Quotes About Gender

Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.

For many women, and a fair number of men, saying 'I'm sorry' isn't literally an apology; it's a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation.

I want to go as hard as I can, and if I look like a guy out there playing ball, well, hey, I feel sorry for the opponent.

I had the most frustrating thing happen when I was trying to find a label. I sent my album to this indie label, and they were like, 'We already have two girls on the label. I'm so sorry, we just can't take your project.'

I feel sorry for girls getting caught up in it and still thinking they have to define themselves and their success by being in a relationship, straight women, straight girls, by being in a heterosexual relationship or being in any relationship, as if that's in any way a mark of what kind of successful human being you are.

Sorry, equality is a myth. Women aren't as strong as men - they can't even hold their booze as well as men.

I think our society has sort of built this gender binary, and the way we've said it exists does not really exist in nature.

Women didn't go to school when they were young because parents preferred to send their brothers. The women couldn't access loans in their own right because the banks sought the approval of a male dependent.

It seems to me that 'women's writing' by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

Sexuality is who you are personally attracted to... But gender identity is who you are in your soul.

Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

It's very hard to not give in, to sell your soul: to flatter a more experienced male person of power, a producer or director, in order to get what you want. You feel a pressure to flutter your eyelashes and flirt because you know that will work, and I think it's admirable to not do that.

Sometimes when I talk, I sound like a feminist because I get really angry when I hear certain things. For instance, a lot of families don't really educate their girls much while they educate their sons to the full extent. I think that's not fair.

Whenever you're dealing with something that's difficult to describe, that you can't get across to someone in a sound bite, it sounds like the normal default is to pick what's easiest, and in the case of fiction written by women, fiction involving women, fiction involving any sort of relationship, the word that comes to mind is 'romance.'

I just read that 81 percent of Americans are ready to vote for a woman. So it sounds like America is ready.

When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.

Most historians and other writers of what we now consider 'primary sources' simply didn't think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.

South Korea first allowed women into the military in 1950 during the Korean War. Back then, female soldiers mainly held administrative and support positions. Women began to take on combat roles in the 1990s when the three military academies, exclusive to men, began accepting women.

My husband doesn't listen because his mother didn't make him listen. What am I going to do, beat him? I mean: firstborn of a southern family? Firstborn boy? Please. I mean, I love him to death, but is he going to take the garbage out? No.

I think it would be a lot easier if I said, 'I feel like a dude,' but I was raised by a southern mom, so I know how to put on lipstick and walk in heels and rock that look. It's exactly that juxtaposition that confuses people.

My grandmother, my mother and my aunts and their friends were all of southern Chinese ancestry, and they were all strong figures. Though if you asked them who was the head of their families, they would have said their husbands; and yet it was the women who ran everything.

At the end of the day, the sovereignty of maleness is an illusion. In essence and in origin, we are all entirely female.

The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.

It's hard because I think I fall into this in-between space where there's something that's innately feminine about me, and there's also something that's kind of androgynous. I carry myself somewhere in between, and I think my music lends itself to that as well.