Gender Bender 
This article first appeared in Fairfax's Sunday Life magazine on 2 June 2014 

The day started like every other: the obligatory argument with our four-year old daughter as I try to drag a brush through her hair and convince her to change out of a too-small, stained t-shirt featuring a hastily scribbled self-portrait.

‘This is my absolute favourite top,’ she whinged. ‘Why can’t I wear it?’

We were running late. (These arguments can ever take place when you’re already running late.) ‘Look, you can’t wear them – you’re not wearing them – because they’re old and they’re dirty. For once, can’t you just look nice?’ I spit out.

Before the words have even left my mouth, I want to suck them back out of the air. All those years of shielding her from the truth, all the carefully constructed lies, come undone with a single, angry remark.

You see, we had tried – so earnestly – to sell our daughters the line that girls can do anything boys can do, that girls and boys are equal, that the world they were growing up in was more-or-less gender blind. We liked to think that we giving them the same opportunities as their male friends, but the truth is that we (like most other families) don’t really allow them the same freedoms: the freedom to take risks; the freedom to be rough and physical rather than nice and neat; god, even the freedom to leave the house without insisting they do their hair first.

While today’s ‘gently, gently’ parents might think they’re doing the right thing in shielding children from harsh reality, giving them a candy-coated version of the world where pets don’t die, they just go on extended stays at rural B&Bs, and where poverty, inequality and discrimination don’t exist, it may be that we’re actually doing more harm than good. Of course, it would be lovely if our kids grew up in a world free from gender bias, but the reality is that discrimination affects us all. A report recently commissioned from the Girl Guides confirms this point, with over three-quarters of girls saying that sexism affected ‘most areas of their lives’.

As the American congresswoman Shirley Chisholm succinctly put it, ‘The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, "It's a girl.”’ From the second they are born, little girls are wrapped up in a pink blanket of constraint and assumption, becoming fodder for a corporate machine that only wants them to be pretty, pastel-coloured cardboard cut-outs (Disney Princess nappies anybody?) Wouldn’t it be better that we teach them to understand – and begin to question – the gender norms in our society where their lives are going to be shaped, and to some degree curtailed, by the fact that they are female?

That same night, our six-year old was watching the news. ‘Why are they only allowed to show men and boys’ sport on TV?’ she queried.

‘Because someone, somewhere, has decided that women’s sport isn’t as interesting or as skillful,’ I told her bluntly.

‘But that’s stupid and unfair,’ she blurted. ‘Maybe if they bothered to show it more often, then people would get interested and realise that it is just as good.’

Her exasperation, together with a practical approach to redressing the imbalance, made me realise that we can and should alert young girls to inequality from a very early age. Gender analysis and critical thinking are skills that we should teach and practise with girls and boys alike, particularly if we consider the following, probable future for our daughters.

In their tween years, young girls can expect to really catch the attention of the cashed-up marketing machines of big business. The aim? To sexualise young women and link their self-worth to their appearance. Who can forget the Abercrombie and Fitch padded bra tops for the seven year-old market? Social media and the online world might seem to open up avenues for friendship and extended support, but they’ll also expose young girls and boys to significantly more opportunity to experience bullying and anxieties about body image. In their teenage years, our girls will be dared to walk an impossibly thin line: to be seen as attractive they must be sexy, funny and smart – but go too far and they’ll be called a slut, a pig or a nerd.

From a safety point of view, the statistics are positively alarming. The most recent research puts your daughter’s chance of being sexually assaulted in her life at one-in-five. And the likelihood that that she’ll experience domestic violence? A frightening one-in-three.

In their working lives, today’s girls can grow up to expect to earn less than their similarly qualified and experienced male colleagues. It is likely our daughters will spend almost twice as much time on housework and childcare than their male partners, even if they spend the same amount of time in paid employment. And because all their unpaid work has no monetary value attached, there’s every chance they won’t have enough money in retirement.

With a future like that, what good does it do to bring up our girls to uncritically accept the current status quo? Do we really want to send them a message that what they’ve got is good enough? Wouldn’t it better that they learned to identify and call-out sexism and discrimination when they see it?

This morning, when we were running late (again) and my four-year daughter (again) refused to brush her hair or change out of a ripped-leggings-socks-and-thongs ensemble, I looked into that upturned, expectant face and decided that she was just fine like that. We grabbed our things and walked out the door – a small victory for small girls everywhere.

And with tiny steps like that, together with frank discussions about narrow social ideals for women, I hope that as my daughters grow up they’ll learn to see through sexualised media and marketing bullshit that tries to pressure them into looking and acting in a certain way. I hope that they’ll be given the opportunity to become whatever they want in life – whether that’s a politician, a lawyer, a mother or a plumber. But perhaps more than anything, I hope that they will proudly call themselves feminists and fight for a world where every child is given the chance to fulfil their potential.