Ella

I’m 12, even at my age I’ve had a decently long list of sexist comments and a few experiences of sexual harassment. I never really thought much of it until I watched the TED talk on this that I realised just how often and to what extent this is happening. The first time I experienced any sort of sexism other than the very common ‘Can I have a nice, strong boy to carry these books’ sort of thing from teachers, was when I was in my cooking lesson at school. I never saw who did it, only who it was directed at, but It was along the lines of ‘You should be good at this. Can you do mine too’ from one of the boys to one of my friends. Then I was passing a rugby ball with another of my friends; we were passing it forwards just to practice passing and a boy in my class came up to us and said that we were girls, we couldn’t play rugby and that we were doing it all wrong. I told him we were doing a drill and to go away, My dad coaches rugby and my brother has been playing for 14 years now so I really know my stuff, he followed up by calling us idiot girls and tried to rip the ball from my hands. I’m much stronger than I look, so he failed and stormed off later that day to come back and ask if he could borrow the ball and play rugby the right way. I have also been told by another student not to go into engineering (my current career choice) and to ‘ go be a pretty secretary’. I’ve also had my bum slapped and inner thigh grabbed by my dad on multiple occasions and up til recently thought nothing of it. Looking back, I’ve realised that in some of my lessons, teachers ask harder questions to boys and simple questions to girls. I’ve also seen some girls get yelled at or given detention for asking boys to stop touching them, pinching them or to stop taking their stuff.