The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
Women are taught endurance long before they are taught consent, authority or power.
Not through a single lesson or explicit rule, but through repetition. Through praise for being mature, warnings framed as protection and subtle consequences for speaking too loudly or wanting too much.
Psychologists call this normative conditioning: the quiet shaping of behavior through reward and consequence. As a consequence, many women have already learned how to carry fear and discomfort by the time they are ever celebrated for their strength.
This education begins with interpretation. From early childhood, girls are more likely to be socialized to read the room, monitor tone, anticipate reactions and adjust themselves accordingly. Girls are typically encouraged toward relational awareness earlier than boys, noticing emotional shifts and managing interpersonal tension. What is often praised as empathy is also training in self-surveillance.
From youth, women are encouraged to identify and soothe pain in others, completely de-emphasizing themselves in the process. When something feels wrong, the reflex is rarely “Why did that happen?” but rather, “What did you miss?”
On American University’s campus, women are warned against walking alone at night and are expected to manage their own safety, while the University’s policies — like the Discrimination, Harassment, Retaliation, and Sexual Misconduct Policy — exist mostly as documents that students sign haphazardly rather than engage with meaningfully. Students trade safety tips in group chats — watch your drink, text when you get home — showing how danger is treated as inevitable and the responsibility for managing it becomes personal.
Rather than asking why these warnings are necessary, women are taught to modify behavior preemptively. Harm becomes something to anticipate and safety becomes an individual responsibility instead of a collective obligation.
Culpability rarely sits at the source of harm. “You should have known better” echoes in countless variations; women could have dressed differently, spoken differently, left earlier, been clearer, been quieter. Resources framed as prevention often center women’s behavior rather than confronting the actions of potential assaulters. However well intentioned, they should be redirected toward stopping harm at its source, not teaching women to manage its risk.
Researchers call this defensive attribution, a way societies preserve order by believing harm happens only when someone fails to behave correctly. On a campus like American University, where conversations about safety, Title IX, and student conduct are ongoing, this mindset can shape how incidents are discussed in dorms and classrooms. This makes women responsible for anticipating harm, watch your drink, text your friends, don’t walk alone, but relieves men and institutions of the responsibility to change.
This also shapes how women are allowed to want.
The idea of the “M-R-S degree” may sound antiquated, but its logic persists. Women’s ambition is still encouraged relationally: be driven, but not disruptive. On campus, this appears when women in leadership roles are praised for being approachable rather than decisive, or when assertiveness in student organizations is read as hostility rather than confidence.
In a man, this behavior would be interpreted as confidence. Research on role congruity shows women pursuing power are often perceived as negatively violating gender expectations. Competence is read as coldness. Authority becomes arrogance. Warmth turns into a prerequisite for acceptance, even in positions that require decisiveness.
Leadership remains culturally coded as masculine. Studies consistently show women leaders face a double bind: too soft and they are dismissed, too firm and they are penalized. This resistance is not personal, it is cognitive. Status quo bias favors familiar hierarchies, and women in authority disrupt deeply internalized assumptions about who should lead and who should accommodate.
The claim that girls mature faster reflects this demand, and while there is research showing that girls often develop certain cognitive, emotional and social skills earlier than boys, it also contributes to an unfair set of expectations. Girls are disciplined earlier, sexualized sooner and held accountable for consequences they did not create. When women speak about their experiences, credibility is judged less on what happened than on how it is delivered. Was she calm enough? Was she emotional, but not too emotional?
This is what philosophers describe as testimonial injustice — the systematic devaluation of someone’s knowledge based on identity rather than accuracy. Women’s feelings devalue their meaning. Their credibility is filtered through gendered expectations of emotional response.
Women are often praised for resilience, but that praise can be misleading. Traits like hyper-independence, emotional containment and heightened empathy often develop as survival adaptations to risky social conditions. Over time, this required endurance hardens into identity, and once survival is admired externally, it becomes harder for women to impeach the why driving these traits.
Ultimately, this is not an argument about individual men. Quite the opposite: it is about a system that socializes dominance in one group and endurance in another, then labels the outcome natural. Men are similarly constrained by narrow definitions of masculinity. But women are uniquely trained to absorb consequences quietly. On a campus that prides itself on social awareness and justice, that contradiction should matter.
American University students are taught to analyze power structures in classrooms, but struggle to confront them in daily life. For example, it’s easier to critique inequality during a class discussion than it is to question everyday comments, or assumptions that reinforce those same hierarchies. If we want a campus culture rooted in equity rather than subsistence, that requires more than personal safety tips and resilience workshops. It requires collective accountability.
Female students should question the reflex to internalize responsibility when something feels wrong. Too often, a female student raising concerns in a meeting will have her feedback dismissed as overly cautious, while a male peer with the same point is admired as thoughtful and strategic.
Student leaders should examine whose voices are labeled difficult and whose are labeled strong. Faculty and administrators should prioritize prevention and power analysis over individual risk management. Commit to noticing who is listened to, speaking up when voices are dismissed and working together to create a campus where all experiences are taken seriously.
Claire Flakker is a sophomore year student in the School of Communication.
This article was edited by Harry Walton, Addie DiPaolo and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Avery Grossman, Arin Burrell and Nicole Kariuki. Fact-checking done by Andrew Kummeth.
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