I went to an all girls high school and have always felt it’s important to advocate for women in the workplace, in underrepresented fields(STEM), and in positions of power.

When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was do the same activities as my older brother. Christo started playing baseball when he was four, so I started playing baseball when I was four. Christo went to the Baseball Center on 74th Street on Wednesday nights to work on his hitting, so I started going too. I loved playing little league baseball every weekend, and on my baseball team and at school, it didn’t seem to matter that I was a girl. I still got MVP awards after games, I started at first base every weekend, and I loved playing pickup wiffle ball in the basement at school during recess with the boys, many of whom were some of my best friends at the time. But during third or fourth grade, things started to change. My brother and the other boys at school started joining travel baseball clubs, which got to travel to tournaments in Connecticut and Maryland. But most travel clubs didn’t allow girls to join. In little league, the number of other girls diminished until I was the only girl on my team and almost never saw girls on the other teams. More importantly, the boys at school started excluding me from baseball during recess, telling me that I wasn’t good enough to keep up with them. It didn’t matter that we were all the same height or that I could hit the ball just as far as them—the older we got, the more separated the boys became from the girls, and I gradually lost a lot of my male friends. In middle school, I joined softball instead of baseball, and even though I enjoyed playing with just girls, this gap seemed to become even more insurmountable. These days, my brother and I are still extremely close and love all of the same things. Even though he’s in college, we still call a few times a month to talk about baseball or fun facts about trains or how to fix the latest bug in my Python code. But the difference between the things I couldn’t do that Christo could during our childhood still sticks out to me. Even though it was just baseball, the overall increase of gender-exclusive social spaces and activities negatively impacted my educational experience as a girl.

Growing up, I had always played soccer and it was a large part of my life. I was on a travel team and practices and games consumed a large part of my life. For middle school, my family moved to Japan and I quickly learned that the opportunities for girls to play soccer were much smaller. In the fall of 6th grade, I joined the co-ed soccer team, but was only one of two girls on the team. I ended up playing on the co-ed team for one year and the girls team in the spring for two years, but eventually I dropped soccer because it was draining and not fair for me to play against teams that were all boys and much bigger than me. Eventually I switched to playing volleyball, which I grew to love, but I wish there were more opportunities for girls to thrive and play soccer there.

It can be really difficult to be one of the only women in certain classes because a lot of men do not understand what that does to your confidence or how you conduct yourself in class. While studies have shown that women do better at test taking when they are surrounded by other women, people still don’t take this lack of representation as an issue. Truthfully, it has turned me off of going into STEM fields and made me feel like the only thing I am good at is the humanities because I am so much more comfortable in the latter.

I have been lucky so far in my life and haven’t experienced lots of discrimination because of my sex. I am a musician, and am going into percussion as a career. I have had many supportive teachers who don’t view me as less than a man…though I have realized recently that almost all of my music teachers have been men. I never truly thought about this or the impact it has made on me until my percussion teacher’s own teacher from years ago assumed I couldn’t play fff on timpani because I’m a girl. I was surprised how frustrated I became. I asked myself, how dare he assume and question my ability? How dare he see me as less than a man? It was hard to think someone could say these things about me without even giving me a chance. This man may not have a direct impact on me and my choices, but experiencing this opened my eyes to the extent of how badly women are discriminated against in the world of percussion. Sure, it’s gotten better over the past few years, but the sexism isn’t completely gone. I believe that women are powerful, creative, passionate, hardworking, dedicated, and most of all, courageous. We’ve fought for so long to win equal rights and respect for women, and we’ve more than proved we’re capable of anything we put our minds to. I believe in women empowerment and I believe that we were given a voice to use it for good.

My experience is on female education, specifically my experience as a girl who plays percussion, which is largely a male-dominated part of music. Last summer, I was auditioning for From the Top, a program run by NPR that grants scholarships and allows students to perform on the radio. Because I didn't have access to the instrument that I needed at home, I needed to practice and audition at my music school (where I attend a pre-college program during the school year). Because precollege students' ID don't work during the summer, I needed to ask the security guards to let me in manually. On my audition day, when I asked the school's security guard to let me in, he asked me where I was going. After explaining my situation to him and telling him the room number, he looked it up and told me that it did not make sense, as this room was for percussionists, implying that it was clear that I was not a percussion student. Even after politely ensuring him that I did play percussion, he did not believe me until I showed him my mallets, music, and begged him to let me up because my audition was in 10 minutes. Although I usually would not have let microaggressions like this impact me, this experience stuck with me because it occurred in a space where I usually felt safe and respected in. Additionally, I was already nervous for my audition, and this interaction made me angry and uncomfortable. Thinking back on this experience, it felt extremely targeted because there was no point in him doing that: he already knew that I was a precollege student because I showed him my ID, and instead of just accepting the fact that I booked a percussion room, he had to get defensive and question me.