Over the course of my life, I have experienced a few struggles with being a woman. However, one specific struggle impacted my life so greatly and affected all my future dreams and plans. The struggle I am referring to is discrimination against woman in the workforce and armed forces. My dream ever since I was a young girl was to get into the Navy and eventually become a Navy Seal. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with what a Navy Seal is I can give a brief explanation.
Navy Seals are part of the Navy’s Sea, Air and Land Forces and in order to become one, they have to endure what is widely considered to be the most physically and mentally demanding military training in existence. I had started working out and training for what I thought was going to be my future, in the 7th grade. Each day after school I dedicated half of my evening to working out and training hard. I figured that starting out training at a young age would put me ahead of others competing for the same thing. By the time I got into high school I was in very good shape and continued to train each day. Working out and eating extremely healthy was my life. The only thing in my head was that I wanted to get into the Navy and become a Navy Seal. That was my inspiration for each workout session I did. In my junior year of high school, I found out the worst news I could ever imagine. I had talked to an army recruiter and told
him of my future plans of becoming a Navy Seal and he stopped me and uttered
the words, “Women are not allowed to become Navy Seals.” At that moment, my hearted dropped and I felt so much anger and frustration. Literally, half of my life had been dedicated to pre-training and getting my body into the best shape it could be in so I could endure the actual training I would have to go through in the future, and now all of that time and hard work was thrown down the drain in a matter of 5 seconds just because of the fact that I am a woman. I was so sad and didn’t realize at all why such discrimination was allowed and how they couldn’t even give me a chance to prove myself.
All I wanted to do was yell at the army recruiter and tell him how unfair it was and if there was anything I could do to change things. I actually did ask him if there was anything I could do to change that rule or if there were exceptions and he told me that
there was no way around it. He said women aren’t physically capable of enduring the training that the Seals have to go through and that they would be a distraction. At that moment, I was furious. I could understand that woman may be a distraction but telling me that women are not capable of the training really upset me because I knew if I had the chance to become a Seal I would prove that fact false. I then realized that this
was just the start of the discrimination I would face just for being a woman. To me, I felt like it was so unfair to discriminate against a gender and not even give them a chance to prove themselves. Unfortunately, in today’s society women are discriminated a lot when it comes to physical capabilities and in certain workforces. I think that the more we as women stick together and prove false the misconceptions about our gender, the less discrimination we will hopefully see.
I just wanted to share my story and hope it
inspires some of you to go out and prove yourselves worthy and capable of doing
anything you want!