“You fight like a girl!”
“Why are you throwing like a girl?”
“Wow, you are acting really emotional, why are you acting so girly?”
While these may sound extremely offensive, these are some of the phrases that we are so used to hearing in our surroundings. But what happens when you hear these in your professional
environment?
As a fresher, we expect a life in the concrete jungle that is built up in our heads by the
videos/series/movies we have consumed in the past or read about in articles/books. Our institutions bring us up in a sheltered, protected, and privileged environment where casual sexism, misogyny, and misandry as subtle and uncommon. We are not allowed to see that just being efficient is not enough, we must be resilient as well.
I was lucky to have strong women mentors in my time at the corporate I worked at, who taught me the meaning of keeping my career over and above what people thought of me. They were women who knew how to hold their juniors as well as their managers accountable, and knew what it meant to be an equal in a world full of people who were ready to discriminate against them based on their gender.
While there were people like my mentors, I also met some people I worked with who did not know
how casual sexism and misogyny had been hardwired into their brains and left no chance to say
inappropriate things to or about women around them. These were entitled men who thought that
doing the bare minimum could get them places because “women were too emotional to be part of
corporates” and that sometimes if a woman is losing her temper, it maybe because of a hormonal
disbalance and not their inefficiency.
While I was almost always sheltered from these experiences, I was not blind. I could see these
instances occur in front of my eyes, where men and women spoke about their female counterparts in demeaning ways. If a woman is too involved in her work and expects everyone around her to be as particular, it meant she didn’t have a life. If a woman was not working hard enough, it meant she didn’t need to worry about a living because her father or husband maybe rich. There was no winning!
That’s when it struck me.
Even though we put in everything, even though we fight like there’s no other way out, it is never
enough. That is because there is no unity. There is no empathy.
We, as women, judge other women, poke at them, and assume things about them.
Even when we expect to be heard and understood, we refuse to hear others out. We refuse to
accept faults in others, refuse to see the light in others and hope for the world to be more
understanding and appreciative of us.
If we spend a fraction of the time we spend in colluding, judging and even just assuming things
about others, man or woman alike, we can make the world the place we want it to be for ourselves.
For the answer to our questions lies within us and can be found with just a little bit of reflection.
Fighting with girls has been a trend for a while but setting the trend straight would be to learn how to fight like a girl.
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