Cultivating allies

I'm not aggressively feminist at work, but I do preach from a low level women-in-science soapbox pretty consistently.  Sometimes it's met with resistance, other times empathy, and many times with a blank stare.  I worry a little bit that it's annoying, but I figure sexism is such a pervasive problem that it's worth it to irritate people a little bit.

It seems my persistence has paid off.  I work with a male technician who, as far as I can tell, was brought up in a fairly traditional family with pretty typical gender roles.  This guy is terrific -- super cool, quite competent, excited by science, and respectful of me as someone senior to him -- but had never really been confronted with feminism and so had never really considered that the way men and women navigate the world, especially the science world, may differ. 

Today this colleague made a point of telling me about his recent experience with an auto mechanic.  His sister's car broke down, so he drove her to the shop to pick it up after the repairs were done.  He said that although the car was clearly his sister's and she paid for the work, the mechanic looked at him as he explained everything.  No eye contact at all with the sister.  My colleague said this was the first time he had noticed such an injustice, and thought it was because he was more aware of it now after all my bitching and not because it had never happened before.  Very cool.