Perception is Everything

In a recent meeting I attended, the lone man in the room said quite seriously, “well, now that women have taken over the world, you all don’t need to worry about all this.” My immediate thought was that life really is all about perception. We recently appointed only the third woman in 111 justices to the Supreme Court; there are just 17 women in the U.S. senate; and Oklahoma ranks 49th in women serving in state elected office.

Girls who participated in focus groups on leadership after the presidential election in 2008 pointed out that it was much harder for women leaders to succeed in this country than men. But perception is everything. And the lone man in the room felt that we had taken over.

Once, while teaching a college class on Adolescent Female Development, I led a guided imagery to the class, asking them to go back and connect with the 8-year-old self that they were, before body changes and social perceptions changed how they may have perceived themselves. Since it was a class on female development, I used the pronoun “she” as the generic term instead of “he.” Right away, the three men in the class fidgeted until the quiet imagery part was over. Immediately their hands went up: “We can’t do that.” “I could not translate ‘she’ to ‘he.’” said another.

Do we women even think about that? When the word “mankind” is used, women have no problem including themselves under that terminology. Unless you were somehow blessed with the perception to question the status quo (I sometime want to figure out why I liked the “emperor has no clothes” story so much!) most of the ways women are disconnected from or denigrated in the picture are missed: the photo of all the white, male scientists; the assumption that the doctor is male, or that the picture of Sotomayor hanging from a rope in a cartoon was supposed to be funny because she was depicted as a piñata.

But just because we miss what is being said to women in subtle and not so subtle ways, do those images still influence us? A recent study about teens links stress with pregnancy. While researchers thought that teen moms were often stressed after the birth of their child, the studies point out a good predictor of teen pregnancy, is often stress before the onset of pregnancy. Higher levels of psychological distress in their teenage years led not only to pregnancy, but lifelong issues with depression.

This study, coupled with the Centers for Disease Control’s report a year or so ago about the increase in suicide and suicide attempts in girls 10-17 makes me wonder if living as a girl in our society, whether you know it or not, can be hazardous to your health. If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I am grateful I am doing the work that I am doing: working with girls to develop their voices and to build their leadership muscles, can only help them as they encounter the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.