A few years back, I booked a weekend online at a hotel in a neighboring city. I registered my name as the guest and my husband's name as the secondary guest (we have different last names). I then gave my email as contact (myname@gmail.com) and paid a deposit using a credit card in my name. Not long after, I received a confirmation email addressed to "Dear Husband's Name, thank you for booking with us." Needless to say, I was hot at being so blatantly erased like that. I wrote back, gave them a polite piece of my mind, and demanded that they send ME a confirmation. They tried to act like it was a computer glitch, but that seems unlikely unless they have their program set to search for the man's name and assume he's the client.

I wrote an essay on the "authority gap" a while back, and there's plenty of research to indicate that a lot of men still can't envision women as experts or authority figures. Doctors are assumed to be nurses, and lawyers are assumed to be legal assistants. A large amount of this is subconscious but that doesn't make it any less harmful or insidious, and it clearly illustrates that we still have a long way to go for actual equality.