Apropos of nothing, men think they’re better than me at things
I do not remember if the boys communicated their discontent about my apparent smartness to the teacher or if he heard us muttering about it, but somehow, he found out. And so, we had a class competition. It was all the interested boys versus me.

The rules were simple: there’d be a 5 question test that we had to complete within a specified time period — I forget how much time — and all the boys who scored lower than I did would be labelled class monkeys — I still don’t know why my teacher chose monkeys — and their names would be written on a cardboard and displayed right in front of the class. I don’t remember the exact questions, but they covered concepts we were yet to learn.

I, smart ass that I was, was unperturbed by this test. I’d always been top of my class before then, and I scored highly on the random mental Math tests that we had without warning in this new class.

When I think back to this story, I wonder: what made these boys so self-assured? I think about the reasons the girls didn’t feel (or express) that they could compete with me, and why the boys believed that they were inherently better than me just because I was a girl. What do we teach boys and girls that make them see the world differently. Is it in telling boys: “how can you let a girl win you in that contest?” from as early as primary school? Is this why boys feel entitled to the best things while girls feel that they should settle?

Sometime in late 2017, a picture was circulating on social media. The photo was allegedly of a classroom in Northern Nigeria. In it, the girls were sitting on the floor and the boys on chairs. Are we inadvertently (or even purposely) teaching girls that they are worth less than boys? Telling boys that they are better than girls just because they are boys?
['Lade Tawak']
['Gender Equality', 'Patriarchy', 'Inequality', 'Personal Essay', 'Feminism']