How to Deal With a Manterrupter
Calling attention to the problem leads to better behavior all around
Ever since the term “manterrupting” was coined in a 2015 TIME article, people have argued that it’s not a thing. I’m here to tell you that it is. And not just on debate stages (see Biden and Sanders this past summer) — also in your office, and maybe even at your dinner table. It’s interrupting, except done by a man to a woman with wearying regularity.
Now, just in case you’re about to “manterrupt” me and mansplain why manterrupting isn’t a problem: there are many studies that show that, well actually, yes it is. Writer Jessica Bennett coined the term, and then went on to expand on the phenomenon, along with other gender-bias and sexism-driven behaviors in the American workplace, in her 2016 book Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace.
“Men speak more than women in professional meetings, they interrupt more frequently, and women are twice as likely as men to be interrupted by both men and women when they speak (and even more if they’re a woman of color),” writes Bennett, now gender editor-at-large at the New York Times, in her book. (Alas, there were no women of color — or any people of color — on last night’s debate stage.)
