Name: Jaimee Whirledge
Community/State: Busselton, Western Australia
School: Georgiana Molly Anglican School
Age/Grade: 17 Years, Year 11
Overcoming the odds – how can we push through barriers to achieve gender equality?
A race is about to begin.
There are two tracks, each running along a hallway. On one track, all the doors to the hallway are open. On the other, the doors are closed. The race begins. A man sets off on the track with the open doorways, and a woman races along the hallways of closed doors.
The man gets there first.
“It was a fair race,” he insists. “They’re both the same distance.”
And the world agrees.
Our society is full of barriers preventing gender equality. For proof, you only need to take a look at Australia’s gender pay gap, averaged at 21.3% between 2017-18 according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
One of the most harmful barriers resulting in the gender pay gap are gender based stereotypes, which supply our society with unrealistic and unjust expectations on how women should behave and be treated. Harmful gender stereotypes such as the idea sporting professions are “male careers” and “men are better at sport than women” have created sexism and misogyny within environments like the sporting industry. The result of these stereotypes? Winners of the 2018 Men’s Football World Cup were taking home $54 million, whereas the winners of the 2019 Women’s World Cup took home a mere $5.7 million.
Ending discrimination against women means our society needs to overcome these gender stereotypes. These barriers are like doors; and whilst they are able to be pushed through after painstakingly fiddling with the lock, these opportunities should not be locked in the first place. Women do not need keys to open these doors; they need them to be forever open, the barriers dissolved.
Dissolving barriers means challenging stereotypes. Social attitudes need to change. We need a society that realises sexism is a battle we cannot afford to sit out on. We need a society that listens when people speak up against sexism. We need a society that will reject these stereotypes, a society willing to change their attitude to abolish gender barriers altogether. Only then will we have a chance at achieving gender equality in Australia.
A man and a woman race down a hallway. There are no doors, no barriers, and when the reach the end at the same time, they turn to each other and laugh.
“It was a fair race,” they say.
And it was.
Jaimee’s Power Trip is kindly being sponsored by AgriFutures Australia!