First of all, lets get the context in place, and let me apologize for the low level of English, I have to thank you for making the effort of reading this.
Today, at class, Computer Network Administration, 15 classmates, 1 of them a girl. Just with this info you can start making a shape in your head of the topic. We have a class where they tech us laboral advice and legality, the teacher tells us that there is a help for a company in terms of money if they hire someone that is a victim of gender violence. Is not much, as I can remember something like 70€ a month (I am in Spain).
Till here not comments, it is good news if there are help for those people, the perfect situation would be if there are not people suffering for that, but this is very very difficult, sadly.
The teacher (male) told us that the mayority of these cases are women who have to deal with gender violence. Then, one classmate brings up a comment, it is not a new idea, as I have heard this words in many other ways. He argues that giving a woman monetary help just because she is a woman is like giving a reduced movility person help just because of his or her condition. Obviously the teacher tells him he can not be more wrong, not every help that the goverment gives is because of the same reason. There are not many more explanations why it is entirely different, but my classmate did not seem very convinced, he tried bringing up that if we all help women to try to fill the gender gap we will never be equal.
The teacher tells us about our history, that women until the recent present had things very difficul, they stayed at home all of the time, didn´t have jobs and depended entirely on their husbands. I can correlate this idea with the vision of women as an objet in the past, not half a century ago women had to go to the banks with their husbands to create an account.
I din´t say nothing as I thought that trying to change someone´s mind is very difficult and not part of the current class, but made me realize how far from equality we are. I hope that my other classmates, who as me stayed in silence were sharing my thoughts, if by any chance it is not the reality I am very sad for all the people out there trying to make a better world.
What I think they didn´t see is that we were talking about victims of violence, not women, as a man if you are victim of this kind of violence you can get the money of the goverment´s help too. But that thought didn´t reach their minds.
There are men too sufering from gender violence, in a much lower number, but they exist. In my opinion the word women in my classmate activated some kind of machism button, I´m close to sure that this happens to many people out there too, and is that kind of thinking that is pushing the equality of genders furder in the future.
I have surely missed some points telling the story and I tried not to give my opinion until the end of it, but I will now, and it is that I treat women as equal as men in job relations, I haven´t had any experiences that showed me tho opposite, and I´m conviced that I will never have to. I´m very sad that my mother or sister would ever experience some kind of machism in their lives just because they were born women. So if you read my words till the end, let´s fight for equality together, and if the person is not willing to talk to you and see your point as you can see theirs just stay away from him or her.
This is a story and thought that I wrote just after arriving home. I hope you enjoyed reading it and most important, that it makes you think, because more and more we are not thinking when we read and that is dangerous, as we are molding as the writer wants, and we have to be ourselves allways.
If you have any thought or comments tell me, I really want to know what people out there think.
