The other day, I was thinking about the best advice someone has ever given me. After everything I’ve ever been told since I was a child, I could not think of a single one. It’s funny that today in class of mine, a teacher had me almost jump out of my seat after she said this:

“As a woman, you will have to be twice as good to get half the credit.” Now I know this isn’t advice… actually it’s nowhere near advice. It’s a statement.

It’s 2016, and women are somehow still looked down to as the inferior gender. Granted, we’ve come a long way, but obviously not far enough. We still live in a world where young girls aren’t allowed to wear spaghetti straps because they’re “distracting” the boys, and women are only getting paid seventy-nine cents of every dollar a man makes. So let me ask you a couple questions.

Why? Why should we have to work twice as hard to get half the credit? Why are we belittled, while men are cherished for doing things women are more than capable of doing? Why don’t we have equal rights? How do we still live in a country where women can be doctors, veterans, judges, and/or mothers, etc. but women still aren’t “as good” as men? My fear is that these “ideas” and rights will still be here for the next generation of kids, my own future children. So I'm going to make my own advice for you all, based of the above statement.

Do something so as a woman, you will not have to work twice as hard to get half the credit. Talk about these issues in your community. Whether that’s expressing your beliefs in school, or writing articles like this, you can help make a change. Stop giving children as young as eleven, boy and girls, the idea that men are better and can get away with more because of what they have between their legs.

Feminism is the belief that women should have political, social, and economic equal rights as men. It’s that simple, that easy. You don’t have to go walking down the street of New York City chanting, “Free the Nipple,” and you also don’t have to grow your leg hair out until it’s seventeen inches long. It just means that you believe women are as incredible as men are. At certain jobs, maybe even better. We all have to be feminists, because if we don’t start making a huge change now, when will we?

What’s crucial for this to even begin is that women need to support other women. We come from a society of people that constantly feel the need to tear women down for whatever reason that may be. Whether that’s their body, sexuality, academic level, jobs, etc. we are always looking down on one another. How are guys supposed to see that we are as good as them at everything, when they constantly hear us talking shit about each other?

Women are beautiful, strong, intelligent people that can accomplish anything they want, if you give them the chance. Everyone has to change their out look on how women should be treated, so the future generation of girls don’t look around and see a world that admires men more.