The hepeat prescription

Ever had your idea ignored, then a man makes the exact same suggestion and gets the credit? Now this heinous habit has a name, which is the first step to stamping it out, says Polly Dunbar

i’ve just ventured to suggest an idea. Judging by the disinterested faces of my mostly male newspaper colleagues, they’ve heard better. In fact, they seem more interested in studying the lurid green wall of the editor’s office in which we’re sitting than engaging with what I’ve said.

Until the following day, when the very same idea – my idea, the one I’ve ONLY JUST pitched to them – emerges from the mouth of a man. I stare at him, wondering if I’m having an out-of-body experience. I must be, right? Because not only is he speaking almost exactly the same words I spoke yesterday, but this time everyone’s nodding and the editor’s saying, ‘Good idea’.

I’ve been hepeated. And I guarantee any woman who’s sat in meetings with men has been through the very same experience. It’s happened to me countless times, not just in male work environments but, depressingly, also in social settings, from parties to pub quizzes. One friend told me recently, ‘I didn’t even notice at first when boys in my social group would reiterate my quick and quietly made quips and steal the laugh. Once, I called them out on their joke-propriation, but telling someone they’ve nicked your one-liner, when half the time they don’t even realise they’re doing it, is a sure-fire way to kill a fun situation dead.’

At least now, thankfully, we have a name for this abomination: ‘hepeating’. As in, ‘Ugh, he hepeated me again in that meeting!’ It was coined on Twitter recently by Nicole Gugliucci, an American professor in physics with a special interest in extragalactic radio astronomy – proving that even women you’d think were quite obviously worth listening to suffer from a mysterious ailment preventing their ideas from being heard, unless they come from a male voice.

Gugliucci’s word and definition has been liked over 68,000 times by those it resonated with. As with the term ‘mansplaining’, the genius is that she’s given a name to a situation universal to women, yet never really acknowledged as a barrier we face on a daily basis. The naming gives us power and, hopefully, a way to challenge it.

We often focus on numbers to measure change: how many women are becoming CEOS, MPS or editors? Are we closing the pay gap? Vital as these questions are, so much sexism today exists in a more insidious form, in the belittling of women by men.

Hepeating is perhaps the most insulting example of all, because it involves someone else taking credit for our idea and then – even worse – being applauded for it because, somehow, the fact it was delivered by a man gives it more credibility, more gravitas.

We may be some way off eradicating the practice of hepeating, but personally, I can’t wait to use this new addition to my vocabulary to call it out.