UNDER MY WING

Foto de Yoann Boyer en Unsplash

It is said that people tend to deny what they do not want to see by hiding their heads under their wings. In this way, what I don’t see — what bothers me or what I don’t know how to face — simply doesn’t exist. Under my wing, I can believe that my world is the one I want or live in, and that this is reality — that there is no other. What I make invisible, does not exist.

We often hear or read: “Relationships have no gender; they occur between people.”That belief prevents us from seeing that relationships are not symmetrical. When they occur between men and women, they are not equal. Equality has been understood as allowing women to enter the male world — and that space has been considered “equal and neutral.”

Our society continues to reproduce discriminatory behaviors — from childhood with girls to adulthood with women. Today, girls no longer learn sewing at school, nor boys electrical repairs; instead, external services are hired. Yet if it’s sewing, it will most likely be done by a woman; and if it’s electrical work, by a man. In this way, we keep devaluing the work traditionally and continually done by women. Domestic work remains undervalued, and feminized jobs continue to be paid less.

We may believe that value today is attributed to responsibility, complexity, or knowledge, but in reality, women are still mostly relegated to the kinds of work that are valued less. And when men and women share spaces in organizations, collectives, or groups, we tend to place ourselves in that supposedly “neutral” space to relate as equals — without seeing that women live a different reality.

We must lift our heads from under the wing. We must see women. We must listen to them — and then act accordingly.

By TERESA CLEMENTE, lawyer and mediator. Head of the Relational Mediation Space.

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