International Women’s Day, a day created to celebrate women’s achievement, to stop and reflect, to raise awareness on the work that needs to be done.
Today, I have one challenge and hope: that we use International Women’s Day as a chance to ask questions. Instead of downplaying the importance of this day or inquiring when men’s day is, we ask women about the challenges they face based on their gender and stop to listen.
I challenge you to realize that while no one can properly understand another’s adversities, we can choose to listen to the experiences others have had. We can understand that there is harm and challenges and hold that up. We can do this for all minorities; for women, LGBTQ, Indigenous peoples, etc.
“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” – Benjamin Franklin
In 2018, we celebrated major accomplishments for women on a global scale: Saudi Arabia allowed women to attend soccer games, the country’s most popular sport, and drive a car for the first time; El Salvador passed a law to protect women from violence at work; the United States had a record 84 of 435 seats won by women in the House of Representatives in the midterm election; NASA announced its plans to launch the first all-female spacewalk on March 29th.
Subsequently, we can see the vast disparity our society still experiences based on United Nations’ reports:
* 8% is the number of female executives of Fortune 500 companies in 2018 (24 down from a record 32 in 2017).
* 7% is the portion of female representation in national parliaments around the world.
* 23% of all governments have passed laws to fix the gender gap, but globally, women still earn 77% of what men do for equal paying opportunities.
These statistics selected show that while women have made progress, the people who lead our countries through government and powerful Fortune 500 companies are still not near equal.
“But knowing that things could be worse should not stop us from trying to make them better.” – Sheryl Sandberg
While actively, you and I can’t change these numbers today, we can consider that we are all bias in certain ways and challenge these stereotypes within ourselves. If we can recognize the problem, we can begin to change it.
Acknowledge that women face challenges for being women.
Nike’s most recent campaign started to do this. It raised awareness on the words we use to describe women, not all with positive connotations attached: bold, bossy, crazy, dramatic. It showed how we judge women differently.
Consider the Columbia Business School Heidi/Harold experiment, created to test perceptions of women in the work place. The professors took a Harvard Business School case study about a real-life entrepreneur, Heidi, who is described for her outgoing personality and successful credentials. All students were given this case and then polled on questions, except half the students had Heidi’s case and the other half had the same case but with one difference: Heidi’s name was switched for Harold. The results had students rate Heidi/Harold equally competent and respected both. The difference: Harold came across as a more appealing colleague where Heidi was deemed “not the kind of person you would want to hire and work for.”
Decades of social science experiments have confirmed we evaluate people based on stereotypes (gender, race, sexual orientation, age, etc.) and our subconscious bias exists. The first step to overcoming this natural bias is recognizing it. Acknowledge the things we do to make it harder for women in our society. We can start by asking questions – ask women about their experiences.
“We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back.” – Malala Yousafzai
If you are interested in reading and learning more about the gender gap and how it affects our world I suggest some of my favourite books: Blink by Malcom Gladwell discusses our subconscious bias, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg shares lots of research on how to get more women to sit at the board room table and move up into leadership roles, and That’s What She Said by Joanne Lipman has numerous studies and data on how our perception affects women’s progress.
Sara
