Are You Bropropriating? How Men Undermine Their Female Coworkers

Frequent and unnecessary interruption of female coworkers, often to explain issues they know more about than the interrupter, as well as outright usurpation of female workers’ ideas, are some of the major issues that are holding women back from professional advancement, Doug Richardson with Pam Woldow’s Edge International legal consultancy writes. He defines the terms for such behaviors – mansplaining, manterrupting, and bropropriating – and explain how they function to take advantage of cultural perceptions of male speech versus female speech. Manterrupting is about “power-tripping, marginalizing, demeaning or dismissing,” Richardson writes. “It turns collaboration into competition – competition in which women are put at peril.”