It is always interesting to get different perspectives from folks.

How do you filter the people who hold the door for everyone vs the ones that are only doing it for ladies? Or for those fellas who where told countless times as a youth to hold the door for a woman. Because someone is polite, that is a red flag?

As for calling a woman a lady this one is new to me, and I don't think I've ever used the word "colleague" aloud in my life. I would say, "that is a {guy|lady} that I work with." I've never been made aware previously that referring to a woman as a lady would be taken negatively. I had only heard that some woman don't care for ma'am as they can feel that is a title for an older woman. fwiw, I do tend to use gender neutral words like "they" or "them" over he/she when writing.

> "that is a {guy|lady} that I work with."

"Person" also works in this case. +1 for they. "Lady" seems patronizing to me - would you call someone a "gentleman"? To me, "lady" describes a woman who is "traditionally feminine" – I get that when people use "lady" today they don't typically mean "traditionally feminine," but "lady" is still evocative of a time when women were seen as delicate/demure/less than men.

Language changes and evolves. I don't think that it means "feminine" as much anymore and is less paired to "gentlemen;" instead, I think most people use it as a drop-in replacement for woman, girl, etc. Similarly, "gay" has gone from "happy" to a self-describing word for homosexual men, to a pejorative, to a stand in word for "dumb" (man, that field-trip was gay), and now is more towards a non-negative way to refer to homosexual males. All that aside, I'll take the opportunity to reflect on my use of "lady" and I'll ask some of the woman I work with on the side what their opinion is. Thanks for the food for thought.

"Gentleman" is pretty common between male colleagues, 2c

> men constantly hold the door/say "after you" and let me walk through the door first

I think it may not be a good idea to draw conclusions from this without seeing if they do the same for guys too (which you may not be able to observe during an interview). In my workplace everyone pretty much holds the door for everyone else if they're walking in a group. The first person who gets to the door will open it and stand behind it while the others walk in first. Sometimes we'll throw in a lighthearted "after you" too. I'd really hate for someone visiting our company to get the wrong idea about our culture from a common courtesy, especially in an interview scenario where the interviewer may just be trying to be nice to the interviewee regardless of their gender.

I should have clarified – it's a pet peeve for me when men do this exclusively for women/not for other men. It's definitely something I think it can be pretty observable during an onsite – for example, if you're waiting in a lobby or go to lunch as part of an interview, you can watch how men and women interact around a door. I've a man hold open a door for the sole woman in his group, and then walk through the door after her and not hold the door for the remaining guys in the group. Not trying to be super granular here – just for me, it's something I watch for. It's also an additive thing – if the door thing's just a one-off deal, it's probably not indicative of anything. If, however, it's paired with some patronizing language and other vaguely sexist things, it might actually mean something.

As a man this behavior (not only towards women) annoys me as well. When meeting new people with my wife it sometimes happens that other men reject to shake my hand or even look at me before they have introduced themselves to her, giving me a disparaging look and commenting how I could be so non-chivalrous. My wife thinks this behavior is silly.

The same thing happens often in trains, where sometimes as a man you get snarky comments or disapproving looks from other passengers for not jumping up to "rescue" a woman that dares to put her luggage in the overhead compartment all by herself. Would be curious to hear how women here see this but I always think that people are able to ask for help if they really need it and that automatically assuming that they can't put their luggage up by themselves is degrading to them.

Sorting people by gender and age when going through doors or out of an elevator is also silly and degrading I think, so I can understand that you don't want to work in such an environment.