Shut Up Woman! Your Opinion Doesn’t Matter
Who cares what you think about the faulty electrical wiring?
“Shut up! Women don’t talk when are talking” was a phrase I repeatedly heard from my elders during family meetings. With time I accepted this behavior as normal.
I wasn’t surprised that this attitude existed, after I moved to the States, but it wasn’t intensively used as it was in Nigeria.
When women speak out — to promote positive ideas or solutions — their voices go unheard.
When I worked in a male-dominated industry as a data entry specialist at a tech company, my manager did not listen to my input on an issue with making a video presentation.
I repeated myself over and over again and was completely ignored as if I was not present in the room. Until a man on my team repeated exactly what I had said.
He was praised and applauded for coming up with a solution. But then he pointed out that the idea was mine and that he merely spoke up because no one was taking my advice. The manager didn’t like that the guy had referred to me, a woman, as the original idea contributor.
My girlfriend is a female aircraft mechanic and works on mid-size private jets. She’s the one I talk to when I hit my car because she’s so damn smart.
Her senior manager called her fish brain during an in-job training because she had offered a suggestion on a technical problem the pilots complained of.
I’ve seen my female coworkers treated worse by male customers, and the managers did nothing. Rather they were blamed for pissing off the customers.
Many men are socialized to believe a man’s word over that of a woman, especially when it comes to stereotypical men’s topics.
I can’t stand such men. It makes me so damn mad when I’m brushed off or ignored because of my gender. I pretty much just walk away and actively avoid such men.
Is biology behind misogyny
Misogyny is a psychological technique aimed at controlling women and legally or socially excluding women from full citizenship.
In some cases, misogyny rewards women for accepting an inferior status.
Subtle clues about “masculine” and “feminine” behavior from birth, shape our behavior and skills.
We are taught that men should act manly, while women should be ladylike.
Two women gave birth at the same in a hospital. One had a baby boy named Ahmed, and the other had a baby girl, Maira.
As they were talking, a nurse interrupted them with two screaming babies. The nurse handed the first woman a “blue-wrapped boy, Ahmed” with approval — he had “a pair of creaking lungs.”
The second woman had a daughter, Maira, who cried as loudly as the boy, Ahmed. “She’s the loudest of them all — not very ladylike,” the nurse said.
And just like that, a newly born girl experiences her first misogyny lecture.
This story made me wonder whether the differences between male and female brains have anything to do with women being treated as inferior.
One of the oldest claims is that women have smaller brains, which has been taken as evidence of intellectual inferiority.
While it’s true that women’s brains are about 10% smaller on average, there are several problems with this assumption.
Then there’s the fact that the overall overlap in the distribution of male and female brains is huge despite the difference in average size. Therefore, we have women with big brains and men with small brains.
It should be noted that Einstein’s brain was smaller than that of the average man. In general, many studies show almost no difference between men and women intelligence or behavioral characteristics. Yet the allegations in the media persist.
Despite decades of research, it has been very difficult to reliably identify significant hard-wired differences in male and female brain structure.
The problem with misogyny is socially rooted
There’s a lot more to social media and ads creative that make a very clear list of what it’s like to be a man or what it’s like to be a woman.
If we believe that there are deep and fundamental differences between the brains of men and women and that the owners of those brains, therefore, have access to different skills, temperaments, or personalities, that will certainly affect how we perceive ourselves, man or woman.
It will also affect how we feel about others and their potential.
Ultimately, we must accept that each of us has a unique brain — and a single label like our gender cannot define our abilities.
Understanding that every brain is different and not necessarily based on the gender of the brain owner is a very important step towards equality.
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