International Women’s Day (March 8) or Women’s Month (March) did not take much significance in my life till the day I realized why.
I’ve lived most of my life relatively free of gender bias. I grew up in a home where women called the shots. It wasn’t because we, women, felt superior to men. It was because we, women, outnumbered them. And I always lived in a democratic household.
There were royal edicts but they were not gendered. My father could be dictatorial but he was not sexist. He recognized competence regardless of gender. He had too much respect for my mother who was intelligent and competent to think otherwise of women.
And while my father had his own ideas about how women should be, he never shut us up when we spoke up to the contrary. And he supported us when we stepped away from the stereotypical roles society expected us to fill.
Despite growing up in a fairly liberal household, I was aware that the world outside our home was quite different. My parents would come home and tell us, often enough, how their friends would warn them about having intelligent and capable daughters.
“They will be very hard to marry off,” my parents were told by their friends.
So, yes, I knew early on, the world was full of gender bias. But after all these years, I conclude it’s our DNA that’s actually repelling and killing the unions.
Growing up, I abhorred the patriarchy of the society I grew up in. But it managed to brainwash me into thinking that this was how the world worked and that if I didn’t accept it, I would be a pariah. I tried to fit in but in the end, my DNA prevailed. I chose to be a pariah than to conform to a mold I could not take.
I read that the biggest gender bias problem that women face today is “not being taken seriously.” I might be very fortunate but I haven’t faced this problem much in my life. I’m not really the kind of person that no one takes seriously. At any age. In any mood. And probably at any era.
I can’t recall any occasion, either, wherein I was dismissed as incapable or incompetent on account of my gender—except perhaps when I’m shopping for hardware or construction materials. These are, perhaps, the only times when I feel undermined by men who believe me completely clueless.
It used to irk me but after a while, I decided to just go with the flow and milked men for all the information they could give me. You can’t imagine the wealth of information I gathered about the industry just by listening to all the eager beavers “mansplaining” everything to me.
It hasn’t happened to me lately, though. I guess it’s probably due to age. Men probably figure that at my age, I should know what I’m doing. Or with age, I’ve just grown infinitely more intimidating.
More stories to come about men, me and other women this March.