My sister, a gender studies professor, friend-zoned by a male colleague

This is totally off topic for this sub, but I just want to share a funny anecdote here. My sister is a professor and teaches gender studies. She’s on the tenure track at a university in Canada. My sister is very smart, knows her shit, and is very confident. She is also very kind, totally unproblematic, and has never taken advantage of anyone in the ways that some profs in the male dominated fields do.<br><br>As most gender studies profs do, my sister is kind of a feminist. And as a result, many of her male colleagues have started to fear her, and some even spread rumors.<br><br>Recently, my sister was asked to go out to coffee with a colleague, totally friend zone stuff. This guy is about her age (mid 30s) and also on the tenure track in the same department as my sister. He is British. Anyway, my sister is in the department of women and gender studies, and this guy is in the department of history.<br><br>This guy asked my sister if she could give him a tour of the university, study areas, etc. This was her first year there, but she knew the campus totally, so she agreed to give him a tour. They went to dinner, had coffee together, and spent a few hours hanging out. At the end of the day, he asked her out to dinner, and she declined. My sister is not single, and her partner has been with her for 10 years. They aren’t married, as this is Canada and marriage is not a big deal here.<br><br>The next day, my sister found out from another colleague that there were rumors going around the university, rumors that my sister was an “angry feminist” “who hate men.” They called her a “man hater” and said that she was a “radical” who was “too extreme” to be a professor.<br><br>My sister was very amused, and told me that it was a gender reversal situation, where a man was spreading false rumors about a woman for rejecting him.<br><br>She has continued to be friendly with her colleague, and has even been invited to a dinner at the guy’s house with his wife and kids. It was a totally normal dinner, and my sister was very amused that they invited her to their house.<br><br>Anyway, this is my story. I just wanted to share this here, because it’s so totally inverted. Instead of a woman getting called a bitch for doing something, it’s the inverse: here, a woman got called a bitch for simply being confident, smart, and not fuckable.