Sure, we’ve heard of girl math – the trend where women are being asked to justify their hard-earned purchases by evaluating the cost per use – but what about ‘girl measuring’?
This latest trend has gone viral on TikTok, with videos featuring women using their arms and hands to measure DIY projects amassing a cool 21.3 million views, and Google searches for ‘what is girl measuring’ have also risen by 83% in the past month.
So what exactly is girl measuring? “Girl measuring is essentially a term being used to describe people using their arms and hands to gauge things like room dimensions, wall lengths, or pieces of furniture,” Jen Nash, Head of Design at Magnet says.
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Yet, just like its predecessor ‘girl math’, ‘girl measuring’ is another sexist trend. It insinuates that women can’t carry out proper DIY tasks, or they are ‘too lazy’ to get the appropriate tools.
The fact that we even put ‘girl-’ in front of anything is patronising in itself. Girls are children, adult females are women. By placing ‘girl’ in front of terms like ‘math’, ‘measuring’, ‘dinner’ and even ‘boss’, insinuates that it’s an activity that a woman shouldn’t be able to do. It’s infantalising to say the least.
Why are we not seeing the ‘boy-’ equivalents? Where’s the ‘boy measuring’, ‘boy math’, ‘boy dinner’, or ‘boy boss’? For men, it’s just measuring, math, dinner, and boss. This is due to the sexist notion that men know how to get a task done, that they are able to budget appropriately, fuel themselves, and that they are expected to be in high ranking positions.
Look, I know ‘girl measuring’, just like ‘girl math’, is supposed to be a light-hearted, relatable trend to show that no one has a unique experience and we all do things the same way. Heck, I’ve even been privy to ‘girl measuring’ from time to time – sometimes it just works. But it’s not just women who use it, men use it too, and by placing ‘girl-’ in front of it it just makes it seem as if women are incapable of doing a simple task, or that we need to dumb things down for women, when this is not the case.
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Women should be able to measure things, buy things, eat dinner, and run companies without it being seen as a novel achievement. We are just, if not more, capable than many of our male counterparts, and by leaning into the ‘girl-’ trends it lends a callowness to the meaning, or that we lack some sort of essential life experience.
The fact that these trends continue to go viral on TikTok just shows that they are part of the human experience. That, as women, we collectively experience things in certain ways – which is reassuring and heartening. Yet, perhaps we just need to come up with a better way of phrasing these collective experiences, so as not to lessen its impact by likening our thought processes to a child’s. Because we are grown-ass women who don’t need to minimise our achievements and smart ways of doing things.