‘Women aren’t seen as 50% of the population’

It was when I realised that when I thought of a lawyer I thought of a man that I first became a feminist. I was sitting in my university library, reading a book called Feminism and Linguistic Theory by Deborah Cameron. It might not sound like the most likely contender for "book to inspire a feminist awakening", but it was mine.

In particular, it was the section on supposedly gender-neutral grammar that got me. In grammar, gender neutral is male. We say “he” when we mean “he or she” and “man” to mean “human”. But studies show that when women hear “man”, they don’t think of a gender-neutral human, they think of a man. This may sound entirely unsurprising, but to me it was a huge shock. When I thought more about it, I realised that when I thought of a doctor, I thought of a man. When I thought of a politician, a chief executive, a lawyer. My mental world was populated by powerful men. It was far from gender-neutral.

There’s a very simple reason why gender neutral is male: it’s because women aren’t seen as 50 per cent of the population, but rather something of a niche interest group. Men can represent humanity; women can represent women.

This matters beyond “one-size-fits-all” clothing that actually only fits men. This attitude has seen car-crash tests that fail women because the dummies are designed around the male body. It has seen women receiving less effective treatment and more side-effects from drugs because they are tested mainly on male subjects. It has seen women in the US army suffering from much higher rates of musculoskeletal disorders because, until 2014, they didn’t have combat gear designed for their bodies. One-size-fits-all doesn’t fit women.

Here are two women who not only highlight the problem with a one-size-fits-men approach; they also show us how women are challenging it, changing it. More than this, they show us that women don’t have to fit into a traditionally male way of doing things to be inspiring, to be amazing. Rather, they show us how to do it like a woman.

Felicity Ashton, Arctic explorer

“Endurance sport has always been a means to an end for me,” Ashton says. And when she started out, that end was no more than discovering far-flung parts of the world. But, like many women who push the boundaries of what it means to be a woman, on entering this male-dominated scene Ashton started to encounter the word “no”. Women cannot. Women don’t. And, slowly, her exploring became about more than discovering new places. It became about refusing to be told who she was.

One example of this ingrained sexism were the all-male groups she had to train who found it “very difficult to have a girl in her 20s as an instructor”. This manifested itself in not accepting her instructions until her junior male colleague backed her up. “I’d be thinking, So, you’re asking a man who’s doing his first season in the Arctic, rather than taking it from me, who’s now on my seventh?”

It took Ashton a while to recognise this behaviour as sexism. At first, she just assumed there was something wrong with her. “Once I’d realised what was happening, it made me furious.”

I always think of patriarchy as something like the film The Matrix. You are living in it every day, and because you are living in it you don't notice it: it's everywhere, in everything. How can you know, when you don't know any different? But then something happens to make you see the world in all its carefully organised inequality – and suddenly you can't stop seeing it and it can make you angry.

“It made me really angry, just livid,” she says. “I was almost incredulous that I lived in a world where the majority of women aren’t able to make their own choices in life. I felt that I should be doing something to change this crazy situation.”

She decided that she needed to turn to what she was good at. “The only thing I was good at was organising expeditions,” she says, so she set about organising an all- female expedition to the South Pole. “Skiing to the South Pole is seen as a male thing, undertaken by explorers with beards with ice in them.”

She tried to put together a team of as many women as possible from countries where they wouldn’t just be the first woman, they’d be the first person to ski to the South Pole. In 2009, seven women, from New Zealand, India, Cyprus, Brunei and elsewhere, ended up joining Ashton on the ground-breaking trek.

Candie, graffiti artist

I’m curious about Candie’s choice of “spray-name” to proclaim her “own self”. Candie is, as she says, “a very obviously girly name”, and if there’s one thing she makes clear, it’s that she does not want to be defined by her gender. So why Candie? “At the beginning, I wanted people to know I was a girl, because there’s so few people doing it. But my attitude has changed now.”

In a scene with such a clear hierarchy between “graffiti artists” and “female graffiti artists”, to mark yourself as female is to relegate yourself. But it also offers a kind of protection. As Candie puts it, “People can be like, ‘Oh, it’s a bit shit, but it’s all right for a girl.’ ” She laughs. “Now I know I’m better than a lot of the boys, so I don’t really need that safety net.”

Although Candie “never grew up thinking that as a girl I couldn’t do what the boys could do”, it soon became clear that there was a difference: “In the evening, the boys would go off, but they wouldn’t invite me. And I always felt pushed out by that. It made me feel like I wasn’t really welcome.”

Running through Candie’s narrative is an almost unacknowledged sense that, as a woman, there’s an extra wall you have to cover. Where a man can go out and create billboards for himself and be respected for that, a woman has to first prove herself worthy of transcending her femaleness.

Like with Ashton, part of Candie’s identity was about proving that she could be a woman but as good as a man. And to have that identity stolen away from her, and at the hands of the men with whom she tried to fit in, whom she looked on as her peers – that must feel disorienting; an unwelcome reminder that, no matter how much she may fight against it, no matter how much she proves herself, for some men, women are ultimately best deployed as “tits and ass”. No wonder she fights against it.

Now she has launched her own crew, Girls on Top. “I love the all-girl crew that we’re in. We’re like best friends,” she says. “Girls who do graff don’t have to be good-looking, they just have to be good at what they do and love it and have a passion for it and that’s enough. You don’t also have to be sexy with it. But we’re not selling our bodies. We’re selling our art.”

• Do it Like a Woman by Caroline Criado-Perez is published by Portobello Books