A female CEO walked into a room full of male subordinates. She delegated efficiently, appraised perceptively, reprimanded harshly and all in all, ran her company amazingly. After the meeting she walked out of the room and one man said to the other, “What a woman!” The other replied, “That’s not a woman, that’s a man in heels!”
A couple of months ago a friend, a male friend, told me this joke. I saw from his teasing, light hearted expression that he found it funny and expected me to as well and as much as I wanted to humour him and laugh I couldn’t make myself do it. Not only because it is not a very funny joke but because laughing at it would be like endorsing it. It would mean that in those seconds when I deemed it funny I made it acceptable to label a woman masculine because she is good at what she does. I wanted to lecture him on female and male equality. I wanted to preach about narrow mindedness of sexist jokes. I wanted to smack the back of his head and tell him to keep the caveman jokes in the thirteenth century where they belong. I chose the latter.
So, what’s the point of this? It’s simple. As much as we like to think that this is the twenty first century where the saying ‘what men can do, women can do better’ is a reality, it’s not quite true. We still, essentially, live in a man’s world. Sad, I know, yet true. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, man have basically been ‘in charge’ since the world began and the fact that they haven’t blown up the universe is certainly a point in their favour.
The world is the way it is that can’t be changed over night, my problem is with the perception of women. Why is it so offensive for a woman to succeed in this man’s world? And when she does, why do people feel the need to label her? This is an old discussion. One which I’m sure most of you have heard before. One which feminists everywhere are still shouting about, so I won’t bore with too much talk on this. I only want answer as to why this keeps happening despite our self proclaimed modernity. And perhaps to spark a controversial discussion as to if it will ever stop.
