Welcome to Womanhood

I have always been told that being a woman in the business world can be tough. My mom, who is a powerful businesswoman herself, has always talked about how much harder a woman has to work comparitively sometimes. This never seemed to reign true for me until I got to college.

I am a current business major and I truly do love the idea that one day, I may run a company. I know that may seem like a very far fetched goal, however, it should not be! Why is it that I may not be able to run a company? Well, I ran into a situation with a recent class where I noticed the professor would be at odds with a lot of the female students, including myself. When a man in the class would answer an open-ended question, he would praise and reward them for thinking outside the box. But when a female student followed up with their own theory, he would disregard it and completely disagree.

Now, I know this may seem like an exaggeration, but my friends and I started test this theory one day in class. So, as the professor would after every class, he ended with a question for us to discuss. We wrote down the comparing responses to the female students vs. the male students. Could it be possible that he truly only praised men for their “impeccable thinking skills”? The answer we came to was, yes.

I started noticing it more, beyond this specific class. Women just get completely disregarded in a conversation, or almost looked sometimes. I brought this recent revelation to my mom and her response was “welcome to womanhood, it is never easy.” I refuse to let this be a social norm moving forward for my generation, because I am a woman. And what I have to say should not be disregarded, or told that my answer was less than. My plan is to bring that thinking into my future work place and some day, when I run my own company, make sure that change is advocated for.