Sara Rigon, Italy, SSH Blog Correspondent
You are walking down the street and a man screams at you “hey, you are beautiful, babe”. You ignore him and keep walking. A million thoughts cross your mind: “Oh no, not again”, “Should I thank him so he doesn’t get mad”, “Does he look hostile?”, “Should I cross or walk faster?” etc.
The bottom line is you just want it to be over and with no consequences, so you rarely ask yourself why. It has happened so many times and it will happen again: it feels so pointless to wonder why.
Nonetheless, if we want to put an end to this we should learn from the best and follow Sun Tzu’s art of war rule: know your enemy. So, where does street harassment and violence against women come from? Where does it all start?
Social norms often view violence against women as a private matter and street harassment as women’s responsibility. Basically it is your fault: the way you walk, the clothes you wear, the way you look or don’t look, you are causing the problem: it is you. But it is not, it is a matter of gender and power. As the United Nation Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, adopted by the General Assembly on 20 December 1993, states “[violence against women] is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women, and that violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men”.
In other words gender violence is a matter of gender equality and street harassment is the daily proof that despite of what some people think in 2015 men and women are not equal, not even in the civil and democratic western world. This is when I get the feeling life is like monopoly: we got the “go back 3 spaces” card. Back to gender equality and the question remains: how do you fight historically unequal power? I say we start from stereotypes and prehistoric clichés.
They say stereotypes are not a bad thing, on the contrary they can save your life as they help you categorize the world and quickly make sense of the mass of data that compose your day which will take forever to interpret if taken individually. However I’m not so sure this is always the case as nothing is entirely good (or bad, of course). Clichés and stereotypes about women, for example, are not necessary true and they definitely don’t simplify your life, especially if you belong to that group of people who is believed to be superficial but caring and maternal, good listener and compassionate but also gossipy and bitchy, ornamental and absolutely not good at STEM.
You may have heard of the term STEM, it seems like everyone is talking about it, creating hashtag and launching campaign to increase the number of students in such an innovating field. For those who are not familiar with it, STEM (previously SMET) is an acronym that refers to the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
I have never really thought about it, but with all this talking about STEM and the lack of women in STEM education I started reflecting on my relationship with math and science. Did an old and narrow-minded stereotype put me off STEM? That’s not possible, I love science, I am a doctor, after all, and I have plenty of women colleagues. As a recent bmj career article reports that back in 2009 the Royal College of Physicians predicted that by 2017 most doctors would be women. I thought we were doing well, however I was forgetting that medicine is not strictly considered science, but more of an art and doctors artist armed with basic scientific knowledge in medicine.
STEM is more about hard science and so my studying to become a physician doesn’t really count. To be totally honest, I’ve always thought I wasn’t good at math and I’ve never contemplated the idea of pursuing a career in engineering. Now that I think about it, even with good grades in math I’m not so sure I would have enrolled in a STEM program at Uni knowing what the boys in my class thought and said about girls who majored in engineering and mathematics.
Reading the recent L’Oréal Foundation international report on the perception of women in science I can say it is not just me, conscious and unconscious bias and cliché on women in STEM are real and they discourage girls from undertaking a scientific education and ultimately a STEM job and career, the same and old cliché that undermine women and sustain gender inequality. Now more than ever, we know the limiting factor is not women’s brain but culture. Science needs diversity, we need a cultural shift.
Unfortunately, cultural changes are known to be slow and painful, especially when they are lead by grown-ups, in such cases it gets a lot easier if you start from posterity. It is not simple to separate nature from nurture and all different aspect of creating gender role in kids, however studies shows that drawing clear distinction in gender roles plays a role in pushing kids toward a specific career and gender stereotype.
So it’s up to us, to you, to be the change you want to see in the world: enroll your daughters to math camp and football teams, ask Santa to bring your son cooking and baking toys and dancing shoes: this could be the first step to stop street harassment for good.
Sara is a registered General Practitioner in Italy and New Zealand. She is the founder and current lead of the newly established Equally Different group within the European Junior General Practitioners Organization, the Vasco da Gama Movement, branch of the World Organization of Family Doctors. Follow her on Twitter @rgn_sr.
