On Locked Doors and Traditional Mindsets
today
i want to talk to you about doors not
the ones you go through every day the
ones you lock to be undisturbed are the
ones you slam
when enraged today i want to talk about
doors
that lead towards a new exciting chapter
of your life
and how they can sometimes be firmly
locked
let me illustrate this with a little
story
shortly before i turned 14 my father my
sister and i
visited my grandma in berlin she is an
artist and we wanted to archive her
works
when going through her documents we
found an old letra
in which she had written about her life
as a child and young adult
though it was very emotional to me i
will not go through all the details
because it was four pages long
but what shocked me was that she left
school in ninth grade
to take care of her adopted cousin whose
father had just committed suicide
while her mother went out to earn a
living at that time
she was half a year older not even than
i am now
she left school though she had not yet
finished her compulsory education which
is why she later on
got sent to housekeeping school for
girls for the remaining
three or four months and secondly she
was an extremely good and talented
student
who hated to get anything lower than a
two
which is the equivalent of a beam
she could have won every prize gone into
every profession
achieved every goal if it weren’t for
this locked door
but just because such things occurred 60
years ago
it does not necessarily mean that these
things don’t happen today
around half a year ago i texted a friend
to ask her why she wasn’t in school
she told me that she had to take care of
her little sister who was ill
her mother was away and her dad was at
work
this clearly shows that the stereotype
that girls have to set back
their academic ambition to help take
care of family members
hasn’t been overcome to this day
but in reverse there are so many reasons
to keep the doors to education
especially for girls
wide open as it is the sole most
important way
to overcome traditional stereotypes for
instance
the project drawdown which is an
australian ngo
that focuses on reducing the effects of
climate change
states that educating women can reduce
co2 emissions by up to 85.42
gigatons until 2050.
just as a reference you would need to
fly on a boeing 747
for 1 trillion hours to produce the same
amount of co2
but just saying okay we’re going to
educate girls and then everything’s fine
right
wrong because at least for germany
the amount of women with a high school
diploma
or a bachelor degree is way higher than
for men
and coming to the high school diplomas
it’s around
15 percent and with the bachelor degrees
it’s around five percent
but then how come there are only
seven female ceos in the fortune 100
companies
and angela merkel is the only female
state leader in the g20
now some people might say well maybe
women don’t want to have these jobs
they’re wrong because
it’s not that women don’t want to have
these jobs
it’s that sometimes and i deliberately
say sometimes
men lock doors in order to stop them
a few years ago a woman was applying for
a seat on the board of directors on a
large public german company
she was a brilliant person and full of
potential
but during the application process she
was suddenly accused
of putting company money into her own
there was no evidence for this
whatsoever but she was still excluded
from the application
until the match had been cleared in the
end it turned out she was completely
innocent
but by the time this was realized the
post had already gone to someone else
in this case it could have been because
the person really
badly wanted the job or some other
reason
but in on my father’s side my
grandfather wanted my grandma to stay at
home
take care of the children and do the
household work
shockingly this was the norm at that
time
as until 1970 men were allowed to decide
whether their woman wife worked a job
outside the house and they were allowed
to quit
for them without any plausible reason
and until 1977 women were obligated to
do
all household chores by german law
but apart from all of these hurdles
we’ve seen so far
and all of these traditional stereotypes
women
are facing an additional challenge it’s
that they’re being judged because of who
they
are and what they are
and trust me i know what it feels like
every time i met a new person and told
them how old i was
surprise was written all across their
face they didn’t even have to show it
but what i was like a medium
searching for a holy spirit to
communicate to i could feel its presence
sometimes i asked people to guess my age
some said i was 11 or 12
maybe 13 but once someone thought i was
in third grade i was actually 12 and a
half
sometimes these incidences made me
wonder
whether they were right whether i was a
little child
and whether i also behaved like one
and i lost part of my self-esteem and
i’m
far from the only one in austria
women went as far as to write magista in
front of their name
on a business card so that in a meeting
they wouldn’t be mistaken for the
secretary
in the past and present so many women
have been
underestimated just look at ruth bader
ginsburg who unfortunately passed away a
few days ago
who was asked to gather with all other
female law students at harvard
while she thought that she deserved to
take a man’s place
florence nightingale who was laughed at
when saying that she wanted to become a
nurse
and michelle obama who held a fabulous
inspiring speech only then to find out
that the only thing the press had
written about was her
outfit
though there have been so many horrible
incidences
with against women in the past i’m
really happy to say
that there have been some improvements
for instance
the amount of women working in germany
has gone
from around 58 in 2000
to around yeah another 10
in 2019 as well as that
the amount of women in the german
parliament has risen from a measly nine
percent
after the second world war until 30
percent in 2013.
these quotes could be way better but i
think you will agree that it is a step
in the right direction
everything i’ve talked about so far
might seem like a really complex topic
that’s hard to grasp but the solution to
it is surprisingly simple
so may i present the rebecca formula
and just so that you don’t wonder i
spelt it with double c because there
aren’t enough english words with k
r is for responsibility because we
cannot pretend that everything is the
universe’s fault
e for education because it is the sole
most important way to overcome
stereotypes
be for bravery to stand up to these
ideas
e for encouragement to tell others to do
so too
c for coaching to help people overcome
their prejudice
c for change because this is what needs
to happen
and a for awareness because this is what
needs to be raised
when i look into the future i hope to
see
men and women ask equal in every aspect
of life
though the way there will certainly not
be easy
i hope that one day my dream will be
achieved
and so i tell you today don’t judge
women by looking at their covers
and never ever lock a door standing in
their way
thank you
you