The myth maintenance department
Why myths about women persist despite mountains of evidence to the contrary
The myths about what women can and can’t do are remarkably well-maintained.
Every year, around International Women’s Day, they come back out. Dusted off. Refreshed. The usual suspects: women are too emotional. Too risk-averse. Too physically limited. Too irrational under pressure. Too [whatever the situation requires].
What I find most interesting about these myths is not that they’re wrong. It’s how specifically, repeatedly, thoroughly wrong they are — and how little that seems to matter.
People don’t update their opinions. When they meet evidence to the contrary, confirmation bias files it under “exception” and your subconscious gets to wallow in comfort.
So during this week leading up to International Women’s Day (8 March), I’m not celebrating abstract women’s traits. We don’t need applause for existing and being capable individuals.
No. Instead I look at what it looks like when myths meet evidence. And how some men go out of their way to keep them alive.
It’s more entertaining than you might expect.
The myth that needed a co-driver
In 1962, Ewy Rosqvist-von Korff entered the Argentine Turismo Standard Grand Prix. She was a factory driver for Mercedes-Benz, which had bought out her Volvo contract because they wanted her specifically. She was also a three-time European champion at that point. Her co-driver was Ursula Wirth. Also a woman.
They won all six stages of the 4,626km race.
Not just won — they set a new speed record, raising the average winning speed from 121 km/h to 127 km/h. In a two-ton Mercedes 220 SE. Across Argentina.
Ewy’s whole career: not a single accident. Not a crash. Not a broken car. She stopped competing in 1967. Entirely intact.
The myth that women can’t drive persisted anyway.
Here’s what that tells you: inconvenient evidence doesn’t kill myths. People file it under “exception” — she was special, she was different, she doesn’t count — and the myth continues, unmolested. The myth was never a hypothesis being tested. It was a conclusion being protected.
Ewy died in July 2024. She was 94. I imagine she had very little patience for the Myth Maintenance Department.
The myth that needed a race director to intervene
April 19, 1967. Boston Marathon.
Kathrine Switzer signed up as “K.V. Switzer.” That was how she always signed her work. There was nothing in the official rules explicitly barring women from the race — mostly because no one had thought to write it down, possibly because the idea seemed too absurd to need prohibiting.
Partway through the race, the race director, Jock Semple, spotted her. He ran onto the course, grabbed her by the bib, and screamed: “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!”
Her boyfriend — running alongside — body-blocked him. She kept running. She finished.
Women were officially permitted to enter the Boston Marathon in 1972. Five years after the race director physically attacked one for running it.
The myth wasn’t that women couldn’t run marathons. The proof was there in real-time, bib number 261, crossing the finish line. The myth was that they shouldn’t. That there was a category of things that belonged to men, and women running through it needed to be physically removed.
Kathrine Switzer has since run the Boston Marathon many times. Including at 70, in 2017 — fifty years after the attack — in the same bib number. Four hours, 44 minutes, 31 seconds.
The myth that needed an entire country to stop
October 24, 1975. Iceland.
90% of the country’s women stopped. Not just paid work — all of it. Housework. Childcare. Cooking. Everything.
Fish factories closed. (Most of the workers: women.) Newspapers couldn’t print. (Most of the typesetters: women.) Schools and nurseries shut. (Most of the staff: women.)
The men took their kids to work. Reports from that day describe offices full of small children and bags of sweets that someone had bought in haste at a petrol station. Hot dog sausages, apparently, for the ones who managed to find a grill. Iceland’s businesses were running on emergency confectionery.
In six hours, Iceland found out exactly how much of its functioning depended on labour it hadn’t fully counted.
The following year: the Gender Equality Act.
Five years later: Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the world’s first democratically elected female president. She held office for four terms — sixteen years.
All from one day off.
Every ten years, Icelandic women do it again. As a reminder. They’ve done it in 1985, 2005, 2010, 2016, and 2023 — sometimes the full day, sometimes leaving work early. The message is the same: we remember what one day cost you. Do you?
The myth that needed a press statement
Garry Kasparov, 1990: “She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche. No woman can sustain a prolonged battle.”
Judit Polgar was fifteen when Kasparov said this. She became a grandmaster that same year, the youngest in history at the time.
In 2002, she beat Kasparov. Competitive rapid chess. The only woman ever to beat the sitting world number one in competitive play.
He later revised his position. Slightly. He said the Polgar sisters had “shown that there are no inherent limitations to their aptitude — an idea that many male players refused to accept until they had unceremoniously been crushed by a twelve-year-old with a ponytail.”
The twelve-year-old with a ponytail, for her part, went on to beat eleven world champions in competitive play. She retired undefeated from competitive chess in 2014.
Kasparov had said no woman could sustain a prolonged battle.
Judit Polgar’s sustained battle lasted decades. She was not consulted about her limitations before she started.
The myth that needed an updated rulebook on ageing
At the 2024 US Olympic Swimming Trials, Gabrielle Rose was the oldest competitor in a pool of 949 athletes. She was 46.
She swam personal bests in both the 100m and 200m breaststroke. Made the semis.
She had first competed in the Olympics in 1996 — for Brazil, in Atlanta. Four years later, at Sydney, she competed for the USA. At 46, she was faster than she’d been at any point in either of those careers.
Twenty-eight years of improvement.
She didn’t qualify for Paris. But personal bests at 46, against competitors young enough to be her children, in one of the most competitive aquatic environments in the world — that is the story. The Olympic place was never the point.
She said: “Age is a big way that we limit ourselves.”
I still submit that’s an understatement.
What the myths are actually doing
Here’s what connects all five of these: in each case, someone needed the myth to be true.
The men who wanted to drive needed women to be bad at maps. The Boston Athletic Association needed women to be too fragile for marathons. Iceland’s employers and government needed women’s domestic labour to be invisible so they didn’t have to pay for it. Kasparov needed women to be constitutionally unsuited to chess so the world he’d excelled in stayed legible to him.
The myths aren’t hypotheses. They’re conclusions that someone put up fences around.
And “difficult” women — the ones who drive anyway, run anyway, stop working for one day to make the point, beat the world number one in rapid chess, swim faster at 46 than at 22 — they don’t argue with the myths.
They just make them untenable.
That’s not a strategy. It’s not a movement or a message. It’s just women doing the thing they wanted to do, and the myths looking increasingly stupid in comparison.
The Myth Maintenance Department has been working overtime. The evidence department has been busier.
Happy International Women’s Day. Be inconvenient.
— Marjan
If this landed — forward it to a woman who needs it, or a man who might learn something. 42 Sidenotes publishes every Tuesday.
Love it, Marjan! Let’s keep doing what we want to do 💖