Chamberlain College of Nursing

Socioautobiography

Professor Adam Rafpolajd

4 October 2015

I grow up with value of being independent woman, and hard work. I came from a lower middle-class family due to my mother widowed working single mother of three children. In my family, gender didn’t affect much of my upbringing. Growing up with three problems and mother who worked 2 jobs; I didn’t really know what it meant to be what society perceived a little girl should act or dress. I wore most of my two older brothers hand me downs, my wardrobe consisted of white, blue and black oversized t-shirts and baggy blue jeans. The social norm for girls in middle school was to play with dolls, jump rope and/or discuss their latest celebrity boy crush. After school, I would hang out at my uncle’s mechanic shop where I would help fix tires, change the oil and tune-ups for cars and motorcycles. Now looking back at my childhood, I realized I wasn’t like most girls at that age. I fell in love with fixing motorcycles, by the age of 16 I could fix a carburetor and spark plugs in a motorcycle. (TCO 3, TCO 4 and TCO 6).

My uncle sold his shop and because he was friends with the new owner; I was able to get my first job as a Lube Tech at 18. I truly believed that I could do anything a man could do, and deserved to be treated equally. With this in mind, I dedicated myself to being the best and hard-working employee. I received a lot of back lash from the other employees. My fellow employees were all men, and I was in one of my most uncomfortable positions of having to prove that I could do the job and deserve it not because of my connection with the owner but because I had the skills to do the job right. At such a young ago, I came to learn that they are in fact gender role differences in the workplace. While there are the