What Is the Biggest Form of Sexism You've Encountered?

I've wanted to do this for a while, and I need your help. How has sexism played a role in your life? All points of view are welcome.

Yep. My dad ignored me because I'm a girl, but when this lady moved in with a son he payed attention only to the other kid just because he was a boy.

It wasn't exactly me, but it happened to my mom when she was in high school.
There was a guy in her Geometry class who was rather egotistical and one day they were talking and he said "I think God gave men the brains so that they go to work and women stay home to take care of the children. That's why guy are smart and women aren't." She replied with; "Then why do I have an A+ in this class while you have a D-?" x]

She said that that "inspired" her to rise above the egotistical pricks in her career field. Now, she gets paid more than most of the men in her company.

Not really about me..

These are mild in comparison to other friends of mine. I am often bullied by acquaintances (bullied as in made fun off, or treated less than) because I don't dress "like girls should". It also is related to making comments of me being sexually active that revolve around "Obviously you're so experienced because, apparently, that's something women do only after marriage. They're condescending in the tone and making "fun" of me being open about my sexuality.

The only time I've been treated right was one time in which I wore a dress. Everybody, and I mean it, was complimenting me, opening doors for me, and pretty much trying to reinforce the action by removing the mocking and making comments on how "I should dress like this because women should dress like this."

It angers me, because there are young college students, educated students, yet they are full of sexist and homophobic ideas and attitudes.

Observing this couple in a small town I lived in during my freshman year in college, a man ordering this women about, and the sheer look of terror on this young lady's face as he commanded her around the store. She was so quiet and did everything he said in silence, such as screaming at her for not bringing their discount card, or calling her the b word in every sentence randomly. I wonder what kind of fear he had built up in her entire life.
I saw the same couple the next week at the same store, and I went out to my car and found out he had his wife locked in the car so "she wouldn't cause too much trouble".
I confronted him and asked him why she would be causing any trouble in the store, and he replied only with incomprehensible remarks and slurs to me, getting in his car avoiding any argument.

It will guilt be forever that I didn't help her.

Daniel Tosh's rape "joke."

I guess I'd probably say within my line of work. I'm a health and life insurance broker and, I don't know about other companies and regional markets, but within mine, the field is very male-dominated. At the company that I actually just resigned from the other day, I was one of only four other women within the Colorado market. A lot of my male co-workers often spoke down to me as if I had no idea how to do my job without their help, and whenever I'd close a high-value sale, they'd attribute it to my being a "pretty young girl", rather than my skill or persistence. And then when the time came for us to discuss the Affordable Care Act since it's going to have a huge impact on our industry, the men treated us women as if we were too stupid to possibly understand the ins and outs of the law--even though we work in the industry. I could name more things, but that's basically the gist of it.

However, I was also the youngest person in the company (the second youngest person was 9 years older than me), so I attribute a lot of that to ageism in addition to sexism.

@ fen'harel.
I've never really understood the whole "you should dress like a girl" thing.

A teacher of DT (design and technology) in my school was fired recently because of all the complaints coming from girls from all years. He was extremely sexist, and wouldn't help out any of the girls during lessons. If we cut our fingers off with a saw, then we should go to another teacher because he wouldn't give us a second glance. He used all the boy's projects to put on display in the department, and would only ever send boys off to do design competitions.

It got bad personally two years ago, when I told him I wanted to choose DT as a subject for later in life. He told me I shouldn't, because there were better subjects for my talents, such as drama and cooking. At first I thought 'okay, well, there is a lot of truth in that. I'm not great at DT.' So I chose different subjects. Then I found out that he'd said the same to every girl in our year who wanted to take DT, and had only allowed the few who were children of teachers to go through with the boys. We all complained to the head of year, and to the head of school. It turned out he'd had complaints from girls from all the other years too, so he was eventually fired when they realised how sexist he was actually being. The girls who had really wanted to take the subject and had been turned down were then allowed to go through, but I chose not to. I took art and drama instead.

The worst part is probably that after that, all the boys who take DT tease the girls with sexist comments similar to the things he said. They like to tell every girl who turned down DT how they're typical wimps and should stay gluing and sticking in art and cleaning dishes in cooking. It's really disgusting that the boys think it's any more acceptable for them to make the comments just because they're not a teacher.

I've only witnessed one instance of sexism upfront (that is to say, with my own eyes as opposed to in the media) and strangely enough it was by a male teacher, in favour of females.

There was some sort of incident that happened at school (I actually forget what it involved), and students were being questioned about it, to get to the bottom of what actually happened. Interestingly, this particular teacher disregarded the accounts that the boys had given, and instead listened to all of what the girls had to say, because, quote, "girls don't lie". We were bewildered. It was almost like Poe's law, in that it was almost impossible to tell whether he was being serious or not, but the way he said it didn't feature a single hint of humour or irony.

He ended up losing his job later on after he used a racist slur against one of the black students, but that's a separate issue.

Alex; periphery.:

I've only witnessed one instance of sexism upfront (that is to say, with my own eyes as opposed to in the media) and strangely enough it was by a male teacher, in favour of females.

I don't consider against-male sexist behaviour to be 'sexism' - that sounds like a sexist incident based on a sexist belief, but that doesn't make it 'sexism'. Just as a white person might experience a racist person or circumstance, but is not a victim of 'racism'.
-isms are a lot more structural and involve uses of power and social relations that aren't reversed by one person or situation.

Edit: while making tea I reconsidered what I'd said. I suppose where there's a system and a dominant group has power (sorry, tautology) if that power is based on the group itself being oppressed in certain (harmful) ways, maybe that would justify -ism. For example, if a man is told he cannot cry because he is a man, he is clearly suffering the effects of a sexist system e.g. of sexism. (But is it enough for these 'oppressions' to merely be the direction to not resemble the subordinate group? Surely - though 'weighing' of suffering is inadvisable - you would still hold the subjugated group as the 'primary' sufferers, and the suffering associated with the dominant group's 'superiority' would merely be 'peripheral' suffering?) Hm. At any rate (in my opinion) it would still 'only' be where gender was invoked to uphold social sexism (which is, undeniably, set against women) not merely any circumstance where a male was unjustly targeted based on his gender.

I was walking with my friend johnathan and I was complaining about how if I didn't pass I couldn't go out for a sport and he was like "Well Girls can't do anything physical anyways, they're to dainty. They would break if a fly landed on them"So then I punched him in the gut, he was doubled over in pain and wouldn't talk to me for a week.

There was this guy in middle school who was seriously sexist and majorly egotistical and was not shy about talking about how girls couldn't think for themselves and whatnot. One day, he came up to me and said he asked himself out for me, because he knew I wanted to ask him, but I was too weak to do it myself. He got hit.

It wasn't me, but a close cousin of mine was called all kinds of names because she is transgendered. The sexist part was that her family kept saying things like 'why the hell would want to be a female?' like it was a bad thing to be a girl, and her dad even said, 'what's better than being a guy?'. It's sad that people in this day and age think in such an ignorant way.

I went on AskMen.com once, it was like entering a dark alternative reality. The worst forms of sexism, I think, are not a few, isolated men setting out to do unequivocally bad things to a few, isolated women out of hatred or resentfulness or just because they're bad people, they're the widespread, inescapable patterns of behaviour / thought, so it's hard to boil them / it down to isolated instances.

^ I've been on forums where the majority of users are guys, and there is a shit load of sexism on there! It was quite creepy...

Honestly, I find it pretty sexist that if I wear high heels, I get a lot better treatment from guys (holding doors open for me, letting me get on the bus first) than otherwise.

At work, my manager gave a math oriented task to a male coworker of mine because that was something "boys did," even though I had far superior math skills and the task fell under my domain. I was absolutely livid and raised hell about it, and my manager felt bad. I don't think he even realized what a sexist assumption that was. And I don't blame the coworker who took on the task; he didn't want it anyways and got caught up in my fury xD

I don't feel like I personally have experienced anything extraordinarily sexist. I mean, there have been numerous times when I was told not to handle a task of physical labour, simply because I wasn't 'as strong' as, say, a male classmate or coworker. I've never, ever had my intellect question on account of my gender, or had any comments made about my choice of clothing, style, mannerisms.

When my Mom was in high school, the girls weren't allowed to wear pants - not even during the winter! They had to wear skirts or dresses; and this was a public high school. Also, girls weren't allowed to take shop class, or any kind of technical class. They had to take typing, business, or home ec. On her behalf, I took shop class and technical drawing class for two years.

I agree with @ catinabottle here; Daniel Tosh's joke about rape was the most insensitive and disgusting thing I have heard him say yet.

Edited by an admin for bashing. Especially if you have to make jokes about rape. This whole victim shaming, 'rape culture' that we, as a society, have come to is really terrible.

In church, I was told I should never expect to be able to make decisions in my household and I could never teach a Bible class because I'm a woman. I was told my husband would be the head of the house and I would need to defer to his opinions on everything. I was 12.