it's the women we make fun of. Men assert, women whinge. Men point out problems, women are being Karens. Florence Nightingale was a Karen: privileged, annoying to anyone content with the status quo, and insisted on seeing the manager – for her, government ministers, flooding them with complaints in the form of pie charts and entire new models of military medical systems. The second wavers – the women's liberationists had no truck with politeness, with queues and submission. They marched, called for the managers, demanded change, and ran in greater numbers for office, seeking not to access, but possess power.

The world has spun on the force of Karens who seek to challenge the authority of those more powerful, but less competent than them. Female dissatisfaction is the petrol that has fuelled every inch of progress of the women's movement. (And yes, long stretches of this movement have been too white, and lacking intersectionality, the voices of many women of colour and differing abilities and cultures have been excluded, and this remains a problem today. White women have hogged the microphone for too long and been ignorant about the impact of this.)

Could it be that women are more noticed when they complain? That we see blokes assert views so often it's normal? Or could is it that people are less tolerant of complaints by – or criticism by – women? Think of a recent study by Martin Abel, an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College, which was published in the Institute of Labor Economics late last year. This found that both men and women react more negatively to women bosses who criticise them – even when the feedback is precisely the same as that given to them by men.

Abel surveyed 2700 people and found "criticism from female managers doubles the share of workers not interested in working for the firm in the future and leads to a 70 per cent larger reduction in job satisfaction than criticism from male managers". Abel found that men will dismiss the criticism from women as less valid and less accurate, while women didn't. The one hopeful finding? Those less likely to dismiss women were younger generations.

Anyway so I delivered a monologue on the "Karen" to my 13-year-old this week when she was sitting in the back of the car. Staring out the window, she said simply: "I'm getting strong Karen vibes."