A non-exhaustive list of what it means to be a woman:
Being interrupted more during conversation
and at work; having a statistical chance of being paid less for the same work
performed by a man; having one's pain not believed by medical professionals and
taking seven years on average to have pain conditions properly diagnosed;
having a high lifetime chance of suffering sexual assault; having a high
lifetime chance of suffering intimate violence; having one's clothes and
appearance relentlessly policed; spending more money and time than men to
achieve a presentation that is considered professional; paying more for lower quality
and less well-fitting clothes than men; being called on less in educational
settings; having to overcome implicit, explicit and institutional biases about
our innate abilities and talents in educational settings; being much less likely
to have either celebrity or closer role-models who look and dress like us in
positions, either professional, political or social, of power and influence;
being offered predominantly sexualised role-models that emphasise our role as
objects of desire for men than any other quality or capability; being highly unlikely
to have role models of any kind who deviate from the white, able-bodied and
youthful ideal of desirability; being expected to minister to men's feelings
and either control, absorb or be blamed for violence performed by them; having
to undertake the majority of child-rearing labour; being expected to perform
more housework than men and being blamed, openly or implicitly, if the
cleanliness, tidiness and aesthetic appearance of our living quarters do not
meet the arbitrary standards set by our social milieu; assuming responsibility
for the wellbeing and medical treatment of any children, adult men, or elderly
people in our immediate or in-law families; being likely to have much lower
lifetime earnings due to the burden of the above responsibilities; being likely
to hold significantly less inherited or earned wealth than men; having a much
higher chance of falling into old age poverty due to the above factors; having
our testimonies of discrimination or abuse disbelieved by individuals and
institutions; being held to a much higher standard than men when we perform
journalistic, activist or academic work which aims to demonstrate and analyse
the above list of disadvantages; being required to subordinate the struggle for
the elimination of these disadvantages to political movements that include, and
therefore prioritise, men; being punished and threatened with expulsion from
our own political movements when we insist on the priority of our struggle for
liberation as women.
A complete list of what
it means to be female:
Producing, or having the kind
of body with the potential to produce, the large non-motile gametes in sexually
reproducing organisms.
