From the toxic culture that gave us mansplaining, here comes …‘hepeating’

May 18, 2022

Have you ever noticed how some men make a habit of repeating what women say—and taking all the credit for it? There’s a word for that: “hepeating,” reports The Guardian.

The hepeat is just the latest in the expanding list of terms for sexist male behavior, a glossary that began with mansplaining. It’s the term used when a woman suggests an idea—often in a meeting—and it’s ignored, but then a guy says the same exact thing and everyone loves it.

How is the new term used in a typical conversation? “Ugh! I got hepeated in that meeting again,” or “He totally hepeated me!”

And it’s caught on.  The concept was immediately recognized. U.S. physics professor and astronomer Nicole Gugliucciv’s original tweet proposing the term, posted back in September 2017, got 185k likes and 58.8k retweets. And they weren’t all “shetweets.” Men liked it, too.

The Oxford English Dictionary hasn’t included it. Yet. But the term has just been introduced into an internal handbook for the staff of the U.K.-based exam regulator Ofqual, where hepeating is described as “a situation where a man repeats a woman’s comments or ideas and then is praised for them as if they were his own”.

It has been rejected in some quarters, though: The (male) historian Jeremy Black is not a massive fan of the term. It’s an “ugly new made-up word that’s foolish and devoid of meaning”, he told the Mail on Sunday. He went on to say that it “should play no role in educational advice”.

So who does think it’s an actual term, then?  Any woman who has been in a meeting, or at work—or indeed anywhere with men.

Research contact: @guardian