A lot of arguments against discrimination and a lot of trainings tend to go the route of “imagine you were a woman/person of colour/[insert protected category here], would you like…”. One can’t imagine they are something they never have, never will, or wouldn’t even want to be. As a result, let me offer a different thought exercise. Feel free to imagine the most expensive car of your dreams.

Imagine you have a Ferrari. They’re nice cars. They cost quite a lot of money, so they must have set you back financially a bit. But a Ferrari looks good, and runs very well. People like and admire your Ferrari. Since you got your Ferrari maybe a few more friends are willing to go on road trips with you. Is it because they like you and since you’ve gotten a Ferrari you’ve been wanting to do more road trips? Or do they just want to spend time in the Ferrari? You hope it’s the former… but can you ever know?

Now imagine that one night your Ferrari got stolen. You’ve informed the police, but they can’t seem to find evidence. One of the police officers suspects you of insurance fraud. The other is not hopeful that they’ll find anything. You get dragged into the police station multiple times over the course of two months, but at the end they were not able to find anything. Naturally, you are quite angry when they give you the news and ask them to look harder, they turn you away and say you’d better be happy they’re not convicting you for insurance fraud, as they couldn’t find enough evidence that you in fact staged the theft.

Now think how this experience makes you feel. You chat with your mum and she tells you “I’m sorry this happened to you. But I told you it was a bad idea to get the Ferrari in the first place. Why did you get that Ferrari, when you could have gotten a nice Prius and done something else with the leftover money?”. So was it your fault for getting that Ferrari, were you just tempting the thieves… yet there’s plenty of people who passed by your Ferrari and admired it, but never touched or even considered stealing it…

Even if the people around you were supporting, try to imagine the type of feelings you would have if your car got stolen. You may start wondering if you’d locked your car. In fact whenever you’d leave a car in the future it would start gnawing at you. Did you lock your Ferrari on that fated day it got stolen? Or you may start wondering if you were careless with your keys, or perhaps the private road you parked on wasn’t as safe as you thought it was, or you should have paid an extra 20 thousand for a state of the art tracking device for your car, but thought you wouldn’t need it, or … or… or maybe it’s all really your fault.

So you got your Ferrari stolen, the insurance company was doubtful of your case and they never paid up and the police were unable to ever find your Ferrari. It would make the chances of you buying another Ferrari quite slim. For one, the financial value is considerable, there’s maybe little assurance in your mind it won’t happen again, and the new Ferrari may remind you of your old one which you had grown quite attached to.

Now take all of that and imagine you never had a choice in the matter. You just have to have a Ferrari. That’s how it is being a woman at times. Sometimes you get lucky and nothing bad happens, because not everybody is bad. Sometimes you get lucky and there’s someone who believes you and they are able to prove wrong doing and help you. But most of the time you’re not that lucky. And whilst there is a chance your Ferrari may be returned safe to you, there’s little chance of undo-ing the bad things that have happened to us.