Growing up in a modern family in which both parents work and gender equality has always been regarded as pivotal, I am relieved to say that I have barely had any encounters with gender binary so far. Sadly, this was not always the case in other social environments. Without wanting to offend anyone, I must admit that I noticed the most striking differences when meeting people from a different cultural background and sometimes also those with a lower level of education. For example, I gave English lessons to a guy from Chechnya who truly believed that men had the privilege of sexual liberty, whereas women were automatically denounced as unworthy of marrying if they acted the same way. Apart from his culture and educational status, I think it was the clearly hierarchical order in his own family that shaped him the most; his sister had an arranged marriage to a stranger who was chosen by her parents. Personally, it makes me shudder to come across such a narrow-minded and conservative view, but today opinions like this are still very common all over the world.
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