Drip, drip, drip. It’s not a single incident that makes gender inequality so harmful. In fact, individual incidents are often maddeningly difficult to protest, quick as people are to respond that you’re overreacting, imagining things or making a fuss about nothing.
The easiest way sexism seeps into our collective consciousness is by starting before we are old enough to challenge it. Pre-school girls worry about the size and shape of their bodies. Babygros in pink and blue promise future princesses and potential presidents, strictly delineated by gender. Research shows that parents interrupt girls more often than boys and that boys are more likely to speak up in the classroom. When children are taught that girls are particularly bad at a certain subject or activity, their performance declines accordingly. So what impact does it have when we tell them boys are naturally good at science, or sell them T-shirts that say ‘I’m too pretty to do maths’?
By subjecting girls to sexism, harassment and assault before they are old enough to question it, we ingrain in them the notion that they are second-class citizens and must simply accept this behaviour as part of life. When sexual assault becomes a normal part of the school day, we send the clear message that it is a normal part of daily life too. By excusing and praising boys and blaming girls for everything from sexual harassment to dress code violations, we teach them that women’s bodies are men’s to use, and that the fault lies with victims, not perpetrators.
I recently spoke at an event about some of the issues facing teenage girls, including body image pressure, mental health problems, online abuse and more. Seeing a little girl of nine or ten in the audience with her mother, one of the organizers went to warn the lady about the nature of the talk, concerned that the content might be too mature for such a young child. The mother explained that she was fully aware of the topics, and had brought her daughter on purpose. At the end, the little girl came up and thanked me. She said the talk had been particularly useful, because she’d received her first unsolicited ‘dick pic’ a year ago and hadn’t known how to respond. At another talk, a shy 14-year-old came up afterwards and told me, in a voice barely louder than a whisper, that over the past year she’d been pressured by ten different boys to send them nude pictures of herself. Most of them she barely knew.
These little girls go on to grow up in a world in which they rarely see themselves portrayed in the media (particularly if they’re disabled, transgender or girls of colour). Their stories just aren’t told by the Hollywood machine that churns out hundreds of hit movies each year but affords women only 28 per cent of speaking roles and sees them remove their clothes three times more frequently than their male co-stars.
As they attend college or university, young women are faced with sexual harassment and assault often so extreme that those outside the education system would find it difficult to believe. Yet our stubborn societal insistence that gender equality has already been achieved makes it incredibly difficult to speak out about the reality of misogyny on campus without being branded an oversensitive snowflake. Young women aren’t clutching their pearls and looking for something to complain about, as some right-wing commentators would have you believe. They are battling a litany of abuse in pursuit of their education, a situation so severe that many I have spoken to have simply dropped out of higher education altogether.
In September 2017, three major pieces of research were published in the same week. The first, a government-funded study, revealed that a shocking one in four girls is depressed by age fourteen. The second, a survey of 2,000 young people by charity Girlguiding, found that 64 per cent of teenage girls have experienced sexual harassment in the last year alone. And the third, The Global Early Adolescent Study, polled people across fifteen countries, showing that children felt straightjacketed into rigid gender roles in early adolescence, as the world expanded for boys and closed in for girls. Amid widespread coverage, I never saw anybody suggest a possible connection between these three sets of devastating findings.
And as the world around us sends us clear messages about our value and place, it also provides us with a litany of small examples of sexism, often combined with other forms of prejudice, so regular and expected that we slowly become desensitized to the situation. Part of dismantling the invisibility of gender inequality is taking off the blinkers that blind us to these daily abuses, because we are so used to the situation that we no longer even notice them at all.