It started when our manager gave me a project that this coworker struggled to make progress on (the transition was made in a way that allowed the coworker to save face, if he wanted to). Prior to that, he tried to talk to me as though he was a mentor, which I mostly just nodded at - some of it was useful, at least at first. After the project transition though, he complained that I made gratuitous style changes, opened several PRs to try to fix the problem before I could and then in response to my code review publicly told me that he had more experience than me so maybe I should listen to him.

All of that might be attributed to his own self-consciousness if it weren't for the fact that he was deferential to male engineers in code review, and during the height of the tension with me, during scrum he started openly criticizing/mocking a female contractor's work (on an entirely unrelated project that he knew very little about).

This is a pretty egregious example, but I could imagine that a much subtler version happens more often (possibly it's happened to me but it seems more pragmatic to assume it's not related to sexism if at all possible).

One of the things that's always interesting to me about these kinds of issues is how the inappropriate behaviour is usually inappropriate regardless of the reasons the person targets someone. I see this kind of stuff all the time on teams and it is really frustrating. In a very strange sense, it's actually nice if the person is targeting only people of a particular gender or race because then you can easily fire them. It's much, much, much harder if these people mistreat others indiscriminately.

In my home country I'm part of the racial majority. In my adopted country, I'm a racial minority and I've worked in offices both places. I've experienced bullying in my home country and racism in my adopted country and it really doesn't feel any different to me. If someone is targeting you for abuse, it doesn't really matter what the reason is. I wish both were recognised as being inappropriate in the workplace.

Thank you. This was useful to have articulated for me (and I hope for others).