After spending a sunny afternoon at the playground with some of the boys in my hometown, someone said to me, “It would have been nice if you were born a boy instead of a girl.” I was six or seven years old at the time, and it was at this point in my life that I felt a little off about my identity.
I was aware that everyone had a different lifestyle, but for the first time discovered that many societies have some set of unwritten standards for different gender identities.
I was an eclectic mix of various traits as a child. I enjoyed playing with dolls and wearing skirts, but felt that people viewed me differently because I would hang out with the boys and play video games. I did not recognize the stereotypes that had been assigned with each gender—I was simply being myself.
Yet, it dawned on me that the world I lived in always had aspects of segregation based on gender, regardless of if this was a good or bad thing.
As soon as students entered middle school, they began to have health lessons in gender-segregated classrooms. I vividly remember sitting in a classroom with the other girls at my school and our instructor, a woman, came in to give us the lesson. She went through a PowerPoint presentation and showed us videos on womanhood.
She spoke of how we should act as maturing women, yet another set of standards we were expected to follow. Our lessons were supposed to enlighten us,to teach us that we were women, the more careful and conservative of the gender identities.
However, I was scared of becoming something different, someone different. I had always just been myself, and now, I was being taught how and why I should act in certain ways in school.
I became curious as to why women are told to be more conservative and careful than men. Is it because of our physiological differences? Why are boys allowed to mature at their own pace but girls are expected to become women at a certain time? And, more than anything else, why was it that becoming a woman had to happen all at once and under such intense supervision?
In college, I learned about Simone de Beauvoir and her writing “The Second Sex.” Her words resonate with my thoughts as a pre-teen. She writes: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Looking back, I feel like I was trained to be a woman.
According to the Pew Research Center, the U.S. is the only country among 41 OECD nations that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents,meaning that it is not a legal requirement for women to receive paid maternity leave when they have children.
This is an example of how women are forced to fulfill certain gender roles. The lack of paid maternity leave puts pressure on women to return to work as quickly as possible so they do not fall behind in the work force.
Also, the fact that there is a greater emphasis for paid maternity leave than paternity leave suggests that our society still considers women to be the primary domestic caretakers—another gender role women are expected to fulfill.
I believe the physiological task of bearing children should not be a reason that women fall behind on their personal aspirations. Women should be seen as individuals, and they should be able to behave however they wish. Women should not be taught how they are expected to mature, nor told at what age they should begin to do so.
All people should be equal and should be raised in an equal setting. Young boys and girls should be educated together and should not have gender expectations set for them. Our society is beginning to accept this idea, but we still have a long way to go.
I am a strong supporter of gender equality, and I hope that young people across the country and the world will be able to express themselves however they feel is right.
Hae Rin is a junior majoring in history. What do you think of the gender stereotypes that students are taught in schools? Send all comments, questions and concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
