Why does everyone hate girly girls

Pink is a pretty color. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. From our Series. Girls Story highlights The gender revolution among children tips in favor of the masculine The toy industry has experienced far more pressure to expand the definition of girls' toys than boys' toys.

He has spent his early years in Oakland, California, largely surrounded by adults who avoid use of the nouns "boys" and "girls" unless necessary. His world is blissfully, ignorantly gender-neutral.

In the fall, he'll be heading to elementary school, and I was thinking it might be time to explain to him that as natural as his love for this sweatshirt is, there are a lot of people who find a boy in a girl's sweatshirt unnatural and won't hesitate to let him know.

The hardest part of this conversation will be what, inevitably, will follow. He, a scrupulous monitor of fairness in matters large and small, will ask whether there are also things people think girls shouldn't wear. I, remorsefully, will have to tell him "no. Gender progress: a one-way street. Read More. Though feminism has made great progress in stripping childhood of gender norms, the efforts have been awfully lopsided. Today, there's not a single traditionally masculine thing a girl can do that would raise eyebrows.

Join a sports team? Over half of them do it. Play with toy guns? Nerf makes a line just for them. Cut their hair short? Interested in STEM?

On trend. Pretend they are superheroes? I loved pink as a child. Then I developed a severe hatred for the color and all its connotations, throwing away an entire collection of pink cat shirts and the like. The problem was never the color pink. The problem was how I was treated while wearing pink cat shirts. Girls are as multi-faceted as everybody else. The feminist movement may have overcorrected when it came to girly girls.

The thought that being girly is always solely due to societal pressure is also subscribing to the patriarchy. What is the point of feminism if it eliminates fluidity of choice? I wanna wear pink, and tell you how I feel about politics. Girly girls in popular media usually come in two flavors: the popular school bully or the insipid idiot. Or, their media portrayals are twisted to fit a gendered stereotype. Objectification is a form of dehumanization, a process that often occurs for scientists and especially female scientists.

We can fight this together by displaying the diverse faces of female scientists, the diverse ways in which we can be female scientists, our diverse motivations for pursuing science, our diverse personalities, etc. But it takes many to stand up with the one.

This is another form of discrimination and the outcome of objectification of women scientists. The stereotyping - looks, clothes, make-up, while appearing perhaps trivial and minimal - actually has very serious and real impacts. You may sadly have to use scientific competence cues in your communication efforts, in order to be perceived as both feminine and STEM-competent.

From lab coats to our titles, we may have to use our competence cues to overcome stereotypical perceptions of women as warmer but not as competent as men.