How Do We Ignore the Voices That Say We’re Not Enough?

A couple of weeks before Christmas, I was watching TV and a trailer for the movie “Hidden Figures” came on.  A man in the movie asked Janelle Monae if she would want to try to become an engineer if she were a man, and she said, “No, because I would already be one.”  And I cried.

The next week, I was in Barnes and Noble buying a book for my niece, and I happened upon the book, “Isabella, Girl in Charge,” which uses plays on words to introduce influential women in political history.  I got to the last page, where the daddy has Isabella on his shoulders as a woman is being inaugurated President of the United States, and I cried.

As I was fleeing the curious stares in the bookstore, I was mentally yelling at myself, “What is the matter with you?”  Don’t get me wrong – I am a board certified crier.  If you yell at me on a jobsite or try to start a fight in a meeting, I won’t shed a tear.  But if two people fall in love during a 15-second coffee commercial, or my football team wins, or there’s a ribbon cutting at the car wash down the street, I’m a torrential downpour worthy of a Weather Channel official name.  I’m an empathetic weeper, more likely to cry with joy than with sadness, so tears are not unusual for me on an average Monday.

It took me several days of evaluation akin to a good wall failure analysis to figure out what was going on.  I know that I cry at movies, but my reaction to the trailer was a bit much, even for me.  And I was disappointed in the election results, (even though I don’t agree with all of Secretary Clinton’s policies), but there was something else there, something that reached beyond my distaste for President-Elect Trump’s attitude toward women.

I have to admit, I was shocked and well, to be honest, embarrassed when I finally realized that my emotional reaction really was a latent condition that was triggered by the election.  It made me realize that I bought it.  Bought what?  The idea that women are ever so subtly just not as good as men in certain areas.  Somewhere, deep in the recesses of my psyche, some little piece of me actually has believed the pervasive social perception that women are less in some parts of life.  To be the star engineer, to be president – if it happened it was a fluke because we aren’t really equipped to do that.  I’m not really equipped to do that.

How could this be? I’m still amazed.  My feelings certainly had nothing to do with the way I was raised.  My parents NEVER differentiated between their two boys and two girls.  They asked us, “What do you want to do?  What do you want to be?”  They drove me to Little League baseball practice, not because they were on a feminist crusade, but because my brothers played and I said I wanted to, too.  I told them I wanted to be good enough to play professionally when I grew up, and they said, “Great!  Work hard.” (Thank goodness I quickly discovered that I hate baseball and that football is life). I could have said I wanted to grow up to be the foreman on an offshore oil rig and they would have sat down with me and come up with a plan involving a good education and a lot of hard work.

I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by supportive and equality-minded friends and family my whole life.  And I can’t think of anyone who has met me for more than 3.6 seconds who would classify me as a pushover or a doormat.  So how did this happen?

Stepping outside my head a bit, it occurred to me that apparently the fabulous friends and family didn’t create enough of a wall to keep the chatter from the rest of the world out.  I went through school only one year after my wonderful, brilliant older brother.  No matter what I did, no matter what great test scores I got, someone always was around to mention, “Yeah, but her brother did way better.”  In high school, my school didn’t have calculus*, so three of us lobbied to drive over to the nearby boys’ school during lunch to get to take calculus there.  We didn’t get the arrangements made until the first week of the school year, so we couldn’t take the top class, which was a college credit class.  But we enrolled in the advanced calculus class, and we got the top three test scores for the first four tests of the year.  Several of the teachers commented, “They got the best scores, but it’s because they’re not in the top class.”  And in college, I heard repeatedly that girls do well in engineering school only because they study more.  It didn’t help that I didn’t particularly like math, and English was my favorite subject.  This only reinforced the stereotype that I wasn’t really meant to be there.

Even in my professional career, where I own my own business and I’ve worked through some brutal conditions on remote jobsites, I have listened to snide little remarks about how I got things done because I got along with the guys, not because I was technically competent or because I had good management skills.  And there has been no shortage of well-meaning people who didn’t realize how condescending it is to act like it’s “cute” that a little woman is ordering guys around on a construction site.

I suppose the constant outside influences somehow penetrated my rock-headed Irish consciousness over the years.  And for that I am embarrassed, and disappointed, and angry.  I think the possibility of a woman becoming President somehow was a subconscious trigger for me, a sign that maybe all of those people were wrong.  We say all the time that anyone can be anything in the United States, but I think that a woman becoming President would make a nice concept a reality.  And somehow it would validate the theory that women are just as capable as men of doing anything – math, science, world domination.  And it would validate that who I’ve been all these years is not a façade over an inadequate structure.

Of course I’m crying as I type this, and I hope that little girls everywhere share no inkling of the insecurity I apparently have felt for many years.  I hope that we have a woman in the White House in the near future, not because we need to prove anything, but because we can.  In the meantime, I’m going to concentrate on exorcising this demon of doubt from my soul.  I’m not happy that the election turned out the way it did, but I’m glad that the trauma of it wrenched free a problem I didn’t even know I had.  Who knows?  Maybe that woman President will be me.

*Note:  Mercy Academy in Louisville, Kentucky, has more than made up for lost time, becoming the first all-girls high school in the U.S. to have a STEM-accredited program. Mercy also launched an award winning ad campaign several years ago that centered around the theme “You’re Not a Princess.” Go Jaguars!