Have you ever tried to join a group or game but have been rejected because you are female? That’s happened to me. When I was younger I would try to join football games at recess, but the boys would say that I couldn’t join because I was a girl and I was weak. But if I’m being honest, I was probably stronger and faster than most of the boys there. In the fifth grade, I was put in a group with all boys for a project. The boys gave me the easiest part of the project and didn’t let me add anything or suggest things for the project. When I asked them why, they said it was because I was a girl.
What happened to me probably isn’t as bad in comparison to what has happened to other women. Take Shirley Chisholm. She tried to run for the democratic nomination to become president of the U.S. in 1972 but faced resistance because she was a woman, and she was African-American. When people try to publish pieces of writing, sometimes they get rejected because the material isn’t what the publishers want. That is perfectly normal. But sometimes people don’t get things published because they are female. And that is exactly what infuriates me. People don’t realize how difficult things can be for women and girls. People portray women as weak and that “They belong in the kitchen.”
Think about jobs too. If a man and a woman work the same job, sometimes the man will get paid more than the woman! And they work the exact same job! Sometimes it goes deeper than that, like if the man got a raise and the woman didn’t. But usually it’s not. Even in sports women still get paid less even if the female version of the sport is more popular than the male version. Take the WNBA for instance. According to the website Statista.com, the average WNBA salary was about $103,000 for this past season, but for the NBA, it was about $9.4 million. And the difference between the numbers only gets bigger when you look at top-tier players. Player Diana Taurasi makes about $235,000 a year compared to Stephen Curry who makes about $52 million this upcoming season.
Once when I was in 6th grade, I got dress coded just because the tiniest sliver of skin was showing from under my shirt. The teacher who dress coded me said that it was distracting for other students and told me I had to pull my shirt down further. I still cannot believe that that teacher would dress code me for something as stupid as that. The same thing happened to my friend that year, but her situation was much worse than mine had been. The teachers went as far as to send her home to change. At the elementary school I used to go to, tank tops and spaghetti straps were banned. I obviously understand that sometimes girls can go a little far with clothing, but tank tops should not be a stopping point. Girls should be able to wear the clothing that they want to wear, without having to worry about getting sent home to change or getting in trouble for what they are wearing. Boys on the other hand, never seem to worry about that kind of stuff. There was this one boy in my grade who had tucked the bottom of his shirt into the top of his shirt like a bikini, and he was just walking around the hallway! No teachers tried to stop him! So boys can get away with it, but girls can’t?
In conclusion, boys and girls, men and women, should all have the same rights and rules. Girls and boys should both get in trouble if they do the same thing wrong. They should all be paid the same money if they work the same jobs, because look, JK Rowling is a woman, and she is just rolling around in money. Francoise Meyers is also a writer, and she has an estimated net worth of US$94.9 billion. Women should not have to live a life where they are bossed around and depicted as a weakling and a maid. Because women are people too. And all people are equal.
No comments:
Post a Comment