Suzanne Harrington: Breaking the gender bias is long overdue

It is somewhat mind-blowing that here, now, in 2022 – where tech and science advances mean billionaires (the name we give oligarchs who are not Russian) can fund space exploration as a hobby – we are still in a position where half of the global population continues to oppress the other half. And the other half continues to put up with it.

Why else would International Women’s Day exist, if the other 364 days were not structurally in favour of international men? No matter how feminist/aware/fair-minded individual men are – and millions are – structurally, women are still banging their heads against bias.

This is the theme of International Women’s Day this year – Break the Bias. The first time I heard the word bias was in school, in Home Economics, a class where girls were taught how to cook and sew – and bias binding was not a tool of the patriarchy, but something you did with a sewing machine. Unless you were a boy.

It's broad-spectrum, bias, manifesting differently from region to region, culture to culture; being forced to wear high heels at work or having your emotions pathologized and medicated is not in the same league as, say, female genital mutilation. Yet such things tend not to happen to men.

International Women’s Day invites us to “imagine a gender-equal world, a world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination.” Sounds dreamy. But bias is baked in, and carried forward from generation to generation. Structural patriarchy - gender polarising, stereotype propagating, pay gap maintaining - keeps us divided, unequal, resentful. Women carry it forward too – the patriarchy is not male, just as feminism is not female. So what can we do about it, here, now, today?

Stop labelling, for a start. Stop medicalising women when we express non-compliant emotions like anger - anger is not just for men. Stop calling women ‘mad’ or ‘stroppy’ or ‘difficult’ when we refuse to go quietly. Stop expecting women to defer, to acquiesce, to tolerate, to relent. To put up and shut up.

Stop expecting women to be ‘naturally’ nurturing and caring – and allow men to be more nurturing and caring. Stop expecting men to perform masculinity and stop expecting women to perform femininity; because that’s all it is – a performance, assigned from birth. Stop with the pink and blue.

Stop victim-blaming. Stop saying ‘she was raped’, and say instead ‘a rapist raped her’. Stop saying things like ‘boys will be boys’, which transmits your bias to the next generation. Stop excluding trans people – you might think you’re a TERF but really you’re a FART (Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe). There’s no room in feminism for exclusion. Question your own bias - we are all biased, no matter who we are. Shine a light on it.

But most of all question why, when we are 51% of the global population, we live in a world where International Women’s Day is still required. Break THAT bias.