This Is Not My World To Judge

This Is Not My World To Judge

I am not black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, Jewish, Islamic, Catholic, or foreign.

But I am female.

I have to admit that I lived a sheltered life--living on a farm near a tiny Midwestern town, where "people who looked different" were uncommon. Basically, if you weren't a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, you were considered different.

In spite of this, I never experienced prejudice. From a young age, my parents encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do, and never told me that I had to do certain things because I was female or not to do certain things because I was female. I helped my father on the farm, and I also helped my mother with the household chores. I held an outside job from ages 13-17 and still helped at home. I was encouraged to get a job, actually.

At school, most of the girls were considered to be the "smart" ones. The boys either hid their intelligence to avoid getting beat up, or just were not as scholastically-minded as the girls. Not once did I ever feel less than human because I was female. I did not see the boys getting called on by the teachers more often than the girls. The boys usually did not know the answers anyway (or else pretended they didn't know). If anything, as I was growing up, I never met a male who was smarter than I was.

In college, it was much the same. Either the males didn't know the answers or did not want to speak up. There were more females in my classes than males, anyway.

The incident occurred when my husband and I were shopping for a mortgage. We set up an appointment with our bank. The loan officer happened to be male, probably in his forties. (My husband and I were in our late twenties at the time.) Throughout the entire interview, the officer did not look at me, or talk to me. He talked directly to my husband, as if I wasn't even there. Even when I asked questions, he still directed his answers to my husband. I do not know if it was an age thing, a female/male thing, or just a bad customer rapport. Needless to say, we did not pursue a mortgage with that bank, but we did end up keeping our other bank accounts there.

I had never been ignored like that before. I was so annoyed with the way I had been treated that I was quite angry when the interview was over. I realize that it doesn't rank high on the scale of being treated differently because of skin color or religion, but the incident bothered me, and it still bothers me. I can't even imagine the pain I would have felt had I been of another race.

I have a daughter now, and I would hate to see her treated differently because of her sex. I know what it's like to be ignored and not heard. I only hope that more people in the future realize that women's opinions and voices count, too.