REMEMBER BEING A LITTLE GIRL...
This post was originally written 4 year ago… On March 21st 2020, the day the UK government announced the first Covid lockdown
And wishing to be a grown up? This title is a little tongue in cheek. Despite being 36 years-old and a production manager in film, I'm often - in a professional environment and otherwise - referred to as a girl. It seems like despite our wishes and best efforts, the world is reluctant at times to accept we've become fully grown women.
You may think there is nothing wrong with being called/calling a woman, girl; it is perhaps a term of endearment. But there is a time and a place for it. And in my case, that time ceased in 1994 and the place should never have been an office or any other workspace that I frequented in the past 15 years.
I am a guilty feminist - you can listen to the Deborah Frances-White podcast to know what I mean by that until I care to elaborate further. That's to say I can cut some slack and accept my boyfriend or my friends may use GIRL at times when referring to me, without jumping on their throats demanding they take it back. Unfortunately we've all been raised and carry with us the weight of a ton of unconscious biases that help reinforcing the very same stigmas we would like to strip ourselves off.
Post Coming Soon: I will take the Harvard IAT test, part of the Project Implicit, and I promise I will share my experience with you.
Image by University of Tennessee
This video by Mayim Bialik - by the way, I am a big fan, since good old Blossom days! - illustrates it very well. I follow Mayim closely, and we don't always agree 100%, but I second every word of hers when it comes to why we should stop calling women, girls.
And I am "saving you the time" to google Sapir-Worth, as she suggests:
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, part of relativism, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪər ˈhwɔːrf/, or Whorfianism, is a principle claiming that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. [continue to Wikipedia]
