The Skills: From First Job to Dream Job - What Every Woman Needs to Know. Mishal Husain
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British TV drama and saw female characters brutally attacked again and again, to the point where it was barely noticeable any more. ‘We need to start noticing again. We need to consider how little we learn and what a warped perspective we get on the world when the gender imbalance driving its description is so strong.’
Reese Witherspoon thinks you can often see the effect of the imbalance in the lines assigned to female characters. ‘I dread reading scripts that have no women involved in their creation,’ she said in 2015. ‘Because inevitably, the girl turns to the guy and says, “What do we do now?”’ She has a point – it’s happened in films from Gone With the Wind to Toy Story to Judi Dench as ‘M’, speaking to James Bond.15 Perhaps it is to make women more likeable, something the screenwriter Cami Delavigne says she is often asked to do in the creative process. ‘It is not “likeable” for a woman to say “No”, to say “You can’t do that”,’ she says. ‘That is not charming. That is not sweet.’16
When you grow up female all of this surrounds you, whether or not you are aware of it, but the mirror image of that is the effect of gendered beliefs and expectations on boys. ‘We stifle the humanity of boys,’ said the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a 2012 speech which was later sampled by Beyoncé and distributed to every school in Sweden. ‘We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability.’ For girls, the parameters are different: ‘Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage,’ she said. ‘I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a good thing, it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and not teach boys the same?’17
I see this overemphasis on marriage a lot in my own community, whether among those of south Asian heritage in Britain, or when I visit Pakistan. Women who have done extraordinary things can be perceived as somehow deficient because their private lives did not take a course in line with societal expectations. Sometimes those expectations are so internalised that young women pursuing advanced qualifications, such as medicine, can see them more as a route towards a better marriage than a professional future. ‘It is much easier for girls to get married once they are doctors and many girls don’t really intend to work,’ said one medical school vice-chancellor, Dr Javed Akram. ‘I know of hundreds and hundreds of female students who have qualified as a doctor or a dentist but they have never touched a patient.’
Today, while 70 per cent of Pakistani medical students are women, they make up less than a quarter of registered doctors. The barriers range from families frowning on daughters-in-law going out to work, to the practical – childcare, transport and security.18 Now, two entrepreneurs are trying to address the shortage of practising female doctors through an initiative called ‘Sehat Kahani’ or ‘Health Story’ – using live video to connect a doctor who is at home with her children to patients, often women in remote areas with little access to healthcare.19
In the West, too, there are generational shifts in women’s expectations. Gail Rebuck, the publishing executive whose company was behind Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, contrasts her experience with that of her mother. ‘For my generation it was all about escaping from our mothers’ shattered dreams,’ she says. ‘Most of them were products of the 1950s, intelligent women and absolutely capable, but the mores of the day dictated that as soon as they got married they would be at home bringing up the family. We grew up with that sense of unfulfilled possibility, almost a silent rage.’
Gail herself was born in 1952 and started her career in the 1970s, taking charge of a major publishing house in 1991. ‘When I was coming through I could only do my best and it certainly wasn’t perfect in many ways,’ she says. After publishing Lean In, she observed something different among Sheryl Sandberg’s generation – a sense of ‘necessary excellence’ and a feeling that they needed to be the perfect executive and perfect mother. ‘Today’s forty-somethings are often angst-ridden, partially empowered but conflicted because of the equal impetus coming from this notion of excellence.’
How true this rang for me, both in terms of the age group and the feelings. I had grown up with a stay-at-home mother but found myself making my way in the world with a different set of circumstances – wonderful opportunities and possibilities, but also being pulled in more disparate directions. I could not fully model myself on the example of motherhood that I had experienced as a child and concepts of excellence, perfection or guilt were more likely to hinder than help. What I found empowering was the simple act of being open about the juggling act: these were intense phases in my life and I was fortunate that that was due to choices I had made rather than adverse circumstances.
Openness can also be a powerful tool and motivator where women and girls might feel daunted by barriers or the lack of a female role model. In a 2013 study, researchers in the United States set out to test several theories on interventions that might encourage girls to consider careers in the physical sciences. They looked at single-sex education, exposure to a female physics teacher, bringing female scientists in to the school as speakers and class discussions on both the work of women scientists and the lack of women working in the field. That final intervention was the only one found by the researchers to have a significant positive effect. ‘Explicit personal discussions regarding issues that women face in pursuing the physical sciences may help female students realize that feelings of inadequacy or discomfort they might have stem from external norms and pressures rather than from their capabilities, interests, or values,’ they said.20
In other words, we need to talk about this, and we need to do so in a way that is not hinged on celebrating a few particularly successful women who are then perceived as exceptional, or as ‘superwomen’. When Helen Fraser was leading a network of girls’ schools she spoke about the pressures she witnessed, first on girls to have the perfect appearance, school record and friendships, and then ‘on young women in their twenties, who as they start to build a career, form a relationship and find a place to live, are told that they need to start having children fast, or their fertility will be gone’. Against that backdrop, she worried about the impact of an ‘inner critic’, holding girls and women back if they thought that what they had to say wasn’t good enough, interesting enough or valuable enough. ‘If the female half of the population are routinely censoring themselves,’ she said, ‘their great ideas aren’t getting aired or implemented and the world is a poorer place.’21
I think back to my own childhood and the frequent question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and wonder if, today, a better question to a girl might be ‘What is your ambition for when you grow up?’ It stakes a claim to a word so often used negatively for women. With only sons of my own, I have no real-world experience of looking close up at girls as well as boys at the age when the effect of stereotyping sets in. But in my sons I see a self-belief that I don’t remember experiencing at a comparable age. Moments after one first managed to ride a bike on his own for a few wobbly metres, he asked if he might do the Tour de France one day; another, on being told that Sadiq Khan, also from a British Pakistani background, had been elected mayor of London, said: ‘I think I’ll go for prime minister.’ Without really knowing the word ambition, they appear to set their sights high as a matter of course. Life will teach them in time what else is required, but it’s not a bad base from which to set out.
Progress depends on the choices we make today for tomorrow
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