Being assertive is a male characteristic. I tend to think of it as “New York” attribute, since that’s where I’m from and since most of my daily comparisons are between passive North Dakota and my aggressive city of birth. But the local culture doesn’t change the fact that men are socialized to be more forceful in just these kinds of situations, and that even if the worker didn’t notice me because I was male, he might have ignored them because they were female. In the end, gender, if it did play a role, might have influenced the surface interaction or it might have gone much deeper. None of this even considers tangential question such as whether, were I not a professor on my own campus, I would have refrained from talking with them in the first place for fear that I might appear to be hitting on them. It’s complicated.