TYPICAL On my third day at work, a senior engineer rolled his chair over to my desk while I had a failing endpoint open in two windows, and explained to me what a REST API is.
I was, at that moment, debugging one. I have a computer science degree. I knew what a REST API was at nineteen. I nodded through the whole thing anyway, the way you nod at a waiter reciting specials you already read on the chalkboard, and when he rolled away I sat there with my face hot and my cursor blinking in the same broken function.
Call him Derek. My first read was the obvious one: he assumed I didn't know because I'm a woman. I still think that's true. My second read took longer to form, and I think it is also true. He explained it to me because explaining is the only way he knows how to feel competent in a room. The first read, on its own, handed me a villain. The second handed me something I could use.
He explains to everyone
After that day I started watching Derek, less to catch him than to understand him. He explains things to the junior men on the team and to engineers with more years than he has. In standup he restates points other people made thirty seconds earlier, in slightly different words, as if information doesn't count until it has passed through his mouth.
Derek is not confident. He is performing confidence on a loop, and the performance takes the form of explanation. If he is the one who knows, nobody can find out what he doesn't. The day he stops, he has to sit in a meeting with the possibility that he is not enough, and for Derek that seems to feel like standing on a floor that might not be there.
I recognize this because I have imposter syndrome too. Mine comes out as silence. When I'm unsure, I go quiet, and in tech that gets read as she doesn't have an opinion. Derek's comes out as noise. When he's unsure, he fills the air, and that gets read as he's authoritative. We are running the same fear through different equipment.
That fear belongs to both of us. A 2020 systematic review of 62 studies in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found the syndrome common among men and women alike. What differs is which performance the room rewards.
A debt nobody is collecting
I've come to picture it as a debt. Derek walks into every meeting believing he owes the room a running demonstration that he deserves his title. Every silence is a missed payment. Every question he can't answer on the spot is a debt someone might call in. Explaining is how he keeps the account current.
Nobody is actually collecting. Our team lead asks does anyone know? and looks relieved when someone says let me check. Derek pays anyway, in a currency that costs the rest of us time. This site calls it performing strength. It is tiring to watch, and I suspect more tiring to do. If that debt sounds familiar, start with the page on mental health for tech workers.
The part that is about gender
Derek explains more to women. I kept an informal tally for two weeks in the notes app on my phone, and he interrupted the women on our team more often and walked us through basics we hadn't asked about. My tally is not research, but it rhymes with research. When the linguist Kieran Snyder logged interruptions across about fifteen hours of tech-industry meetings in 2014, men made 212 of the 314 she counted, and most of those landed on women. It was one observer's count, not a controlled study, and the pattern is still hard to unsee.
So the gendered piece is real, and it sits inside a bigger pattern. Derek over-explains to everyone because he is afraid of being found out. He over-explains more to women because the social script lets him. When he walks a male peer through the basics, he gets dude, I know, and he pays a small price. When he does it to me, the room is quicker to assume I needed it.
Gender is the permission slip. Fear is the cause.
The distinction matters because the fixes differ. If this were pure sexism, the fix would be a rule: call it out, train it away. Because it is fear with a gendered outlet, a rule can close the outlet and leave the fear right where it was. The deeper work is a sense of worth that doesn't depend on being the smartest person in the room, and almost nobody offers that at the office.
My father, who explains nothing
Both my parents are engineers. My father is a quiet man who has never, in my hearing, explained anything to anyone who didn't ask. When I bring him a technical question, he says let me think about that and comes back later with a small, exact answer. That is what humility looks like when it is backed by real knowledge.
But at work dinners, especially around white male colleagues, he does the mirror image of what Derek does. He under-explains. He defers. I have watched less knowledgeable men repeat his ideas back to the table and collect the nods. He notices. He decided long ago that an Indian immigrant correcting a white manager costs more than the reverse, and the essays on this site about race and masculinity describe that arithmetic better than I can.
Over-explaining and under-explaining answer the same question: am I allowed to take up space here? Derek answers by taking all of it. My father answers by taking almost none. Neither of them is free. So when Derek explains a REST API to an Indian-American intern, calling it mansplaining names one force in that exchange accurately and flattens the rest.
What I actually say
Now, when Derek starts explaining something I know, I say: Thanks, I'm familiar with that part. What I'm actually stuck on is why this call only times out in staging. The redirect puts my competence on the record without making him the enemy, and he often turns out to be useful on the real question.
Some of the women I work with think I'm too accommodating, that I'm doing the emotional labor of managing his feelings. They're right, and I carry some resentment about it. For now, as an intern on a team where a public confrontation would cost me more than him, it's the trade I've chosen. I don't think every woman has to make the same call.
What I'd ask of the Dereks
Blame alone makes the blamed man defensive, and a defensive Derek explains harder. Someone has to get at the fear underneath, and he is the one best placed to do it.
I still get explained to. I've mostly stopped being angry, because the anger was crowding out a more useful question, one I ask myself each time Derek's chair starts rolling toward my desk: what is he so afraid of?
If you recognize yourself in Derek, try two things. Before you explain something in a meeting, ask first: How familiar are you with this already? Then believe the answer. And the next time you can't answer a question, say so plainly. In any meeting, the most senior person who admits not knowing makes it cheaper for everyone after him, including the intern who has been going quiet. If that feels impossible, name the humiliation you're bracing for, and say the words to yourself in the car before the meeting.
The words are short. I don't know yet. Let me look. Say them once this week and notice that the room is still standing.