Over this past summer, I examined the different perceptions of feminism. I worked with a group of about fifteen other young women to define feminism in our own terms. Obviously there is only one dictionary definition, but many people see feminism in different ways. To me, being a feminist is about recognizing the injustices women face and working to overcome them.
Feminists are often perceived as man-haters or overly bossy. At some point since women started voicing their opinions, the reality of feminism has been skewed. The real definition of feminism is advocating for women to have political, social, and economic equality to men. Yet some people believe that feminists want more than men, which is just an inaccurate portrayal.
I am a feminist that wants to have the same rights as a male counterpart. I want to be considered equal competition for jobs and I want equal pay for equal work. I have spent my past thirteen years in school, struggling to prove my worth, and I have recently learned that most of the boys I grew up with do not face similar pressures. I consider myself smart; I take challenging classes and maintain a 4.0 GPA, yet I constantly feel less valued in class discussions than males with the same level of academics. I know that men must work just as hard to get good grades and succeed, but they seem to start with higher expectations from people around them.
I spent second semester of my junior year of high school digging deeper into the causes and effects of the gender wage gap for a research paper. What I found was that women didn't ask for raises as often as men because that made them seem too aggressive to company executives. Yet men making those same requests were admired but the executives for being forward. This set the spark of passion that has been inside of me about this for a long time into a roaring flame. I was angry with society for continuing to dehumanize women with such negative attitudes. But in reality, I knew it would not change overnight.
I have seen progress being made to shatter the glass ceiling and create an equal playing field for men and women, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. I have engaged in social experiments asking friends, both male and female if they were feminisms and why or why not. Often people would agree that women should have equal rights as men, but would not categorize themselves as feminisms because they did not agree with some racial ideas. One person said that he did not think women were greater than men and so he was not a feminism. Another person claimed she was not a feminism because she did not hate men. This idea of feminism needs to be destigmatized so that more progress can actually be made.
As a seventeen year old young women, I hope to be able to be a competitive candidate for jobs in the future, without being prejudged based solely on my gender. I hope future generations of little girls will be able to truly dream big without any gender-based obstacles on their road to success.
