Thoughts: International Women's Day

This Thursday was International Women’s day and it turns out it’s quite a big deal here in Cameroon (and in Africa in general). Many women had dresses and outfits made from a special fabric made available just for this occasion and then headed downtown for a parade/march. The newspaper talked about how the President’s push for more women in government was working and how they were ahead of many other countries in terms of female representation. The first lady was the host of the parade in Yaoundé. Day Crew kept wishing me a happy women’s day. And I was in my full contrarian mode, dismissing it and saying, for me, every day is women’s day, 365 days a year. I am a woman every single day and I am empowered to do anything I want to every single day.

As I’ve thought about it more and more this week, I realized what an absolutely amazing thing that is. The fact that I have those opportunities and could choose to do anything - that is a testimony to all the women who have come before me. That comes on the back of those who fought every step of the way. I sometimes take that for granted as an unalienable right but it’s only in the last 100 years that women have had the right to vote, and have been elected to public offices. Women and men have fought for every freedom that I now currently enjoy, pushed for equality in all areas of life. And what I take for granted, what I assume that everyone around me understands (that women are smart and capable and amazing), is not the common assumption in many other countries. It’s the reason that this day is so big in Africa, because women across the continent are still fighting that fight. They are fighting to be provided opportunities outside of the home, to have their voices heard.

All of my life, I have had strong female role models to look up. The women who held the first Women’s Day in 1909 in New York, I wonder who they looked up to, who their role models were? Did they just have a dream, a sense of what they could do? When I was in high school, my dream was to do hockey play by play commentary for TSN (a very Canadian dream). I couldn’t believe how many times people would laugh at me, or tell me they a woman could never do that, that no one would want to listen to a woman’s voice for hours. I was shocked. At home, I had always received encouragement from my parents that I could do anything I wanted. To be told I couldn’t do something based simply on my gender, with no consideration or even interest in my skills, well that was appalling to me. So I couldn’t have been happier when Cassie Campbell became the first woman to do colour commentary for a Hockey Night in Canada broadcast in 2006. As the years went by, soon all the morning sports shows had women announcing the highlights. In 2017, ESPN had a woman, Beth Mowins, do play by play for an NFL game, the first time since 1987. There is still a long way to go, but I strongly believe that a woman with the skill and desire now has those possibilities available to her. And young girls have another dream to add to the list of possibilities. As for me, I did do some play by play announcing for the men and women’s hockey and soccer teams at the university, but ultimately, God gave me new and different dreams.

Those new dreams largely have to do with politics and I want to point out two women who have inspired me greatly. The first is fictional – C.J. Cregg from the West Wing. According to Wikipedia: recognized as one of the greatest female characters in American television history.  C.J. Cregg spent the first 6 seasons being Press Secretary for the President of the United States. She uses her intelligence, quick wits, humour and ability to build relationships, to do her job with excellence. She more than holds her own in a room full of men and women. Then she gets promoted to the President’s Chief of Staff. I know she isn’t real, but watching her overcome challenges and stigma around her gender and all the things that come with that (even being made fun of for her height), provided quite an education and inspiration about how it could be done. I’m thankful for the writers of the show who were willing to put that dream out there (since we still haven’t yet had a female chief of staff) and give women someone to look up to.

The second woman is someone who is very real – Hillary Clinton. I have far too many opinions on her to say it all here, but I want to focus on the lesson that this last election provided about women running for office. The road is still long and difficult. Hillary faced challenges and obstacles that no man would ever face. We wanted her to be more like a woman (personable, softer), yet demonstrate that she could make hard life and death decisions (as if she didn’t already have an extensive body of work to point to). There was no room for her to just be Hillary the candidate. She threw herself in the fire to prove that it is possible, plausible even, for a woman to be the President of the United States. To give little girls everywhere a new dream. Think about the effect that would have had, that for every young child, having a woman as President would have been normal because that’s what they would have experienced and learned about for 4-8 years. The same way Obama being President normalized the idea of black men at the highest levels of power. I think we will see a profound effect from that in the next 10 years as those children grow up and have a new outlook on race relations. I want the same for women.

And yet, I still struggle with this idea of International Women’s Day. Too often, it’s perceived that we are raising women up at the expense of men. This is to the detriment of everyone. Rather than re-distributing the pie, we need to make the pie larger, to everyone’s benefit. To bring new skills and abilities and experiences and observations to the table. Personally, all I want is that all people have the option to do anything they are capable of doing – to be judged simply on their merits and not their gender. To not be shut out of doing something for characteristics they cannot control – their gender, skin colour, etc. I often get told that I am ‘like a man’. I used to take that as a compliment, then I realized how ridiculous that was. When people say that, what are they meaning? They mean that I am strong, independent, strong-willed, direct, etc. Why can’t I be a person who has those characteristics? Why do those characteristics have to be associated with men alone?

Mary Beard recently released a very short book called Women & Power, which I would highly recommend. In it, she talks about how we have very specific ideas of what power looks like, and that if we find that women don’t necessarily ‘fit’ into that idea of power, than shouldn’t we try changing our conception of power instead of changing women? She gives the example of Margaret Thatcher working to change how her voice sounded, or women wearing pant suits, or trying to be more authoritative, essentially being like men. But why would we not want the characteristics that women bring to the table? Compassion, empathy, inclusiveness, a willingness to compromise. A good representation of this is Téa Leoni in Madam Secretary, where we often see her ability to connect and relate about family and children, her willingness to do anything to save even one child, her desire to avoid underhanded or dirty deals, her desire to be fair, to find deals that benefit everyone, her ability to bring many parties to the table. A character who seems to be loosely based on Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who was said to be able to connect on a more personal level with world leaders and who was broadly liked at the time.

This argument might seem a bit strange coming from me since I am not that type of woman. Compassion and empathy are not my strengths. But that is exactly why I see the need for it, why I so admire it in others, why I value it. In a world where the U.S. government is gridlocked and accomplishes nothing, why would we not want more people who are willing to compromise? In a world where unimaginable numbers of people are displaced due to conflict and ecological disasters, why would we not want solutions coming from people who are inclusive, fair and compassionate? This is not a ‘women should run the world argument’ but rather a call to seek different qualities in our leaders. Both women and men can have these characteristics, but changing this conception of power certainly opens the door to more women to be their genuine selves and still be elected to represent us.

It would be foolish of me to talk about any of this without mentioning the critical role my parents played in my life. I grew up in a home where my parents both worked and supported each other. A home where my mother has spent 12 + years in school (2 bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree), and often made more money than my father, yet I never once sensed that he resented that. My sister and I grew up being treated the exact same as my brother (for the most part – for some reason, mowing the lawn was a no go). My parents always encouraged me to speak my mind (I think they regretted that some days), always pushed me to chase my dreams, and never told me there were things I couldn’t do. I was offered choices: Do you want to help build the picnic table or do the dishes? The picnic table, obviously! In some ways, that’s why it was such a wakeup call to go out into the world and be told that I couldn’t do something because of my gender. What does it matter if I’m a boy or girl? And rather than crushing me, it made me more determined. I’m going to do what I want. But I know that not all children have this kind of childhood. That too often, girls are given fewer opportunities, are more restricted, are told they will stay at home. And for those girls who don’t see equality modeled at home, their hope comes from seeing what other women do. Perhaps that fire gets lit by seeing a woman go to space, or became a Navy SEAL, or become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or win a Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps their hope comes from seeing a woman put herself out there and have 65 million Americans vote for her to be President. And if that inspired even one girl to dream big, to not let herself be limited by a box other people created, to believe she can do it, then I think it was worth it.

Let’s not just celebrate strong women, but also ‘weak’ women. Or maybe let’s just change how we define strength. Let’s celebrate women who are compassionate, emotional, empathetic, kind, smart, exhausted, worried, downtrodden, meek. Let’s celebrate every single woman and lift them up, tell them they are worthy, they are valued, and that there are no limits to what they can do.