A few years ago, I was a research engineer at a medical device company. It was my job to find new ways to detect medical conditions and make existing devices smaller, more accurate or more reliable.

I had both a desk and a workbench. I spent a good deal of time in meetings where idea people would regularly discuss the state-of-the-art and opportunities for R&D. A guy named Ivan was often invited, since he liked to read popular science magazines and propose working with the latest discoveries or inventions. He was good at sounding smart.

Everyone assumed he was qualified, and he often agreed to take on some pretty advanced research. I liked him well enough.

One day, I was at my bench tuning an RFID antenna on a prototype sensor patch as Ivan walked by. He said, “Hey Kenzi, what are you working on, a hobby project?”

This confused me a bit, as it was the middle of the day and I was at my own workbench with the usual piles of dismantled medical devices and company-stamped schematics.

“I— what? This is my desk. I’m just doing my job.” I gestured to my name tag on the desk, “I'm tuning this antenna on one of our prototypes.”

This got his interest. He came over and looked at the layout. “Oh that looks like a spiral antenna. Antenna tuning is a black art, it's very difficult to do right and it depends on what kind of antenna it is.”

I put down my tweezers, looked him in the eye and said, “Yes. I know. It's a loop antenna, not a 'spiral antenna’. See, there's a via to the other side that closes the loop.”

He squinted at the circuit and disagreed, “noo, I'm pretty sure that is just a spiral. That's how it picks up radio, you see…”

I cut him off. I knew this game well enough, he was completely not registering anything I said, that I was 3 times his senior and 10 times more experienced. This kind of conversation happens fairly regularly; I don't look anything like the 10 other gray-haired white male engineers in the department, so I get a lot of men who assume I am a lesser engineer, or can't believe I'm an engineer at all.

“It isn't a radio antenna. It's inductively coupled, and it uses backscatter to communicate.”

“Nooo, Kenzi, that looks like the loop is open…”

“Look. Ivan. That's my name on the schematic. Same name as is on the desk. I designed this circuit, I know what kind of antenna I chose and how to tune it. I've built and tuned several of these already and they work.”

I guess he snapped out of it and realized what he'd done, “okay Kenzi, have a nice day!” And he walked out of the building. It was mid-day and he was carrying his backpack.

Apparently he had a habit of leaving early. I had no idea he worked in IT at the time, but he was so obsessed with R&D that he got himself transferred to an R&D office on the other side of the country. He ended up working for a friend of mine. He turned out to be an extraordinarily bad employee, taking an entire month to move and producing zero work for a few months after. It turns out this is why he was transferred — no manager had ever seen him do any actual work.

So I told my friend the mansplaining story. He decided it was better to just fire Ivan than pawn him off on another manager. And from that day on, I put my name directly on the final PCB designs so there is no question it was my design.

Unfortunately, mansplaining isn't always obvious like this. It's lots of little time wasters because men tend to talk down by default before they even consider what I already know. It's excluding and talking over me because they jump straight to answering novice questions they expect I will ask.

To avoid mansplaining, consider two questions:

• How much does she know about it?
• How much explanation does she actually need?