The importance of taking up space as a woman | Ruby Danner | TEDxUniversity High School Youth

Key Concepts

• Body Image Issues
• Fear of Failure
• Taking Up Space (physical and verbal)
• Gender Disparities in Confidence and Achievement (Math)
• Classroom Participation Gaps
• Gendered Communication Patterns (Interruptions)
• Social Hierarchy in Interaction
• Silencing of Women
• Body Dysmorphia
• Eating Disorder

The Speaker's Journey from Invincibility to Insecurity

The speaker recounts her early experiences playing soccer, where she felt "indestructible" and fearless, tackling any challenge. As she matured and played at higher levels, her confidence "plummeted." Mistakes became a source of fear, transforming her previous invincibility into an "intense fear of failure." She became self-conscious of her body, feeling intimidated by the physical space she once occupied effortlessly. This led her to swimming, an environment where she could be "head down, move through the water as fast as possible," finding comfort in the ability to "almost disappear."

Body Image and the Pressure on Girls

The speaker notes that her experience with fluctuating confidence and body image is "not uncommon" for girls, who begin to feel stress about their bodies at an early age due to societal pressures, including the expectation to be polite and the portrayal of "impossible standards in the media." According to the UK's Mental Health Foundation, while body image issues affect both boys and girls, girls are "more likely to be dissatisfied with their appearance and weight." Specifically, 46% of girls reported that their body image causes them to worry "often or always," compared to 25% of boys. The speaker clarifies that her insecurity manifested not as an eating disorder or body dysmorphia, but as an "intense desire to be inconspicuous and maintain perfection within sports."

Reclaiming Physical Space: The Water Polo Transformation

A turning point occurred in her freshman year of high school when she started playing water polo. This sport demanded a complete shift from her previous desire to disappear; to succeed, she "had to rise up out of the water and take up space." She embraced this challenge, which ultimately led her to view her body as a "powerful, capable mechanism." Clinical psychiatrist Gail Salts supports this perspective, stating that "having some stamina and some muscle allows for your body to be more enjoyable, not just because of how it looks, but because of how it feels." This strength and capability, Salts suggests, enables girls to "enjoy the process of taking up space." The speaker identifies this sports experience as the "beginning of a problem that becomes more complicated in the classroom and workplace."

The Silencing of Girls in the Classroom

Concurrently with her sports journey, the speaker developed an "intense desire to be quiet and inconspicuous in the classroom," particularly in math classes. A study cited reveals that disparities in both confidence and achievement in math between boys and girls are "visible by third grade." In contrast, a reading gap favoring boys in kindergarten narrows during elementary school. Since the early 2000s, public concern has largely focused on boys in the classroom. Elizabeth Hubc describes how teachers perceive boys as having more trouble sitting still, being less focused, less engaged, less willing to take leadership roles, and generally less motivated academically. Despite the validity of boys' struggles, the number of studies on girls' inability to speak up has "lagged far behind" since important research conducted in the 1980s.

Quantitative analysis from these older studies revealed significant disparities: girls spoke, on average, 154 words per term compared to 319 words for boys, and girls took 36 turns as opposed to 73 taken by boys. This indicates that girls contribute "far less to classroom talk." Several studies suggest that girls feel pressure to shorten their sharing time, and teachers "tend to favor male students" when calling on participants. The speaker personally resonates with this, admitting she has valuable ideas but feels an urge to either keep her sharing short or "keep my ideas to myself altogether," recognizing this becomes problematic when it impacts her learning and makes her own voice "unfamiliar."

The Continuation of Silencing in Adult and Professional Settings

The issue of being silenced extends beyond the classroom into adult and professional environments. The speaker notes that "talk can be overtaken by men," who tend to interrupt more, control the topic, and use aggressive tactics to gain speaking opportunities. A study by Swan and Gradle suggests this phenomenon is not due to women's desire to remain silent, but rather "an intricate social hierarchy that seems to endow men with greater power than women in social interaction." The Harvard Business Review provides a real-world example of Senator Kamala Harris being "continuously interrupted by her male colleagues" while questioning Attorney General Duffets. Renee Graham of the Boston Globe succinctly declared, "simply to be a woman is to be interrupted." This pattern demonstrates how being silenced in the classroom can escalate to being silenced in the workplace, even in supposedly equitable settings like congressional hearings, where women's voices and ideas "are still not heard."

Conclusion: A Call to Action for Women to Take Up Space

The speaker concludes by emphasizing that with increasing restrictions and expectations placed on women's bodies and choices, it is "increasingly important that each of us learns how to take up space, to use our bodies, to raise our voices, to allow ourselves to be heard." She asserts that women "should not be shut out of the conversation."