Does sexism still exist?

Emily posted about this a while ago and it’s been playing on my mind for a while.

I have a number of friends – most, interestingly, made through my professional rather than my personal life – who tease me affectionately about calling myself a feminist, and ask me why I think I need to defend a cause that our mothers already won.

So, after some thought, here’s my explanation.

I rarely experience sexism in either my personal or professional life. I’ve been very lucky. In fact, the only incident that springs instantly to mind is a business pitch from a year or two ago where I was the only woman in the room. The potential client – a 50-something white male, self-declared success story and “industry visionary” – sat at the head of the table, winked at me (or rather, at my cleavage) when I entered the room, and spent the rest of the pitch looking through me, cracking crude jokes and ending each one with “well of course if there wasn’t a young lady present I could tell you some REAL stories, ho ho ho”.

Just thinking about it is making my blood boil all over again. But that’s beside the point. The point is that I can count those experiences on one hand, and I try to remember every day that this is a rare, rare thing. I have friends in other industries who can top my little handful of stories with one petty insult for every day of their working lives, one comment that made them uncomfortable, one little example of how they’ve been taken for granted, put down, laughed at or patronised simply because they are women.

My friends and I represent a very, very small sample of the world. I try to remember that, too. I try to bear in mind the hundreds, thousands and millions of women who aren’t as fortunate as me. The unlucky ones who fall into a job where they are undervalued, sidelined and bullied because of their gender, or who find themselves in a destructive or abusive relationship they can’t escape from. And, of course, all of those who are born and brought up in cultures where being a woman automatically makes you a second-class citizen.

There’s no denying that those jobs, those relationships and those cultures exist. That’s why I can’t let the small slights go. To me, it’s just an insult I can shrug off; but it’s also part of a bigger, nastier picture that stretches across the world. And it’s not just the world three thousand miles away - this is the world just down your street, where these things are happening every day, whether we see them or not.

So yes, I’m a feminist, and I’m proud to say so. What does that mean? It means I believe that we are all equals, that we deserve the same opportunities in life, and that we should be be judged on something beyond our genders.

Sadly, that's still a lot to ask.