Thank you, academia, for proving what I always suspected was true—the gender revolution cannot happen as long as men are douchebags to women. The study “Marriage Structure and Resistance to the Gender Revolution in the Workplace” made the following findings:

We found that employed husbands in traditional marriages, compared to those in modern marriages, tend to (a) view the presence of women in the workplace unfavorably, (b) perceive that organizations with higher numbers of female employees are operating less smoothly, (c) find organizations with female leaders as relatively unattractive, and (d) deny, more frequently, qualified female employees opportunities for promotion.

I wasn’t able to read more than the abstract, but Jezebel had a little more information about this study by Harvard, NYU, and the University of Utah:

They presented male employers with identical job applicants—same experience, same qualifications, same resume—except one was named Dave and the other Diane. Then men in traditional marriages rated “Diane” significantly lower than Dave. Because, you know, vagina. Every woman has felt that—that moment when you can see a man’s engagement switch off, and realize that he will never take you as seriously as he would if you came back with a chest-merkin and a handlebar mustache. But it’s an almost impossible feeling to quantify, and an even harder one to communicate to people who have never felt it. An argument that can be vaporized with an emphatic enough “nu uh!” is a difficult argument to win.

You all are quite smart, so you know my full name is not Joshua. But this has not been the case in several circumstances, like every time a guy has called me at work and asked for “Mr. Sanders.” In fact, one sheriff—who had met me in person—refused to spell my name right, even though we had an email correspondence dating back to 2005.

As Jezebel points out, there’s nothing wrong with choosing to be a housewife or being a woman in a traditional (some read this as antiquated) marriage. The problem is that patriarchal beliefs don’t seem to have room for women to be equal at work while also being submissive at home. It’s troubling to see the double standard so clearly for women, though, who are at once penalized for getting ahead at work, even when it’s harder for them to do so, and praised for being independent even though it means they probably don’t have time for relationships and therefore, can’t be in one of those “traditional marriages.”

Do you encounter male condescension at work? Does it come from men in traditional marriages—which I assume means partnerships in which women don’t work? Was it verbal or in the form of failing to promote you? I was trying to figure out if I ever had this experience with women being condescending, too, because I wasn’t operating according to the corporate culture the way they deemed I should. I think I can count more women like that on both hands than I can men—but that might just be my experience.

Previously: On Confidence and Self-Advocacy, When Men Get Credit for Inventing the Internet