Posting here today has had me thinking a lot about this now
This stuff probably tops the stuff I posted about earlier because I had to live with it and couldn't get away from it. I don't usually think of this stuff as the biggest form of sexism I've encountered, but it probably is...?
I'm at uni and basically in my first year I went into halls/dorms down at one of my university’s student villages and I had a really bad time of it there.
When I applied I was given the choice of living in a same sex or a mixed sex flat, and I was wary that I sometimes don't get on with other girls so I put mixed to play safe in that respect. When I got to uni it turned out the flat I’d been assigned to had five rooms, so I figured it’d be a 2:3 ratio. It ended up being a 1:4 ratio with me being the ‘mix’ in the mixed gender flat (the hilarious thing about it though was that downstairs some poor guy was the only guy in a flat of girls, so it wasn’t even a case of the numbers not letting me be in a flat with a 2:3 ratio.) honestly though for the first week it was fine. The first night it was only me and one of them. The next day when they all moved in there were still no real problems. On the like third day, one of them, the nicest of them came to my room that morning and asked me if I was okay and was really nice about me being the only girl and told me if they could ‘make it easier for me’ then to let him know. A few days after that someone made a joke about me ‘being in my natural habitat’ while I was making cooking myself dinner. And basically it just went downhill from there.
It wasn’t just me that they did that kind of thing with though. They’d leave like rotten food around for our cleaners to deal with (one of them apologized to me for having to live there) even though they only swung by once a week and that wasn’t in their job description. Once when I spoke up about the mess I got told it was my job to sort it – 'haha only joking!!' They also used to invite this girl over, and I think she really liked one of them, and he’d sweet talk her into cleaning the bathroom because that was ‘a girl’s job’ (the comment was shouted so I could hear it in my room, and I think that was because I point blank refused to clean up after them). It was just a really gross, uncomfortable environment to live in and I had very little support from the people who were meant to help. I ended up having to move back home before the year was even out (about six/seven weeks early) because I just couldn't live there any longer.
I got compensation off the uni though so I guess that's something? (That was mostly for this demonic mold that was making me quite ill though I think.)