Entrants: Female: 150, Male: 1150
I was tempted to ask somebody if I was, indeed, looking at a published list of half marathon finishers. I wasn’t researching income inequality or looking for the number of males and females that entered certain sectors of the workforce, but I wondered whether or not I hadn’t inadvertently stumbled onto something of that nature.
It was my first half marathon, and I was in Istanbul, Turkey. I was shocked to see that the published results were so disproportional. The list didn’t indicate all of the entrants that signed up or dropped out, but, regardless, the discrepancy between the number of male and female finishers was huge. I went home and checked to see what the ratio of male and female finishers in American races looked like and found that such severe discrepancies are less intrinsic in American races.
I was on YouTube the other day. An ad popped up.
Ads + YouTube + Little patience = A Grizzly Bear Personality
My instinctive response to ads is either a) skip the ad if given the option or b) divert my attention to one of the other twelve open tabs on my browser. However, this particular day was no ordinary day. My approach to YouTube and the advertisers took a monumental swerve.
Before I knew it, I had spent a whopping 3 minutes and 18 seconds of my life entranced by a marketing scheme devoted to feminine hygiene products. I congratulate the producers because my attention span is short, and they caught it.
And apparently I am not the only they caught. At the time I viewed it, their #LikeAGirl campaign had more than 250 times the views of the next most viewed video on their channel. The clip with the 2nd most views had been published four months prior. #LikeAGirl had been out for four weeks.
Their campaign made me recall my half marathon in Turkey.
The results explained the sidelong glances I had been receiving during my runs throughout my time in Turkey. During my training runs, my Turkish peers would comment that I ran a lot. I took it in stride; after all, I really had no room to argue. I did take note that the university campus that I frequently ran on had fewer runners on the sidewalks than I would encounter at my home university in the States. The results also explained why, during the race, when bystanders released strings of Turkish phrases ensued with erupting enthusiasm, my limited Turkish recognized the word for, “Woman!” It also explained why, as we ran through the smoggy allure of the Golden Horn, I thought I had caught the eyes of Turkish matriarchs and fish vendors alike stopping to gape.
I don’t mean that women don’t run in Turkey. Because the multitude of running trails and running groups with women in them would prove me wrong. The norms and roles that women and men fill are more dominated by cultural expectations in Turkey than they are in the United States. This isn’t to say that American women and men don’t have cultural norms to abide by. In some regards, Turkey is more progressive than the United States. Turkey is a fraction the age of the United States but nevertheless has had a female ruling leader. Can you go back through American history and pick out a female president? The experience only highlighted that females both in Turkey and the United States have ground to cover and some noise to make.
Girls. I challenge you. Tighten your shoestrings. There is so much you can do #LikeAGirl.Be the next president.
Run.
Travel.
Take a risk.
The beautiful thing is: risks and rewards often go hand-in-hand. And they are out there for the taking for males and females alike.
This entry was contributed by Stephanie Berger, a Public Relations and Marketing intern at Hedstrom - Ball, Bounce and Sport. She studies at the University of South Carolina and is addicted to breakfast foods and sunshine.
