We’re about to finish two weeks of our first-ever Workaway stint. A German/English couple are hosting us in southern France, in exchange for 25 hours or work per week. We pointed three old stone walls, sanded and painted a large ceiling, weeded their garden, burned the remains, and we helped with changeover service for their holiday cottages.

The work is often demanding. We end every day tired, and happy with our newly sore muscles. But… sometimes I’m told to do my work “the girl way,” or that I should do “girl stuff.”

Not the cooking and cleaning – it’s never that blatant. But I’m encouraged to carry the lighter groceries “because I’m a girl,” or I’m consoled when I can’t lift something heavy with the phrase, “It’s okay, you’re a girl.”

I’m an opinionated feminist who would have delivered a rage-filled sermon if these small asides were coming from the husband hosting us… but they all come from the German wife, Lisa.

Most of the phrases above were meant to comfort me, and they were all said in the plural: we should carry the lighter groceries. We shouldn’t lift the heavier stones from the stone pile – let the guys do that.

Lisa is also quick to credit every mistake Mike makes to the fact that he’s a man. He missed a spot vacuuming because “men don’t see these things.” If she thinks he left supplies out, it’s because he’s a man. When I explain that I left those supplies out, well that’s just me being messy.

The comments aren’t frequent, and they’re not insults – they barely qualify as asides. But they get under my skin, especially the remarks about my “girl strength.”

I’ve spent too many hours under the squat rack to be told I can’t lift the same rocks Mike can. I don’t do 50+ push-ups a day to be told I shouldn’t carry the same buckets of sand. I know I’m strong because I worked really hard to get here.

What frustrates me even more is that Lisa is a badass. She renders concrete, she hammer drills stone, and she can sand walls forever, all in 95 degree heat and with hot flashes to boot. She and her husband turned a decrepit garage into a nice two-story house on their own.

She knows how strong she is, what she can do, and what she’s accomplished already. I don’t know if Lisa would call herself a feminist, but she knows women aren’t weak or lesser.

When she makes small comments – laughing, teasing herself just as much – I don’t know what to do. I could tell her I don’t want to do things “the girl way.” I could tell her politely that the comments offend me. I could mention it to her later in a less reactionary manner. But she’s not trying to be mean, and 90% of the time, she’s not preventing me from doing the same work that Mike and her husband do.

I can’t decide where the molehill ends and where the mountain begins.

If I brought it up, I could offend her. I could hurt her feelings, far more than mine are hurt. I could make four or five asides become into the most significant memory she and I take away from two weeks of work.

I have a thick skin, and I know my own strength. Is it worth it?

The answer to that question means a lot. I’ve spent a lot of this year challenging my own concepts of feminism and equity. I know the definitions, and I understand the theories. But where is my personal threshold? What do I riot about, and what do I let pass?

This internal debate seems ridiculous considering I was the middle school kid who forbid – with force if necessary – anyone I knew from using the word bitch for three years because I thought the term was so demeaning.

Of course the easy answer should be, no injustice is too small. All the little things – comments about “girl stuff,” male-gendered pronouns, imbalanced highlight reels – can snowball into barriers that we as women will have to break through later. Or worse, they become barriers the next generation has to grapple with because we stayed quiet.

But my playbook is only getting messier as I get older. If the sexism is subtle, and particularly if it comes from women, I don’t have as many easy answers.

Lisa is building her own damn home, from the ground up. She’s raising a strong, independent daughter, and she is an equal business partner with her husband. Is she actually being sexist to me if she wants to call some of our work girl stuff? I don’t always get to be the 7th grader who forces everyone to conform to her ideals of feminism.

I don’t have enough answers yet. Today was our last day of work, and I probably won’t confront Lisa about any of this. We’ll go the village square, we’ll sip apertifs, and we will celebrate two weeks of hard work together.

I won’t challenge her language, but I can reclaim it. When someone asks what I did in southern France for two weeks, I’ll say I lifted heavy stones. I built walls. I used power drills.

You know, “girl stuff.”