I experience this as mostly an unconscious thing, one that has been illuminated by my transitioning from having the social role of male to female. For about the first two months after I began living full time in the female role I was having a problem bumping into people. At first I thought it was simply a kind of emotional dizziness that had come from allowing myself full expression of myself for the first time in a long life. But as I went along I began to notice that my collisions were almost exclusively with men. It took much self-analysis before I realized that men and women navigate differently in public space.
Men tend to walk directly toward their destination, and women tend toward the more circuitous route.
I realized suddenly one day after another such collision, again with a man, that what happens is that men take precedence over woman in public space. Even the men who would hold open doors for me or allow me to enter the elevator first would also walk right into me. And having navigated most of my life as a man, I simply was navigating like a man in public while men were expecting me to navigate like a woman. I knew myself to contain. I have struggled my entire life with my own patriarchal feelings and attitudes.