Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

I had an experience at work where a coworker (who is black) shared his experience of being told to "stay in his lane" early on in his career. The insinuation was of course racism, he didn't mention it but it was obvious. Then I and someone else (who are white) shared our exact same experiences.

He told me he felt cut off, etc, even though we were sharing the same experience. If we had something similar happen, how can he definitively attribute that experience to racism? Even if it was, that was not the point of the conversation. We were all sharing our experiences on that topic and no one mentioned race. Why do we need to bend ourselves backwards to make sure all minorities feel comfortable all the time?

The point here is you can't talk to minority groups about anything these days, if you are white.

I was discussing programming puzzles with a new group of colleagues. The way these discussions typically go is that after most of us solve it, they will start giving hints/spoilers to others to keep the conversation flowing.

So I did this as usual and offered a hint to the last person (who was a woman) to not see the trick this time. It surprised me when she looked visibly upset and asked me why I was explaining it to her. I'm guessing this is because of her own insecurities that she was worried that I thought she was too dumb to solve it on her own otherwise. Up until this point her gender was irrelevant to me. I only explain stuff because the value of discussing interview problems is to get practice solving and explaining stuff to each other. But now I have to question whether I was "mansplaining" or not.

This minor event bothered me so much I never talked to her about programming puzzles ever again.

Can insecurity be ascribed to gender? If it was a man, and they got offended, could we say it's also because he was insecure about not finishing in time? I think it's difficult to say gender as the de facto reason here. I'm not ruling it out, but I don't think it can be labeled a certainty, either.