Don't be that girl!

   My first encounter with sexism occurred when I was 12 years old. It was report-card day at the end of 2^nd term and I was in class 7. This was an especially important report-card day because it was one short step to class 8 and everything was taken more seriously by the school. In-fact to prove just how serious things were, class 7s and 8s had to wear their school-uniforms while the rest of the school got to wear regular clothes! I was a bit nervous but not that much. I went to school with a pretty competitive bunch of kids so by this day after the marking, verification and revision of most exam papers; we’d taken the liberty of compiling a rough estimate of our total marks and averages. I knew I was in a good place. I just didn’t know how much.

   For the first time in a long time, I’d come first in my class! I told you I went to school with competitive kids. It was hard to maintain the top position for more than one or even two terms. We kept on shifting positions with every exam and the tying of positions happened a lot. So yeah, I’d beat the kid at the 2^nd position by about 10 marks. We were elated. By we, I mean my mom and I, because you had to have a parent present. The class teacher was also pretty pleased too. He was the kind of teacher who pushed you to work hard and then maintain standards thereafter. He told us that the boy who was at no.2 had actually been in with his mom scarcely 30 minutes before us. He’d been holding the number 1 slot for a while and his mom was so shocked that she asked the teacher, “How could a girl beat my son?”

   We told my dad the story and we laughed it off and they were proud of me for weeks after whilst pushing me to maintain my new-found academic success. When school opened I told my friends and they laughed it off too. And I never thought about the significance of that statement until years afterward. At 13, I had more trivial problems: Like how to get my hands on the next Harry Potter book and acne. I didn’t know what sexism, and misogyny and feminism were. I was aware that in some parts of Kenya and the world at large women were treated horribly for being women. And I knew that it wasn’t fair. But I was never actually told that there were things I couldn’t do because I was a girl. I have the kind of parents who push you to succeed whether you’re male, female or a potato! It really doesn’t matter. As long as you live under their roof, you do your best. And maybe I was pushed just a bit more because I was a girl, and the 90s and early 2000s were all about empowering the girl child.

   So back to the incident. Years later I wondered why she said it. Was it really so ludicrous for someone female to succeed in that way? Would it have been better if some other kid who wasn’t a girl had beaten her son? And why did she say that in the first place? She’s female too after all. So my first encounter with sexism was from a fellow woman. It really sounds trivial right now because it happened so long ago and didn’t scar me emotionally or anything and was a minor incident...but how many minor incidents like that happen every day?

   Like the way female drivers who are competent at driving, make fun of their less competent counterparts. And thus it’s a running joke about how women are terrible drivers.

  Or how married women and women in general sometimes shun single women who get pregnant out of wedlock. I personally believe in God’s design for the family within a marriage, but how quickly we forget that it takes two individuals for a baby to be conceived in the first place! When men have kids out of wedlock it’s either expected or praised.

   And what about how quickly we assume that any woman making it up the corporate ladder probably sleeps around. And generally there are women who sneer at successful women for being successful for reasons that I might have to speculate about in another blog-post.

   But these ‘minor’ incidents often build up leading to major incidences. That’s why they are so important.

    Why be that girl? Magnifying the faults of someone with the same chromosomal pattern as you while you let the other 50% of the population get-away scot free with similar or even worse ‘offenses’. Here’s a thought: Maybe to some extent some men treat women horribly because we’ve shown them that it’s ok. We do it to ourselves thereby setting a baseline of expectations, so why should they treat us any differently if that is the normal they see? Now, that is reaping what you sow!

   So please, if you are serious about change in society’s attitude towards women, don’t be that girl!

Ciao...

Oh, and Happy International Women's day!  

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