What I learnt from my Late Father About Women’s Rights
Seeing it’s International Women’s Day tomorrow, I just wanted to share my personal thoughts about this Global Day that dates back to the early 1900s.
I am thankful that I am born and raised in a country where both women and men enjoy equal opportunity and gender is not something we have been made to be super self conscious about in our daily lives.
In fact, I grew up in a household where though my mum was a home maker during the years we were in school, my dad never once made me feel inferior just because I am female. He never used gender as a reason to push back on me for things that I wanted to do but he was not supportive of and never showed any form of bias when interacting with me and my brother. Thus growing up, I was never that conscious of this gender disparity, which ironically became evident to me only after I started out in the workforce.
During the course of my career, I have been involved in setting up women programs and had the chance to work with influential and powerful women leaders. I have also met a few who have supported me in my career alongside men of course. I personally think there’s nothing more encouraging and powerful than seeing women supporting other women. Not in a biased “all men suck and women are better” kind of way but simply in making an effort to mentor, coach or give other women a helping hand in a professional or social setting when you know that it would make a huge difference to them in crossing that important milestone of their life.
On the same note, I can also not think of anything worse than women being biased against other women, consciously or unconsciously. Statements like “oh lady bosses are usually like that” or “I don’t like working under a lady boss because they usually emotion-driven” and often vocalized by women themselves to me are far worse.
Don’t get me wrong as I think ultimately, it’s about meritocracy and may the best person “win” but I do think we need to ask ourselves a few hard questions as to just how far have we progressed since the 1900s?
Is it good enough to have a woman at the very top of your organization but with the majority of your management still being men?
Is it good enough that till today, we are seeing asks of men to be sponsors so as to pave the way to more opportunities for women? Will there be a day where we finally no longer even need to rely on men to be sponsors?
Are we really hiring on merit if everything else being equal, we just cannot find a woman to fill a certain position? Or is there something else we need to address to ensure there are enough female talent to fill the positions?
Just how far have we come in curbing unconscious bias and systemic bias?
I don’t have answers to these questions in all honesty but I just remember how my father made me feel back then. No different from my brother as in what he could accomplish, I could accomplish too. No special treatment and we both could pursue the educational pathways we wanted. And we both would get punished if we skipped school.
So why is it so much more complex in the working world? Is it down to whoever is at the top making that first decision, causing a domino effect, which in turn leads to a male dominated culture and unconscious/conscious bias?
As we note this year’s theme for International Women’s Day to be - Invest in women: Accelerate progress, companies and their board members should perhaps ask themselves seriously just how far they have progressed beyond just ticking off a checklist and gender and diversity quota.
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