Woman Creates Flow Chart to Explain ‘Mansplaining’ to Men

“Mansplaining may seem like a trivial issue in isolation.”

California author Kim Goodwin tweeted out a helpful chart last month to guide men through the convoluted maze of appropriate conversation.

“I have had more than one male colleague sincerely ask whether a certain behavior is mansplaining,” she explained. “Since apparently this is hard to figure out, I made one of them a chart.”

The chart trails through diverging paths of conversation, sussing out the speaker’s relative expertise on the topic in discussion compared to that of his female interlocutor. While the possibility of “not mansplaining” technically exists, most paths lead to the more admonitory range between “probably mansplaining” and “just stop talking now.”

Goodwin elaborated on her full theory of incorrigible male-splainers in a BBC.com post, citing a few studies that show women tend to be more frequently interrupted than men, and that women suffer more social stigma than men for trying to inject themselves into a conversation.

“Mansplaining may seem like a trivial issue in isolation,” she wrote, “but how we communicate tells other people how much or little they are valued.”

One user, daring to raise his male eyebrows, accused the chart itself of ‘splaining.

Goodwin snarked back. The dialogue that ensued was sublime.

And in conclusion:

Just when you thought our discourse was at peak trite.

Several years ago another writer and professional chart-maker Elle Armageddon sketched her own flowchart, which Bustle hailed as “perfectly” explaining mansplaining.

Well, we hope you learned something today.

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