23 Times Men Had The Audacity To Take Credit For A Woman's Work

Earlier this year, after previously unseen X Factor footage was released, we found out that Nicole Scherzinger was responsible for creating One Direction, NOT Simon Cowell.

Fremantle / Via youtube.com

Obviously, this was frustrating to find out, but for most women, not entirely surprising. We're unfortunately kind of used to not getting the credit we deserve.

Showtime

So recently, when I asked the BuzzFeed Community to share a time in their life when a man took credit for their work, I got some absolutely rage-inducing answers, like my blood was BOILING. Here are just some of those stories:

1."I was collaborating on a project at work with a male coworker — and when I say 'collaborating' I mean that I ended up doing 90% of the work: editing, graphic design, etc. All he did was change the font color and add two or three design elements at the end. For whatever reason, upper management thought he’d done the project alone, and not only did he not advocate for me, he took full credit."

2."I successfully wrote, presented, and defended my Masters thesis on a research project that was entirely my idea with methods I came up with on my own. The month after I graduated, my graduate advisor went to a major international research conference and presented my project without my knowledge. He moved me from the coveted first author spot to fourth author. He also misspelled my last name so it’s like I wasn’t credited at all. Guard your science, ladies!"

—Anonymous

3."I'm a golfer, and old men will take credit for my good shots if they can get away with it. So I only use pink golf paraphernalia, even though I don't even like the color pink. I've learned they won't try to claim it was their shot if it's a hot pink ball!"

4."I once had a boss (10 years older, male) who would literally repeat back ideas in meetings that I had just said, sometimes multiple times, as though they were his own. My I-just-said-thats were ignored. The saddest part is that he seemed to be truly unaware, as though he really believed he was coming up with these ideas. Incredibly frustrating!"

—Anonymous

5."Once while having sex, I finally came on my own since the guy I was with couldn't do it for me. (He didn't know that though). Afterwards, he did this little confident smirk with an accomplished sigh and said — referring to himself in the third person — 'Yeah, that's right baby. You know David's always gonna get you there!' I tried to stifle my laughter, but failed."

6."While working at a school library, I brought the collection up to date. I also vastly expanded the collection with more books written by BIPOC authors and made the collection more culturally relevant for our students. My boss not only took credit for this, he TOLD me that he took credit and then thanked me."

—Anonymous

7."I was hired to help the director of a school musical choreograph their production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The whole story is told through singing and movement — there is no dialogue — so every second is carefully crafted choreography whether it’s through dance or complex stage direction. I put my LIFE into this play, hours and hours and hours of me working directly with the students, while the male 'director' did god knows what off-stage. I directed 100% of this play — down to the costumes and even the set. But when the printed program came out, my name was next to a (male) student helper’s name as 'assistant choreographer.' That man was listed as not only 'director,' but also 'choreographer.'

8."I'm a teacher, and about four years ago, my school sent me to a special training to help make our tests look more like the state standardized tests. So I go to this stupid course, and I write up a sample test to present to our superiors at school. My male department head decided that he would present the test he had made as well. (He did not attend the training and claimed he didn’t need to). Per chain of command, I submitted my test to him before presentation day. The day of, he gets up and pulls up MY EXACT SAME TEST and starts going through it as his own. I was absolutely shocked.

I was supposed to present mine next but here he was, going though my questions and going on about how this was something he just threw together real quick. Mind you, I spent three days at this training. Everyone was 'oooohhing' and 'ahhhing' over this. When it came to my turn, I straight up said, 'That’s my test. You presented my test.' He stuttered nervously, laughed, and then really had the audacity to say, 'How funny we came up with such similar questions!'

I have never been more mad in my entire life. I started working on my resume that afternoon and thankfully work in a different district now. I'm still in disbelief of the absolute gall men have simply because they are men."

—Anonymous

9."I'd worked on an important demo for weeks. Five minutes into my big presentation, my colleague booted me from the webinar, took over, presented the material as his own, and refused to let me back in. Everyone believed he'd 'saved the day' because I was experiencing 'technical issues.'

10."My husband takes credit for how well our adult children turned out. He was, in truth, a very hands-off parent most of the time. He would fish with them, and he attended our son's little league games, but only because he enjoyed those activities. He never took them to the doctor, the dentist, the orthodontist, the hair stylist, etc., never went to a parent/teacher conference, and never purchased or wrapped any birthday or Christmas gifts. He did work hard to provide financially for us, but I also worked in addition to doing everything for the kids and our home."

—Anonymous

11."Freshman year of college, one of my programming assignments was copied by a guy in my class, and he submitted it as his own. The professor gave him a 100 and me a 0 and put me on academic probation for cheating. I had six witnesses who all said they saw me do the assignment in the lab with them. It took all of them, plus my parents, plus getting the dean of engineering and the department head to intervene to get my professor to actually question the guy. The dude admitted to stealing my assignment. He got told not to do it again (no 0 and no probation), and I got a long lecture on deleting my work from lab computers.

12."During undergrad, I told my biochemistry professor I was going to do my capstone project on professional mermaids and the physiological changes their bodies undergo due to them training to hold their breath underwater for long periods of time. I never ended up doing my final presentation, but my professor had all my research, sources, and the information I had gathered on professional mermaid training methods. Years after I graduated, a member of my sorority who I follow on Instagram posted about a really cool project her biochemistry professor had just assigned where they learned about — you guessed it — professional mermaids. He used my research, down to some sections of the paper I wrote word-for-word, my sources, and video clips I had edited together."

—Anonymous

13."I’m a teacher, and every day, a coworker would come to my classroom with some pretense of teacher gossip or to ask a question about procedures or whatever. Every time he came in, he would look at the handouts I had created, lined up and ready to be passed out to my students. He’d give me a generic compliment about them, then ask if he could have a copy. I never knew how to say no, and honestly I’m okay with sharing. But what killed me was how much he was praised for getting good scores from his students when every single assignment they had was mine. He didn’t teach them; he sat at his desk and talked on the phone or planned his next cruise. He never gave me credit, never talked me up at meetings, and never truly said thank you."

14."My first office job was with a certain DC-area nonprofit I had always admired. The department I joined was just me and my boss, and he was well liked in this particular field. But, the problems started right away. Every single thing I worked on, he insisted I put his name on it as the creator. He said it was because he had more name recognition than me, so the work would be more impactful if it had his name on it. I bought into that for about a month before I realized what he was doing.

But the worst came near the end of my time with this job. I had organized a huge, international training for some of our employees. I prepared all of the content for the three day summit and organized all of the logistics to get people there from about 20 different countries. It was a huge amount of work, and I did it almost single-handedly.

On the first day of the summit, the president of the organization welcomed everyone and thanked my boss for putting this event together. My boss didn't correct him; he just stood there and basked in a round of applause for work he had nothing to do with. Looking back, I wish I had stood up for myself better, but I was young and I didn't know how to handle it. It was a painful, demoralizing situation, and it hurt my career in the long run."

—Anonymous

15."After posting a response for an online discussion assignment in college, I received a score of one point above failing, and the instructor's feedback was a very abrasive 'you're wrong.' Three to four entries down from mine, another student had copied my work, changing only the spelling of a few words. He did this after I posted mine but before the instructor gave my feedback, so he obviously didn't know that my answer was so horribly wrong that the instructor felt the need to walk that fine line between constructive feedback and verbal abuse. Well, the instructor responded to his post, fawning over his work and stating that it was so exceptional that he would receive extra credit. Then the instructor sent out an email to the whole class highlighting my classmate's (plagiarized) submission, along with the comment, 'THIS is how it's done!'"

16."In college, I worked for the campus radio station. During spooky season, I recorded and edited a radio show under the direction of an upperclassman. It was my voice and my editing that went into the project. He submitted the project to be nominated for an award, and you could put two names on the submission. Well, instead of putting my name with his, he put another guy's name that we worked with and gave me no credit for it."

—Anonymous

17."When I was a teenager, I was hanging out with some guy friends who were changing the gas tank on a truck. They were trying to get this seal on it and having issue getting it on right. There was a groove in the seal that obviously had to line up with the little notch on the tank. I told them this repeatedly, but no one listened — until one of the guys' dads came to the garage and said the exact same thing I did. They thanked him for helping them figure something out that I’d been trying to tell them for 30 minutes."

18."I draw, paint, sculpt, and make custom plushies, but my ex would always somehow take credit for my work. He would end up getting thanked whenever I made anything for anyone. He had no artistic talent whatsoever, yet he'd be the one being gushed over after I spent weeks on a painting for someone. He even tried to insist to me that he invented my own original character, which I had created years before I even met him."

—retrocrebbon

19."We were having major discrepancies at work with location-to-location transfers. After spending several hours creating an Excel sheet to pinpoint where the issues were coming from, I sent it along to my manager, who shared it with our other locations. Imagine my surprise when I opened a company-wide email to see my spreadsheet with a male colleague’s name on it. He hadn’t changed a thing — down to the colour-coding. It was exactly as I had created it and was getting heaps of praise from the execs. When I called him out, I got a 'sorry you feel that way.'"

20."A major storm rolled through during my shift at work and caused a hole in the ceiling along with water pouring in from a broken pipe. I locked the doors, ordered everyone to the conference room since it had no windows, and ran to the junction box and secured power in case it came back on — I didn’t want anyone being electrocuted if there were any exposed live wires. I also closed the main water valves so excess water would stop coming from the pipe. When my district manager called, I told him what I had done and he berated me for it, even after I explained my reasoning. I hung up and called the next closest store. Their assistant manager told me that the district manager called and gave him instructions to shut off power and water, and get people to inside spaces for safety and let him know it was 'his idea.'

Of course, after the storm, the district manager was given all the praise from the owners and other higher-ups."

—Anonymous

21."We were both working for a small town library at the time. He was brand new, and I had been there for several years. A big part of our job was answering patrons' questions. Our main method of tracking how many questions we'd answered each shift was to add a line in a shared Excel spreadsheet with our initials, the date, and how many of each type of question we had answered. I noticed after a little while that he had started overwriting my initials with his, claiming my stats as his own. This happened several times, leaving me looking like I had done nothing during my shift.

22."When I moved in with my (now ex) boyfriend, I was working two jobs and going to school full-time. My partner, however, refused to work. But then he would go behind my back and tell others how hard it was working to pay for our place while I was in school. Too bad the lease was in my name and not his 🤷‍♀️."

—Anonymous

23.And finally, "At work, I came up with an idea to save money. Right after I was done telling a male colleague about it, he told someone that he had just came up with a cost-saving idea — WHILE I WAS STILL STANDING THERE!!!!!!! Glad I don't work with him anymore."

Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.

Has a man ever taken credit for something you've done? How did it turn out? Let me know in the comments!