WHAT'S UP WITH THAT?

138.365, originally uploaded by epicfailer.

Most of us have seen it. That teacher who always calls on the guy sitting next to you, even if you raise your hand before him. The boy who gets better shifts at work when he started a couple of months after you did. What is up with that? We all want to scream out that it is 2010!


Sadly, women still make an average 7% less than men in the same field of work. Why am I bringing this up on Girls in the Hall when most of us are years away from joining the working world? It seems like a minor issue compared to all us girls have to deal with in the challenges of the halls of high school. I'm raising this issue to all of you because it starts NOW. Here's an example to throw out there. Have you ever looked at your report card or sat in an algebra or geometry class, feeling like you were hopeless at math? In fact, statistics show that small children, regardless of gender, have virtually the same performance levels in math. However, as we go through school and the jokes about girls being bad at that specific subject are bantered around, girls' math scores generally drop compared to guys'. How's that for sabatoge? We are subtly told what we should and shouldn't be good at, and those terrible confines echo in our subconscious. So, Girls in the Hall, this issue really started when they put the pink bows on our heads as babies way back when.


Don't get me wrong, I adore wearing lip gloss, having painted toe nails and also hope to go to Lilith Fair this summer. I enjoy scouring thrift stores with my friends for that perfect vintage dress, and also being one of the few girls I know who will raise my voice in debates with guys about football. My favorite journeys are getting lost in novels with stars like Elizabeth Bennet and Bella Swan. Quite simply, I love being a girl, and all of the character traits that define what being a girl means to me. Some girl friends of mine hate sports, some love them. Some look forward to any chance to dress up, some would rather live in jeans. Some love science, some music. You get the the picture. Each of our unique and wonderful versions of being a girl make up a thread in the powerful fabric of womanhood.


How can we shine the lights of what our identity is within our gender, and also break this pattern? Too often, when we do acknowledge such unfair situations, we are labeled--shockingly by women, not just men--as (gasp) feminists. Most people don't know that there are a lot of degrees of feminism ranging from the radical to the passive. What pops in your brain when you hear the word "feminist"? Did words like "manhater" or worse automatically go off in your brain? Check out this interesting post on feminism.com about teens and feminism. Once again (surprise, surprise), society doesn't give teens the whole story. Most of us are not educated in any scope about feminism until we are in our college years, long after we have been thrown on the front lines of this battle in some way.The real truth is that most feminists want equality for women in compared to men while embracing our womanhood. One of my identities as a girl is indeed a feminist. When someone yells, "Feminist!" at me in a debate on this topic, I smile and say, "Thanks."


I know that one day it will happen. There will come a time when "throw like a girl" won't be an insult, we will have the milestone of a female president, and each girl can go to school and not worry that the classmate next to her is getting special treatment because he's a he. As we go from being girls in the hall to women on the sidewalks of the world, we will get us there.