Recently, there have been a lot of gender equality movements and I absolutely love it. It seems like Always started off with their, “Like A Girl” campaign, with the younger girls totally breaking the stereotypes society has filled our heads with. They truly taught women a lesson that “like a girl” doesn’t mean prissy and dainty, but fierce and badass. Then Jennifer Lawrence talked about how she brings in the big bucks for her movies, but for some reason doesn’t get paid as much as her male costars. And let’s seriously be honest, we only come to see J-Law. My current favorite gender equality advertisement, is Secret Deodorant’s #Stress Test. It’s about a young women who’s in the bathroom mirror giving herself a pep talk before she goes to talk to her boss about how she should be paid as much as Todd who hasn’t worked at the company as long as she has. She goes on to talk about her accomplishments and strengths in the mirror, and then she hears the toilet flush and she automatically freezes, because someone has been listening to her coach herself. When the mystery person comes out of the stall (an older woman), she makes eye contact to the younger woman and says, “Do it.” The older women’s encouragement was exactly what she needed to hear before she went out to demand the money she not only earned, but deserved.

I know that gender inequality has always existed, but it wasn’t until I got older that I started to understand how much it affected me. I also started to notice how systematic sexism really is. I once saw my female professor give a male student an extension on his assignments because he simply didn’t do them. He never showed up to class, never turned in his work, and somehow he was able to get an extension on all the work simply because he was a male in a predominately female department. It honestly shocked me when he told me. I was like, “because you’re a man… working towards a degree which is predominately women?” His reply was, “yup”. It truly boggles my mind to see how females are so accepting and want everyone, regardless of their gender to succeed. Whereas, my girl in the commercial had to encourage herself in the bathroom to talk to her boss, Bob, about getting paid an equal amount as Todd, even though she has worked harder and longer. What amazes me though, even though we get paid less, we still work our tails off and that will never change.

Today I went to a boy’s basketball game and there were two different coaches. There was a male coach and a female coach, both coaching the same game. As soon as I saw the male coach I wasn’t a fan because he seemed like a jerk before the game had even started, and then once he saw that the female coach was coaching, he turned into an even bigger jerk. When the game started started, I watched the game and it was all fine and dandy, until I started hearing the male coach screaming to the top of his lungs (we were only 5 minutes into the game). I wanted to know so bad why he was screaming, and I realized, that his team was losing. Then I wondered, if the opposing coach were a male instead of a female, would he be just as crazy? Answer: not a clue. As the game progressed, the male coach’s team started winning, and he started to simmer down, but as the female coach’s team started losing, she never lost her cool. She yelled so her players could hear her, not to intimidate them. She didn’t yell about what they shouldn’t do or what they did wrong, instead she yelled plays and suggestions. She never once yelled, “What?! Man are you kidding me? Listen to me! Listen to what I say!” (The male coach screamed that I swear). Instead, she kept her calm manner, and only shouted out words to help her players. In the end, her team won, which absolutely amazes me, because here she is a female, coaching a boys’ team, and winning. It just goes to show, that even when women are up against men, in a domain they claim is theirs, we will slay. Women run the world, whether it’s a man’s world or not, we run it, and we own it.