Man tries to belittle woman who said she worked at NASA. It backfires immediately.

While Dr. Lauren Mc Keown is a planetary scientist studying Martian meteorites and Mars polar processes, she's also a woman trying to navigate online dating. I'm not sure which one is more difficult and impressive.

We know that women can and have been scientists and doctors and lawyers and every other profession under the sun, men still manage to be sexist and subscribe to the old-fashioned, misogynistic views of generations past. Dr. Lauren Mc Keown recently experienced this nonsense firsthand and handled it like a champ.

On her profile, Lauren writes that the dorkiest thing about her is that she worked at NASA. First of all, that's super cool. Second of all, it could be a really great conversation starter for the right guy. This dude started off great but quickly completely ruined it with his awful, sexist comment.

"So what are you, like the receptionist?" Did he think he was going to neg her with this comment? First of all, being a receptionist is completely valid. It's probably a job with many more responsibilities than this dweeb could handle. But that's sort of beside the point here.

It's clear from his comment that he asked if she was the receptionist because he doesn't believe that a woman would ever be a NASA scientist. And that "Jk you look reasonably smart" is a weak attempt at proving he was kidding. These are the kinds of "jokes" that aren't funny. Luckily, Dr. Mc Keown had the best response.

That wave goodbye emoji seals the deal. It's so good. She posted these two screenshots to Twitter along with the caption, "And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I am single." But she should be proud that she stood up for herself, her mom, and honestly, women in all professions everywhere.

It's beyond insane that women today still have to deal with sexist pigs like this guy. But it's so incredibly common. Even in the Twitter responses to Lauren's post, there were similar examples. "When I started working at a new NASA facility," Megan wrote, "someone assumed I needed directions and I was pointed in the direction of the gift shop..." So infuriating.

"Ugh," Keri wrote. "Once I had a guy break up with me after I gave him a tour of where I was working on a Mars mission because he said he thought I was lying about working for NASA and he has to be the smarter one in the relationship. Wtf." WTF indeed?! How insecure do you have to be as a man to actually break up with someone because they work at NASA?!

There was a whole viral Twitter thread about the sexism and the assumptions that women come up against at work and in their personal lives. Too many women were able to immediately share their experiences with this type of everyday misogyny.

The assumptions are killer, and it's exponentially worse for women of color. It's just unfathomable to me that any stranger would feel emboldened enough to verbally assume a group of women that he just met and knew nothing about were secretaries, but for some men, that's the norm. That's just the world we live in.

I would have paid a lot of money to see the look on that dude's face when Stacy introduced herself after this guy had demanded she serve him coffee. It's way past time for men to wise up and realize that women are capable of anything. This old-school sexism is not going to win you any points on dating apps or in face-to-face encounters. It has got to go.

This article was originally published on August 3, 2020. It has since been updated.