There have been times in life, many times, when I approached a problem or task or concept much differently than others would have. I have been blessed to grow up with people who believe in me, and to have found people who I can relate to, to emulate, when learning to be my best. Not all of these people are women, but certainly many of them are. I say this, because I feel like we all need to find our own way of mastering skills and information as we grow, and we need to feel comfortable doing it our way, by trusted role models who either remind us of ourselves or who, at the very least, are supportive of how we are finding our way.
Entering the teenage and adult world, things change a bit. Though idealized gender roles and stereotypes are always present in our lives, as we get older we start to have to deal with these perceptions independently. This can be a positive thing, so long as we can hold our own and we have healthy self images and images of others as equal persons with equal value. But in the workforce or in adult domestic life, it can be hard to think of men and women as equally valuable.
There was a controversy recently about a European clothing company that marked the washing instructions of a pair of men’s pants with the phrase “Give it to your woman.” At home, we can get the impression that men are no good at performing domestic tasks like cooking, cleaning and organizing. This impression belittles men who enjoy and excel at these tasks, and in a society where men are still viewed as more capable than women at most things, it also regulates these domestic activities and their primary agents – still women – to lesser roles in society. Likewise, women learn from their world not to be good at traditionally male tasks of the home, like servicing the car, in such a way that promotes stereotypes, and even worse, discrimination. As if you are uniquely smart and valuable if you can fix the lawn mower, but somehow less intelligent or needed if you can fix the pot roast.
In my experience, I have found something to be true in the workforce. Men at work are often successful at tasks, or in accomplishing goals, using skills and habits and methods that I do not normally use and with which I might not be successful. Some women I know work quite differently from me too, but in an environment where I aspire to leadership, and most of the leaders are men, I must look to them by default. And in these situations, I have to believe in myself. Others will doubt me when I do things in certain ways that seem unorthodox, simply because the only people who did these same things before me were men, who did them in similar ways to one another, and who belong to an unspoken club where their successes and failures are understandable and therefore acceptable to one another, while mine are foreign.
In this environment, which is no more hostile to women than any other workplace, I must maintain my belief in myself, because women my age are encountering tricky territory in the workforce. We are women who grew up knowing we could be lawyers, but who still expected most lawyers to be men. We are women who anticipated being able to be a mom and work outside of the home, but who still have to think about balancing this lifestyle so much more than our male counterparts do.
When people imagine somehow that there is now true gender equality in our world, a person who actually operates as if there is true equality (for instance, that there is something inequitable about their law firm when it’s not made up of 51% women, 49% men, with a woman just as likely to be leading the firm as a man) gets met with resistance and the opinion that she is militant, delusional, and aggressive, or, if that person is a man, that he is soft and a hippie. In this situation, repeated over again in different ways as we grow up, women tend to accept incomplete levels of equality. We can then start to see ourselves as inferior, as opposed to seeing the reality that we are still discriminated against structurally, and often times, personally. Met with these circumstances, women tend to underestimate their abilities over time, and men tend to overestimate theirs, as if they are responsible for the privileges or pit falls that societal gender equality has put into their lives.
One solution to this for women is to believe in themselves! Not too much, not too little, but with a clear perspective of one’s skills, talents, and ability to contribute and lead in life. If I waited for permission go forward in my life from those who have traditionally paved the way, my growth would be severely limited, as would be the evidence that I am competent in my own way, and increasingly so.
So let’s be real with ourselves, find relatable mentors who cheer us, and never look to a man, another woman, or anyone besides ourselves and our Creator, to design and birth our success.
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