Fight it all…. Win it all!!!

The battle of equality is never ending. It’s almost like giant rocks need to be moved so smaller stones could be turned. It’s exhausting and every day we get farther from it.

As per global statistics the rate of education between boys and girls is finally seeing a bridging of the gap. Even in rural areas this is getting better. Girls are learning and going to school about as much as boys.

In academic and professional institutions, women hold 52 percent of job positions. But…..…

Women don’t have the same representation in leadership roles.

Why? Several reasons come to mind.

Women have been battling some workplace biases that account for less promotions into leadership positions and less recommendations made for them.

A bias at the forefront of it all is largely explained by the attribution theory or the value attribution bias. Women constantly fight against the attributed value to themselves and strive to prove themselves more than what the assumption is about their worth. This is exhausting work and women who work outside their homes don’t get acknowledged for it by family, friends or work colleagues.

But women who work inside their homes aren’t acknowledged for it either. A man’s understanding of a woman who works indoors’ contribution is very limited. Housewives are usually judged by a metric that is devised by either toxic matriarchy or patriarchy. It hasn’t been outlined by the women in the trenches. That is also exhausting. Hearing “what did you do all day” at the end of an exhausting day laden with chores and primary caregiver responsibilities isn’t fun or uplifting.

Women also face tons of priming biases at work. Men, who have had prior interactions with less ambitious and efficient women, tend to be primed to have the same opinion of all women that they come in contact with. This is a hard bias to break. Because most bosses are men, a woman in a subordinate capacity is very limited in how she can break the bias or challenge it. She continues to work harder in order to be acclaimed and sometimes acclaim comes and mostly it doesn’t. Eventually her career ends.

The same bias, unfortunately, happens at home also. Men usually are primed to think the worst of their wives if they haven’t had great role models in their mothers or sisters.

So it’s easy to say that women should try and go up the ladder. It’s easy to say that the mindset needs to be changed. Let me tell you how the cycle of toxicity is hard to break. Let me show facts that support how many more years are needed for a shift in perspective.

Global estimates say that it will take 102- 108 more years to attain equality.

Who has time for that? So here’s what women have been doing. They have been walking out of jobs that don’t respect them or value them. They have been uninhibited in their appraisal of a job every few years to see if their employers are empowering and if their vision aligns with the vision of their employer. They evaluate their job satisfaction against their own personal growth. They see if they have some work-life harmony.

And in the same way, women have been walking out of emotionally dissatisfying marriages. They’ve been unafraid to get into long, acrimonious divorce battles if it would get them freedom and set an example to their kids of not compromising on basic principles.

So while the popular lesson is still obliging and conforming , many women have taken the less popular course and have been fighting it all and even if others can’t see it, they’re winning it all. So for them the program isn’t set at 102-108 years for equality. For them, they own the world today.