>A young, but influential, entrepreneur I talked with remarked that I was probably “only interested in doing a startup to be supportive of my husband.”

That comment is equally applicable to the other husband in the 2-husbands homosexual marriage configuration. Why she decided that it was about her female physiology and not about her being a part of a marriage?

Heterosexual couples have a stereotype of the husband as driver and wife as supporter. Given that stereotype, I think she made a reasonable assumption.

so she chose to assume that the guy was stereotyping while other interpretations were available. That exactly my point - she saw things she was inclined to see.

After a point, all communication relies on assumed prior understandings. The question becomes if those assumptions are reasonable or not. I think hers were.

>The question becomes if those assumptions are reasonable or not.

There is no question here - her assumption is reasonable based on the stereotype she has. There is absolutely no evidence that the guy shared her stereotype.

Direct evidence from him, no. But I think it's a reasonable assumption given that it's a stereotype in our culture. If I swapped the genders, then his question sounds completely out-of-place to me. I'm willing to assume that it is sexism because the mental-model I think a person would have to have for it to not be sexism seems less likely.

One could, of course, just ask the person what they meant, but we weren't privy to the actual conversation to know if she did.

> the mental-model I think a person would have to have for it to not be sexism seems less likely.

well, nice definition of a stereotype.

But I really don't think you'd see it applied there, and if you did it would most likely in the homophobic/sexist way that one is the wife, and their role is to support the "husband". It's one of the underpinnings of what some (and thankfully fewer and fewer) people think of marriage - that it is a union of a man and his wife, rather than that of two equals.

>most likely in the homophobic/sexist way that one is the wife, and their role is to support the "husband".

a guy would share his life with another guy. Based on that i see it is a natural to assign higher probability to the event that "the guy would also like to support his husband by sharing the business venture of the husband" - and you call this assignment of the higher probability as "homophobic/sexist"?