My primary education was in a mixed school whose teachers were clearly not trained on the
psychological impact of words. Phrases like these were often carelessly thrown about.
“Are there boys in this class? How can there be 9 girls in the top 10 positions and only 1 boy”
“Myero dong I cak wunu rooko atetei pyen iti poto wunu cura bala mon.” (“You should start wearing dresses because you are all failing Mathematics like women”).
“Congratulations Sylvia (not real name) you have defeated all the boys in this class. ”
This made it seem like the girls in class were weaklings with no chances at academic excellence. The last statement on the above list quite literally equated my success to the boys’ defeat. All my teachers treated my achievements in a subject relative to one boy or the other. It was always a comparison against another boy. A comparison that I unfortunately embraced. I was so focused on proving my worth, quite ironically, in relation to the defeat of my male classmates. I quickly realised I was slowly normalising the object of “runt beats stallion” that unfortunately still didn’t make the runt and stallion appear equal. Therefore, I decided to directly address the elephant in the room. As the Maths teacher was distributing
mid-term results, one afternoon, I raised my hand after he had made a gender biased comment concerning the exceptional results of one of the girls in the paper.
"Despite the top 5 performers being girls?” I retorted. He simply nodded in acknowledgement clearly unphased. I plainly told him that it was discouraging as well as ridiculing for him to constantly compare a girl’s performance to that of a boy. The results were catastrophic. The class blew up in an uproar of laughter and I could hear shouts of : So what’s the big problem; Now she’s going to cry because of a few words etc I did cry, big fat wells of tears flowed through my eyes and I wanted to storm out of the class and slam the door behind me. Unfortunately, that could not be done as it was only the first period of the afternoon class. So, there I sat in total embarrassment and utter rage.
None of the girls in class seemed to share my thoughts as they all joined in on the laughter. My desk mate whispered between laughs, “small small words”. Implying that words are not supposed to hurt me while adding that “those things of feelings are for whites” When I think about it now, I would have appreciated the acknowledgement of these aggressions instead of pretending they don't exist or refusing to quantify them as gender bias, constantly camouflaging them. It didn't help that the other girls normalized these gender biased comments and were actually happy to be constantly seen in relation to another boy. I think it's time to call a gender bias a gender bias and not a slightly unkind statement.
-Abigail Lee Aol
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