Losing our voices?

This is an article about the personal experiences of the author at a liberal arts college in Minnesota. It was especially meaningful to me because I am a student at a liberal arts college, and I see many of the things the author discusses in my own academic environment.

It’s a delicate thing, coming to the moment when you realize that your perceptions do count and that your writing can encompass them. You begin to understand how quiet, how subtle the writer’s authority really is, how little it has to do with “authority” as we usually use the word.
Young men have a way of coasting right past that point of realization without even noticing it, which is one of the reasons the world is full of male writers. But for young women, it often means a real transposition of self, a new knowledge of who they are and, in some cases, a forbidding understanding of whom they’ve been taught to be.
Perhaps the world will punish them for this confidence. Perhaps their self-possession will chase away everyone who can’t accept it for what it is, which may not be a terrible thing. But whenever I see this transformation — a young woman suddenly understanding the power of her perceptions, ready to look at the world unapologetically — I realize how much has been lost because of the culture of polite, self-negating silence in which they were raised.

I like to think that the work we do here at the AGA will bring more women to that point of transition the author discusses and brings them to an understanding of who they are and what they are capable of.

Today we were talking about female leadership on our campus, and we are organizing a panel to discuss women in leadership, whether academic, social, political, etc. on our campus. I'm looking forward to planning and participating in it, because I feel so strongly that it's something we NEED brought to the attention of our student body. Not because we are lacking in female leadership, but because the nature of its absence in certain arenas, and our implicit acceptance of that needs to change. One of the things we were discussing is the fact that every valedictorian over the past (minimum of) 4 years has been a female, yet the majority of traditional leadership positions (student government, clubs, etc) have been and continue to be held by men. Why is it that professors consistently talk about the superior performance of women in the classroom yet many women still apologize before asserting their opinion? And when will modesty stop being a gendered phenomenon? I still can't bring myself to accept compliments or to volunteer information about myself when it seems as if I'm bragging. I know many women who have the same problem. I don't know any men who do. Why is this? And what can we do to change that?