The Pressure I Feel as a Woman

Okay. You might be thinking, “Let’s stop talking about females so much, alright?”

The majority of university graduates are female. The majority of paid influencers are female. The majority of…

What?

What else do we lead in? Long endurance running?

Except we don’t lead in that. Yes, the best ultra runner is a woman, but the majority of the runners are men. The same applies to marathon running—even though there’s a smaller gap between the number of male runners and female runners.

Well, forget athletics for a second. What about artists and celebrities?

At one point, Selena Gomez had the most Instagram followers. Except now she has the third most followers, and when it comes to the acting industry, females are only the lead actors 32.1% of the time.

What about singers? What about Taylor Swift? Her fan base has become enormous, she’s shattered numerous records with her Era’s Tour, and for 115 weeks she has been #1 on the Billboard Artist 100 Chart. That’s impressive. And sadly, while Taylor has broken through barriers, females are typically no more than 30% of the artists on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Chart.

Why? Maybe more men want to be actors and singers, and maybe more females want to graduate from university (although, with how minute the difference is, males could end up leading in the graduates statistic too).

Maybe there’s not enough places for women outside of the home (I could write a whole article arguing this point—it has notions worth considering).

Maybe the pressure and expectations put on women are greater now, and therefore it becomes harder to achieve goals (not because they aren’t attainable but because the emotional and mental battles are greater).

Who am I to say? Certainly, I haven’t done the research. I’ve only lived my own life. I can only speak to my own experiences. And this is what I’ve concluded:

I feel enormous pressure as a woman.

It’s not the type of pressure that pushes you from upfront or from behind. It’s the type of pressure that pushes from all around. It becomes easy to forget as it is present in nearly every place.

Beauty expectations. Career expectations. Lifestyle expectations. Homemaking expectations. Physique expectations. Self-care expectations. Personality expectations. Caretaking expectations. Lovemaking expectations. Relationship expectations. Family expectations. I’d like to say intellectual expectations, but the lack of expectation there has honestly been a disappointment.

All this pressure comes down on me, and I try to perform to the best of my abilities, but even when I’ve excelled in the past, it’s gone unnoticed many times.

One time, an ex of mine had found out that one of our friends could play a musical instrument. He marveled because this friend was also a finance major and danced. “Wow,” he said, “musically gifted, athletic, and smart. Some people have it all.”

I could play the guitar and sing. I played a year of soccer collegiately and stopped of my own accord, but still kept up with the sport and my own fitness. I didn’t have a degree in finance, but I kept good grades.

One of our friends called him out. “That’s Mandy.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Long-story short, that relationship didn’t work out.

I wish the above was a unique experience, but it hasn’t been for me. It’s not exclusively douche boyfriends that have overlooked my accomplishments, despite all the pressure. I’ve had other females do the same—even family members.

One time I had talked of my ambitions to make content creation my career and my female relative responded that she hoped I meant for a professional company because “no offense, because I love you, but people aren’t going to want to follow you.”

My accomplishments and potential weren’t necessarily overlooked because I’m female, but carrying the pressure I feel as a woman becomes exponentially exhausting when my accomplishments and potential are overlooked.

It does not surprise me how often people have underestimated my abilities. Refer to the stats above. In nearly any area of life, men “win” in representation. More films get made by men, more political decisions get made by men, more companies get started by men. Who could doubt their potential?

In so many ways, men determine how we perceive life. They determine how society should function. They’re encouraged to be innovative and to receive the highest of incomes for their initiative. I thank the heavens that recently (and only recently), women took a slight lead in the literary world. Perhaps I have a chance there.

From my experience, people view a man’s future as worth investing in more than a woman’s. This view may be unconscious, and it certainly doesn’t apply to everyone in the general population, but it also certainly applies to enough people in the population to have a significant impact.

Whenever my ex-husband and I would meet others, they would typically ask about what we were studying. I would answer “English.” He would answer blank. (I say “blank” because he changed his major often—from English to political science to philosophy.) Most of the time, the follow up questions were directed his way. “What are you going to do with that?” “So interesting…”

Perhaps it was my major and not my gender that made people less inquisitive about my career plans, but I doubt it. As mentioned above, my ex was an English major himself once.

When you constantly have to take a back seat to the “what do you want to do in life” conversation, you start to feel the toll. You start to question what about you screams I’m going nowhere in life. You start to wonder if people assume you’ll only stay at home and raise kids, and if they do, and you are going to, then why is it not important enough to ask questions about it? And can’t a mom have ambitions, passions, or hobbies?

Then years pass by and the pressure increases. Changes get made to give women more equity, but they get made slowly, and it still takes enormous amounts of efforts just to get what should have been the bare minimum (talk about a toxic relationship). So, I fight just as hard. And I get exhausted. Because it’s been years.

I’m in my 20s. If I’m tired now, how am I ever going to deal with all this pressure when I’m in my 30s or 40s? (Heaven forbid we consider the pressure I’ll feel dealing with this while going through menopause in my 50s.)

As a woman, my stores of energy get zapped for a week every month. I have not adapted to a place of tolerance for the pain that my period is, nor do I anticipate adapting to it. It’s just never going to be a casual occurrence to bleed and cramp for a week. It sucks. One day, my period will stop and I’ll be pregnant and guess what? The physical weariness will likely continue because most women feel a constant nausea and fatigue when they’re pregnant, if they’re not throwing up and staying up with insomnia.

Yet, I don’t get sick leave or remote work for my periods. Eventually, you can get time off for being pregnant, but that won’t come until the end. Women have to physically suffer and continue on with normal day-to-day demands. Hell, we have to deal with the abnormal, difficult demands that happen at random. There’s no hall pass, and that alone is a lot of pressure.

We really didn’t need society making things worse.

Now you’ve read my complaints. Excuse me. Now you’ve read some of my complaints. Not to come across as ungrateful, but unfortunately there are more causes to the pressure I experience as a female. But truth be told, I’m on my period and I have to run errands and find a way to financially support myself, even though I get constant job rejects. So, I can’t take the time to describe all the injustices that contribute to the pressure I feel. That would be a novel-length of things.

Even if I wrote and published that novel, I know it would only speak to my experience. There are widespread pressures other women feel that I am sure I wouldn’t cover. It’s hard to address everything.

But we try, don’t we?

We try to do and be everything, even though people don’t expect us to become anything.

I’m going to do what I can to relieve my own pressure, even if that responsibility lies upon others. I’m not waiting around. If I do, I’m afraid of what might happen. Because this is a pressure that might crack the rock before it can become a diamond.