All we ask for is equal opportunity and let meritocracy do the rest.

Together, let's #breakthebias

I am born in Iran in the early 80s to a Belgian diplomat father and an Iranian mother belonging to a Christian minority, the Assyrians of Iran. This was during the Iran-Iraq war and shortly after the 1978 revolution of Iran where people of all walks of life manifested and led a revolution to topple the Shah of Iran. Back then, the people in the streets where from all backgrounds, from prominent professors, judges, lawyers, students crying for more socio-economic equality to radical religious leader crying out for more religion and less influence from the West. When the government fell, the radical religious leaders took over and Iran began a new chapter of its history. Women were demoted from all leadership position. For example, Nobel Peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi got demoted from Judge to the rank of clerk. Everywhere, women were asked to step down from all positions of influence. The laws were changed so a woman’s life became worth half of a man’s life so much so that if a woman got raped to death and if the law imposed death penalty to her rapist, the woman’s family had to pay the rapist’ family for half his life because his death sentence was worth 2 women’s lives (true story!). Slowly, dress codes were imposed to all women regardless of religion and up from age 9. In public transportation, women had to sit behind, and men in front so they wouldn’t see the women. And so on, and so forth. Gender bias became a way of life.

As a child, I remember the Iranian government closing our parent-led French school and deciding the fate of each child based on the father’s nationality… because the mother’s nationality didn’t count. I was lucky. My father was the foreigner, so I got to continue in private/foreign school system. But several of my friends having an Iranian father and a foreign mother had their fate tilt the other way, with mandatory public schooling where religious education was central, where girls and boys were separated, and girls given less chances in life.

I remember our gardener always calling my brother “Mr Engineer” since he was 5 or 7 years old. When my brother graduated from his engineering school, I thought about how proud our gardener would be. He was, after all, one of the early instigators in my brother’s self-esteem and self-labeling as an Engineer. By the way, my brother is a brilliant engineer, so I’m very happy he was pushed to be one since childhood, but I can’t help to note that young girls don’t get that message. More often than not, girls got told they are pretty, how they need to learn to behave well and how they’ll make a good mother or wife one day.

Tehran is blessed with beautiful mountains all around so in the winter, we’d be on the ski slopes every weekend. But again, gender bias was playing out: the women had the 2 easiest and most boring slopes, the men had about 5 slopes which were much more challenging and fun. So I broke the bias, cut my hair every December, put on my brother’s passed down ski clothes and would join by dad and brothers on the better slopes.

Summer 1998, aged 16, I signed up for a summer football camp in Belgium. The coach called my grandmother and said he couldn’t accept me because I was a girl. He said he’d never trained girls and I was going to be the only one. My grandmother told him not to worry and that I’d be just fine. And I showed up on that field, 1 girl, 99 boys and I played and I learnt and I improved and 2 months later, I got on the A-team at my school’s try-outs back in Malaysia. Because I was given a chance.

You’d think things have changed. Yes, and no. Fast forward 20-25 years later, in 2020, my daughter got told by boys at recess she couldn’t play football (soccer) because girls can’t play football. And when I was picking up a little boy to carpool him and my daughter to a football holiday camp, he turned to her and inquired what she was doing going to a camp since “girls can’t play football”, to which I couldn’t help but ask him “oh why? Do you play football with your penis? Because if you play football with your legs and your head, then rest assured, Chloe has those as well! And whatever you can do without your penis, my daughter can do as well. And whatever she can do without her vagina, you can do too. So yes, we’ll never be able to pee skillfully while standing up, and you can’t ever birth a baby out of your penis, or breastfeed a baby, but for all the rest, you and Chloe can do as well as long as you learn, train and improve”. Education starts with educating our children about bias. (I used the little cute words we use in French to speak to children about penis and vagina if anyone is shocked about thee use of words and I spoke very softly to the boy, don't worry :-))

Regardless of gender, race, religion, (dis)ability, sexual preferences, when we give a chance, we create an opportunity for someone. And when I look at some of the turning moments of my life, I see the faces of the many men and women that were there for me, providing me with the sponsoring opportunity, that chance I needed to prove that I was worthy of their trust and that I should at least give it a go and give it my best.

Bias is everywhere. I could write hundreds and hundreds of stories of how women don’t get equal opportunity or how they can perform at their best when they are given equal opportunity. The truth is that it’s not just about the women. It’s about equal opportunity for everyone.

So together, day after day, let’s #breakthebias together.

We don’t ask for a special day to celebrate us.

We don’t ask you to wear pink or gift us flowers.

We don’t ask for gender quotas.

We don’t ask for special privileges.

We don’t ask for positive discrimination.

?All we ask for is to #breakthebias

All we ask for is equal chance and opportunity and let meritocracy do the rest.?