Children always have the brightest dreams: doctor, super-star, president, firefighter, astronaut. Before the age of 5 we see the world as ours to conquer, everything is new, bright and exciting and most of our phrases start with “when I grow up”. But just as quickly as our dreams form, they start getting teared down and our strongest desires become our biggest insecurities. We stop thinking that we can achieve everything because we get told we won’t be able to, that the world does not work like that. Parents don’t want their children to go out into the ‘real world’ and fall so they don’t let them fly.
Children are not born knowing prejudice, they don’t know the difference between Clara and Jack, girl and boy. Adults, however, often try to teach children that they fit in a specific box and their future is dependent on that. They give dolls to girls and cars to boys, they tell girls they can grow up to be nurses and boys they should grow up to be doctors, they teach girls what their place needs to be.
I was lucky my mom never did such things, she always let me know my place was wherever I chose to be. When I wanted to put on hot pink lipstick and parade around the house in her shoes, she let me; when I wanted to spit on a cotton swab and analyse it in my tiny microscope I had asked for from Santa, she let me. And she encouraged me. I wasn’t faced with the fact that women are not seen as equal to men until I went to school.
In primary school I realized I was different, when I spoke eloquently and succeeded at sciences, it surprised my teachers, whereas the same behaviour from boys was expected. I remember a teacher telling one of my friends that it was okay if she wasn’t very good at mathematics because that’s more of a ‘boy thing’ and that girls are more emotional rather than logical. We were 10. Girls grow up thinking it is not only normal for them to not be good at STEM subjects, it is expected.
By the age of 15, I remember when our biology teacher asked the class what we wanted to do after high school. Half of the girls in my class said they wanted to be doctors, when we graduated only one went on to pursue a career in medicine. I remember asking a few of my friends who had given up on becoming a medical doctor and gone for nursing instead why they had made such a choice and the overwhelming response was that they were told they were not good enough for a medical career, that they would not be able to achieve the required grades and that they do not have the qualities needed to become a good doctor. This is the story for many women out there, being told they were not good enough to pursue their dreams, being told to aim lower rather than higher because they won’t be able to reach it.
I challenged these notions and moved to the UK to study a STEM subject, many of the ladies in my course (and a few of our lecturers) did so as well by becoming some of the best students of biology and mathematics I have ever met despite being told they were not good enough.
Because the truth is, behind every successful person (and scientist!) is a ‘not good enough’ story.
If you were told you were not good enough but decided to throw those preconceived notions away and prove them wrong, leave your story below and inspire other young women just like you, just like me.
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