On Sunday, Caroline Paul wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, asking a question whose importance has been exponentially growing on me lately. “Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?” she asks, opening the piece:
I WAS one of the first women in the San Francisco Fire Department. For more than a dozen years, I worked on a busy rig in a tough neighborhood where rundown houses caught fire easily and gangs fought with machetes and .22s. I’ve pulled a bloated body from the bay, performed CPR on a baby and crawled down countless smoky hallways.
I expected people to question whether I had the physical ability to do the job (even though I was a 5-foot-10, 150-pound ex-college athlete). What I didn’t expect was the question I heard more than any other: “Aren’t you scared?”
It was strange — and insulting — to have my courage doubted. I never heard my male colleagues asked this. Apparently, fear is expected of women.
Paul writes about how early this conditioning begins: how, although physical activity has been repeatedly proven to be tied to self-esteem, girls are still warned away from anything that could possibly hurt them—including objects as benign as a fire pole on a playground, which was the subject of a study published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology in 1999:
Parents cautioned their daughters about the dangers of the fire pole significantly more than they did their sons and were much more likely to assist them. But both moms and dads directed their sons to face their fears, with instruction on how to complete the task on their own.
And, parents don’t just coddle their daughters preemptively, but after the fact, too:
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