I think the problem a lot of people here are having is that they're assuming the accusation is active sexism. Like it's a cognitive decision to go "phht, what would she know, she's a woman".

I suspect the vast majority of mansplaning scenarios are subconscious. They probably don't even know that's what they're doing abs would never see themselves as being sexist. I think that's because everyone sees the word "sexist" and associates it with clichéd extreme sexism, like cat calling, not wanting a Female pilot, ignoring their ideas in meetings etc.

The thing about subtle unconscious bias is that you're almost never aware you're doing it, but it still has similar effects on the affected group.

The healthy thing to do is to listen to the person it's affecting, analyse the scenario, and reflect on if it's something that you, or people you know, might have been doing without realising.

they are really just pedantic twits that very well could have commented the same stupid thing to a man.

Yes, but men experience this at a slightly lower rate.

So if an astronaut man were to get, say, 10 of these comments, while an astronaut woman gets 15 of these comments, it's fair to infer that about 5 out of the 15 comments wouldn't have been made to a man. Problem is that you can't exactly tell which 5 they are. But you know it's happening.

Of course, if the ratio is actually closer to 50 versus 10 comments like this, then you've got a pretty good sense that 80% of the pedantic overexplainers-to-an-expert are doing it because the original poster is a woman.

And one thing you find for these types of examples with a woman who has clear, unmistakable, objective indicators of expertise (literal astronaut) in the topic at hand is that the ratio is much higher for women than men, in a way that might not have been obvious for lesser credentials (like a high school science teacher). But yet, it still happens.

It's a name for a phenomenon that has existed for a long time. It's a concise way to describe that phenomenon, and I still think it's a good word to have in the vocabulary.

(New person here)

The big issue is that we don’t see men being pedantic towards other men at nearly the same rate. Absolutely it happens, but there is definitely a problem with men not respecting women specifically.

Part of it, I think, comes from social conditioning and it’s more of a reaction than anything on purpose when it comes to a large subset of the people doing it. Even still, it’s important to gender it at least sometimes to highlight why we might be doing it and to give us the correct thing to reflect on. I’ve done it before where I could say it to a man but I realized that I what I was saying or doing was fueled, at least in part, by some internalized misogyny. Knowing that has helped me get to it before I do something stupid.

Sure, but being an arrogant prick that thinks they're smarter than anyone else, regardless of gender, is already a thing that should be derided. Having only a single or few instances of this behavior being aimed at women as an example of his arrogance may mistakenly lead one to attribute that to misogyny instead of a general prickishness behavior, sure. But that's a perfectly understandable assumption to make in that situation and the mistake of calling them the wrong kind of asshole, I feel, is less of a concern than him, indeed, being an asshole.