Book extract
NASTY WOMEN TALK BACK
I was on my way to Cape Town’s Women’s March when a close friend phoned. Aneeqah wanted to vent. She is a medical professional working in a private practice, under a male boss who is technically less qualified than her, and she was at a breaking point.
‘He constantly undermines me,’ she fumed. ‘He doesn’t trust me to make any important decisions, and if I independently take on high-profile clients, he demands that I turn them over to him so that he can treat them instead.’
As I listened to Aneeqah, a rolling stream of flashbacks unspooled. Her words were familiar to me as I’d heard it from countless other female friends over the years. The details changed, the professions altered, but the basic facts remained constant.
Highly competent women toiling under – or alongside – men who were barely performing in their jobs, and yet continuously enjoying greater recognition and reward. Skilled, intelligent women who repeatedly endured humiliations both great and small; who were reminded in a hundred different ways a week of their inferior standing in the workplace and the world, because they are women. I remembered my friend Jen, a successful woman in the maledominated mining industry, who is constantly asked to take the minutes of meetings she attends, despite being surrounded by male subordinates. I remembered my friend Tammy, whose male boss relies on her to manage almost every aspect of his life, and part of whose unofficial job description has become attempting to dodge his clumsy attempts at gropes and kisses while drunk. I remembered my wife Haji, who worked for a year under a man who sought to blame her every time his own professional inadequacies were exposed by superiors. And I remembered my own experiences, in a world that constantly seeks to teach women and girls that their place is below a man, no matter their qualifications or achievements. I remembered being 10 years old, on a hot day in Malawi, and news reverberating around the school like a gunshot: my twin sister had defeated the reigning male tennis champion. And I remember, as if it were yesterday, the curious way that the news was reported. ‘Richard was beaten … by a girl!’ My sister remaining nameless; the focus on the bizarre, inexplicable humiliation of the rightful champion. A sense, unspoken but strong, that this was not how things were supposed to be.
I’m So Tired of Mediocre Men Running Things by Rebecca Davis
I remembered being at an allgirls high school in Cape Town, with Matric exams approaching. The reverence with which our male counterparts’ intellectual prowess was discussed within our mixed friend group, it being well known that Rob and Andrew were the clever ones, the ones whose exam results would guarantee them a passport to any course of study they wished. And then: the revelation, upon the publication of results, that almost all the girls had done better. That we were the clever ones all along, but that it would take an anonymous, standardised exam to make that plain. I remembered the first years of university in Grahamstown, gritting my teeth in tutorial after tutorial as confident male students sucked up all the oxygen in the room with lengthy monologues, arguments and points of view. I remembered the suffocating frustration of knowing that I had things to say – interesting things, important things – but might never have the chance to air them. I remembered my voice betraying me, trembling when I did speak, and I remembered longing for one iota of the ease with which these boy-men considered themselves entitled to hold forth. I remembered the academic mentor I hero-worshipped, and whose approval I had craved, taking me aside at a function to drunkenly confide that he wanted to ‘fuck me and suck me’. And I remembered how I nervously laughed it off and did nothing, absolutely nothing, about it afterwards, because maybe I should be flattered by the attention of someone I so admired? I remembered the male manager who rebuked me for not smiling enough as a waitress: an admonition never doled out to my sullen male peers. I remembered the male boss who told me that he only hired pretty women, because ‘they cost the same as the ugly ones’. I remembered my shock, just recently, upon realising that a male friend doing the same work as me was being paid more than three times as much. As I listened to Aneeqah talk on that morning of the Women’s March, a quiet rage burned within me. It had been burning for some days. I am not American and have no personal ties to the United States. But in the 2016 electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton, by an unqualified, sexist, racist buffoon, I felt again the searing reality of what it means to be a woman in this world.
Millions of women know, although perhaps on a tiny scale, what it felt like to be Hillary Clinton on the morning of that election result. We know it in our bones and our guts: how it feels to be passed over for the man who talks over you, who undermines you, who sexualises you, and who reminds you that whatever your accomplishments, you remain just a woman.
I had brought with me in the car that day a blank piece of white card and a thick black marker. I wanted to write upon it a slogan that somehow captured everything I was feeling, but I settled instead for expressing the very deep, weary disappointment that enveloped me that morning.
Ending the call with Aneeqah, I uncapped my marker and wrote, in block capitals: SO TIRED OF MEDIOCRE MEN RUNNING THINGS. And then I got out of the car, placard held aloft, to join the other women who had gathered to march that day. We may be tired, but we cannot afford to shut up. Rebecca Davis grew up in Malawi and Cape Town and was educated at Rhodes and Oxford Universities. She is an award-winning journalist and author.