The saddest thing is, there are too many to count. So many that it becomes normalized. Sometimes I don’t even realise until after. The worst is when men assume that I’m not as intelligent as them. When I challenge them, they often fabricate some lame excuse that makes no sense and brush me off.
I work in marketing and I get paid significantly less than my male co-workers, even though I’ve never missed a deadline, all of my work has brought in significantly more leads and since I was hired (4 months ago), the traffic on our website, click rate for our email marketing, and successful inbound lead numbers have tripled. My ideas are frequently dismissed and then stolen, not just by co-workers but also by management. Men often talk over me, as if what I have to say doesn’t matter. I know I’m not the only women who experiences this.
I was blessed with an amazing husband who has been able to recognize the fact that there is no possible way a man could understand. He always says that until he met me he had no idea that this stuff happened to women regularly and thought “equality” between genders was not an issue.
Our current society is hopeless. We HAVE to teach our future sons how to be equally accepting and understanding of these very real struggles women face, and teach them to push for change. We need to teach them to not use terms like, “you hit like a girl” or “cry like a girl” . Women have to stop being portrayed as weaker, or less intelligent, or less important to society.
And we need to teach our daughters to be strong and confident in who they are.