At our core we are people, not men or women and not boys or girls. The differences are surface stuff.

That surface stuff seems painfully real for young people as they enter their teenaged years, as it was for me, uncomfortable with myself, the world and my place in it.

Thirty years ago as I was making that clumsy transition into becoming an adult, it became obvious to me that some people believed your gender made a defining difference.

Unfortunately, this defining difference was not always positive.

Instead of looking into your face and seeing a person struggling on the brink of adulthood, these people saw an age and a shape and reacted accordingly.

At that time, journalism, as well as having offices of great talent and vivacity, had its areas of shade with experienced and unhappy men.

I fell into one of these areas along with two other girls straight out of university.

Let me tell you that equality has nothing to do with topless bikinis and massage oil, as my employer encouraged me to believe.

It was the recession we had to have, jobs were very scarce and journalism jobs for graduates were impossible to find.

But this was wrong.

To face the choice of “failure” versus employment and to push away your sense of self worth is destroying.

As far as I know, the three of us got out of this situation after a month of hellish life experience, physically unscathed.

Our accounts of what went on there helped shut down the metropolitan office that had been running for many years.

It was upsetting to learn from a friend at around the same time that she had encountered a similar situation in her first journalism job.

My grandfather, himself a journalist, had told me that he did not want a grandaughter of his working in the industry.

But it was other, kinder faces in journalism who picked me up, dusted me off, set me on a more constructive path.

It took a year and a half, but eventually, that job came along.

While it was decades ago, the memory is fresh and the scars remain.

What must it be like to be the woman whose self-worth has never been recognised?

There are women in our community whose hearts recoil at the sound of their own partner’s footsteps.

There are women who are told daily they are worthless, they are stupid... and worse.

There are women who fight to protect their kids from the worst of life by taking it themselves.

Whether it be through sexism, violence or discrimination, to judge another person to be inferior because of their gender is just plain wrong.

Journalism, like the rest of the world, has come a long way. That sort of behaviour is no longer tolerated.

Unfortunately, it appears that human nature has not come so far.

While most men and women are supportive of other people and willing to recognise a person for who they are rather than what they are, there are people who are not.

There are still people who believe that a female is secondary to a male, and they  have bent their beliefs to hide under the veneer of what is socially acceptable.

It’s not good enough.

The rest of us, men and women, need to be here to pick up and dust off those who have been thrown in the dirt by these people.

Today is International Women’s Day.

Thank you to all those strong people in my life who helped me through the hiccups.

Let’s hope there are enough good people out there to help the women who need it to weather the storms.

In the end, we all want the same thing – to be free to be ourselves.

– Marie Low, editor, Namoi Valley Independent.