Recently while watching a social soccer game, I heard a 12-year-old tell her father she wanted to ‘play for the Matildas’.
With no prompting, she told him her game plan: She was going to start doing solo practice sessions in the backyard in-between her regular twice-weekly sessions with her local team. She’d aim to join a new team when she got to high school, and potentially change schools if needed. She’d be on the team by the time she was 17.
This conversation didn’t just happen. It’d been prompted by something that occurred earlier that day. Something on her television, being broadcast from the other side of the world. That morning the Matildas played Brazil in the Rio Olympics Round of 16. It was a brilliant game, although for the Australians it ended rather tragically in a penalty shoot-out – with the Brazillians progressing through to the semi-finals (they later won the bronze medal).
This girl had been watching the team all week. She wasn’t just a spectator on the sidelines of the men’s game – as many of us were growing up. She was personally invested in the women’s game, and inspired to not only play herself, but to achieve absolute excellence in the sport (and work hard to get there).
This girl summed it all up for me: that you can be what you can see. That’s not merely something that applies to sport (of which there are now plenty of new opportunities for women to want to ‘be’ something they can now ‘see’) it applies to ambitions of any kind – in business, technology, entrepreneurship, politics and elsewhere. It’s difficult to aspire to be something if you can’t see yourself reflected in those who are already doing such things.
Of course, women go on to achieve such ambitions regardless – they go on to be the ‘first’ and to pioneer new paths for those behind them. But when it comes to inspiring girls – particularly those on the cusp of adolescence, about to face some of the most confusing years of their lives – it’s often those they see on their television screens or social media feeds who demonstrate just what kind of possibilities are available.
“You can’t be what you can’t see” is an expression that often comes up when promoting the importance of women in leadership. We all carry our own perceived limitations, along with traditional notions of what we should or should not be pursuing. So we look for examples above us. We look for people who’ve achieved things we aspire to achieve who also look a little like us. Our gender, our race, our nationality. We look for people with kids or without, with qualifications or without. We aim to find some similarities, some kind of normality in the existence of those we find great or inspiring, so that we may connect ourselves to them, and feel a little bit part of their success. With that ‘connection’ made – even if it’s merely one in our own heads – we can then start to plan a path to achieve similar levels of success. We see them. And we aim to be them – in our own way.
We create a game plan, just as that 12-year-old did, on the side of a football field.
The expression ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ is so simple, and so eloquently explains why female visibility is important. It appears to have first been used by Marie Wilson from the White House Project, which did a now famous study that found an equal number of male and female children aged seven will declare they want to be President when the grow up. But within a few years, such ambitions changed. By 15, a massive gap emerges, with boys wanting to be president far outnumbering girls. Part of the problem is visibility: girls simply can’t see themselves in such a powerful position because a woman has never been in it. That’s something that may change in the coming months, if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency.
There are many such shifts in visibility occurring. In sport, in politics and in business. One woman at the top doesn’t solve the leadership imbalance, but it can at least help build the pipeline of future leaders.
