My colleague won't stop commenting on everything I need.

My assistant rolls his eyes at people and meeting.

My manager expects me to work 24-7.

Why does my coworker keep taking credit for all my ideas?

Have any wisdom for me?

Hi, I'm Alison Green.

Welcome to the Ask a Manager podcast.

Some of you may know me from my website, aska manager.org, where I answer daily questions

from readers about how to navigate all sorts of sticky situations with coworkers, managers, and

employees. Each week on this show, I'll take calls and talk directly with listeners about the

toughest, most frustrating, or just plain weirdest work predicaments they're facing. I'll help you

figure out what to do and say to handle these situations successfully and get the outcomes you want.

So let's get started. This week, we're going to talk about mansplaining. If you're not

familiar with the term, it was coined to describe what happens when a man gives a woman an unrequested explanation of something, usually in a condescending way, on a topic that she has more expertise on than he does.

Imagine a man explaining menstrual cramps to a woman without any invitation to do so, and you've

got the idea. It has its origin in an essay by writer Rebecca Solnit, who described how a man

at a party, upon learning what she writes about, kept condescendingly explaining her own book

that she had written to her.

That's mansplaining, the assumption that a woman will need something explained to her,

no matter how much expertise she has on the topic.

And while sure, sometimes this might happen with the genders reversed,

the idea is that it happens all the time to women, really disproportionately often, to the

...