Phone Number of the Day: Swedish Workers Union Opens Mansplaining Hotline
Tired of “mansplaining” in the workplace? Well, if you live in Sweden, you can get a little relief from the tireless, know-it-all attitude of chauvinistic co-workers.
With a new mansplaining supportline, Sweden’s largest Union, Unionen, has opened phone lines to all members when “male colleagues give them unsolicited lectures on things they already understand,” reports The Independent.
Unionen launched the service on Monday to their 600,000 members, who will be able to call “from 10am to 4pm everyday for a week as part of a campaign to highlight and stamp out the insidious and damaging practice.”
"The hotline will advise upset and frustrated callers on what action they should take next, and aims to help them move on. But there are no set answers, instead the people staffing the line will have the freedom to say what they want, based on their own experiences."
The organization defines "mansplaining" as when “a man explains something to a woman without being asked, particularly something which she might already know more about than the man.”
The Independent did a little more digging and reports, “A study by the American Psychological Association found that men ‘tend to overestimate their intelligence to a much greater extent than women’ and showed that ‘self-assurance in men grows with age.’”
So, gross dudes operating under the assumption that they know more than women, time to give it a rest.