‘Mansplaining’ as the internet explains to you is a blend of ‘man‘ and the informal form ‘splaining‘ of the gerund ‘explaining’. It is a pejorative term defining a situation when a man comments on or explains something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner

Lily Rothman, of The Atlantic, defines it as ‘explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, and is often done by a man to a woman’

 Author Rebecca Solnit says this happens due to a combination of ‘overconfidence and cluelessness’

In an essay, ‘Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way’, written by Rebecca Solnit and published on TomDispatch.com on 13 April 2008, Solnit narrated an anecdote about a man at a party who had heard that she had written some books. Solnit was talking about her most recent, on Eadweard Muybridge, when the man cut her off midway, asking her if she had heard about a very important Muybridge book that came out that year. He had neither realized nor considered it to be Solnit’s work. 

Solnit did not use the word mansplaining in that essay, but she described the phenomenon as ‘something every woman knows’.

A month later the word appeared in a comment on the social network LiveJournal. Feminist bloggers made it popular, soon mainstream commentary was using the word mansplaining regularly.

The New York Times included mansplaining as one of its words-of-the-year, 2010. The word then got nominated in 2012 for the American Dialect Society’s ‘most creative word of the year’. In 2014 online Oxford Dictionaries added this word to their list.

Journalists have used mansplaining to describe the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, President Donald Trump, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, actor Matt Damon and many more.

However alternate voices have questioned the fairness of it, given the intrinsic gender bias and negative connotation of this word. Many have bemoaned that its misappropriation had diluted the original meaning. Mansplaining has also engendered parallel constructions such  as womansplaining, whitesplaining, rightsplaining,

Kim Goodwin, the author of the bestselling book, ‘Designing for the Digital Age,’ has succinctly summarized mansplaining in a simple chart, which went viral almost immediately. 

This is as far as the global perspective is!

What about the India scenario then? 

How aware are we? Are we calling out enough when it happens to us?

Or are we simply conditioned to take it in our stride, shrug it off and move on?

Are we simply inured or are we willing to nip it in the bud?

Are we having enough exchanges on the same? Or are we choosing silence over  messy confrontations?

It has been IWI’s endeavor to bring stories that matter to you, me, and us. This Friday, at 6pm let’s get talking about ‘How do women manage mansplaining while managing careers’. 

It is not easy. 

It is not difficult either. 

It starts with apt conversations

But when we share our collective takeaways, we empower ourselves even more.

To Open Chats! To viable solutions!