I’ve got a real bee in my bonnet about sexism lately – which is kind of new for me.
I reached adulthood during the eighties, when we were constantly told “Girls can do anything!” – and so I believed it.
After all, the hard battles had been fought already. Women had won the right to vote, own property, be educated to degree-level, way back in the “olden days”.
The Not-So-Olden Days
I was shocked when my mum told me how she was forced to resign from her government job when she got married in 1964 – and even more so when I learned that she hid her first pregnancy (with me) until she was about six months along. Why? Because even though she was a respectable married woman, at that time, you were sacked for being pregnant.
But thankfully, that was all in the past. Gender equality was a reality – wasn’t it?! Even if I did look around at teacher’s college and notice that there was only a handful of males among the hundreds training to become primary school (that’s elementary for my American readers) teachers, well, that’s just the way things were …
In the early 90’s I experienced blatant sexism when working in customer service. One of my colleagues was a man near retirement age, and customers would often turn to him for advice or to confirm what I had just told them (because as a young woman, what would I know?!) – when in fact I held the more senior position.
Glass Ceilings + Gender Pay Gaps
These days, there is still plenty of evidence of sexism, in the form of glass ceilings and gender pay gaps. One article I read online, reported that in Australia just 12% of all board directors and 10.7% of executive managers were female; while only 3.5% of CEO positions were held by women.
Television and movies are another example. In 2016, just under a third of speaking or named characters in the 100 highest grossing US films were female, according to this report in Grazia, which went on to say:
Not only do women appear in adverts four times less than men, they’re also more likely to be spoken over by their male counterparts and to appear partially or completely naked: men speak seven times more than women, while women are twice as likely to be naked.
And don’t get me started on what it’s like in many churches, where women are given token roles (if any).
Clearly we have a long way to go.
But even when our society is making attempts to redress the balance, I sometimes fear we are doing more damage than good.
What’s Good for the Goose, is Good for the Gander
Take the massive emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects for girls.
Why aren’t we doing the same for boys? Why aren’t boys being encouraged to do more humanities-type subjects – writing, dance, etc? It’s clear that as a society we still value “male” subjects more highly than the “female” ones, if we are not doing the same for boys.
Subtle Sexism
Sexism also takes much more subtle forms, so that we don’t even realise when we ourselves are falling into the trap, because we have been so conditioned over the years …
Take a business workshop I attended recently. It was a fantastic workshop on personality types, and I don’t intend any criticism of the presenter (who did a fabulous job), but something she said made me pause.
To help us visualise the four personality types, she gave us some celebrity examples: Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Bill Gates … and the late Princess Diana. Interestingly, she apologised to the men in the room for making them consider a female role model – but didn’t feel the need to say anything to the majority of attendees – the women!
How Can I Do my Bit?!
It’s plenty to ponder on for sure, though I’m not sure what I can do about it.
Though it seems unintentionally I have fallen into a field which is typically considered to be the domain of males: search engine optimisation (SEO) – which I find curious as SEO is very heavily content (writing) based, although there is definitely a tech aspect to it.
How long do you think it will take for sexism / the glass ceiling / gender pay gap to all become things of the past?!
I ran into the same kind of blatant sexism with coworkers, but thankfully that is long gone. I try to look at those strides over the last 30+ years (for us) and hope our daughters will look back the same way to even better changes!
Hear, hear Denise!