Rep. Tim Ryan’s challenge of the female Democratic minority leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, has ignited charges of sexism.

“This thing where an obscure male backbencher thinks he deserves to replace the most accomplished woman in Congress is how sexism works,” said Ian Millhiser, justice editor at ThinkProgress, a website affiliated with the Clinton-linked Center for American Progress.

“I’m genuinely curious if anyone can argue why Tim Ryan should replace Pelosi other than ‘she was in the job when something bad happened,’” Millhiser added.

Twitter user @shoutingboy added, “I will say this, if a Republican man orchestrated four straight GOP wins in congress everyone would say he’s brilliant…but when a Democrat woman does it everyone acts like it’s no big deal.”

Pelosi (D-Calif.) has led Democrats in the House for 14 years. Ryan (D-Ohio) announced last week that he intends to challenge her leadership — and is doing so by running on a platform of connecting to working-class Americans whom Democrats have neglected.

“We’ve got to address that, and we got to address it quickly. And these are working-class people,” Ryan told NPR in an interview.

“They don’t want to get retrained, you know, to run a computer. They want to run a backhoe. They want to build things,” he added.