March Essay Competition

March 9 — March 22, 2026,

Prompt

The average man, regardless of creed, family background, religion, personal convictions, or social, economic, or marital status, will always feel threatened or intimidated by a successful, strong, independent woman.

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Essay

Score

Not All Men: Why "Always" Is the Wrong Word

By Munira Sadiq

March 15, 2026 · 960 words · 5 min read

🥇 1st Place

I heard a rumor, an empty claim. The claim is sweeping, emotionally resonant, and wrong. It assumes that the average man, regardless of background and belief, inevitably feels threatened by a successful, strong, and independent woman.But this mistakes a cultural pattern for a biological one. The truth is much more complex: while male intimidation of successful women is a real and documented social phenomenon, it is not universal and not inevitable.It is learned. And what is learned can be unlearned.Let me tell you a story.The first time Daniel knew he was afraid of Maya, she was laughing. Not at him, of course. She was laughing at something a co-worker said to her from across the room. She had just finished giving a report that left the entire room silent in the best way possible. It was the kind of report that made everyone else in the building begin to question their own work.Daniel was her manager. He was also, though he wouldn't admit it, threatened, but he didn't know it yet. Instead, he told himself that Maya was "a lot." That she could "dial it back a bit." That she was "talented, but—" and the “but” always trailed off into nothing, because Daniel couldn't put his finger on it. So instead, Daniel began to cc himself on her emails, to ask for updates she didn't need to give and suggest she run things by him first.What Daniel was doing, without realizing it, was what men have done for centuries: creating small bureaucratic walls around a woman he believed was threatening the architecture of his own identity.And here is where the easy story would say: and so it is with all men.But that would be a lie.Because in the same office, in a different department, was a man named Kofi, Maya's mentor, the one who had originally recommended her for the role and forwarded her work to people above him without attaching his own name to it. Kofi had seen his mother run a business in Lagos while his father kept the books and considered it to be an honor. He had learned early that a woman's success was not a subtraction from his own. It was simply… success. A thing that existed. A thing worth celebrating.Two men. Same building. Radically different responses to the same woman.The problem with the aforementioned claim is that it mistakes a wound for a chromosome. It takes something that is painfully, visibly, historically real, and calls it nature, when it is, in fact, culture wearing nature's clothes.To deny this claim altogether would be another lie — history has proven that the world has had its fair share of Daniels. When Marie Curie received her first Nobel Prize in 1903, the French Academy of Sciences still refused her membership. She won a second Nobel Prize six years later, in an entirely different field, and they still kept the door closed.When Serena Williams became the most famous tennis star of her generation, the conversation around her somehow kept drifting away from her excellence and toward her body, her emotions, and her attitude. Her excellence was never quite allowed to simply be excellence.When Hillary Clinton stood at the edge of the highest office in the world, her ambition itself became the indictment. Not what she would do with that power, but simply that she wanted it in the first place. Daniel was not new. He was just another product of a century-old story that said a man provides, protects, decides, and leads, and that a woman who did those things well is somehow doing it at him.Daniel had been told that story in a thousand different ways. In the movies where the successful woman was always lonely. In the jokes at family dinners about men who let their wives wear the pants. In the promotions he'd watched go to men who were simply men, not because they were better or more qualified.He had absorbed all of that. He didn't choose to feel threatened by Maya. He had simply been prepared to.But the word "always" is where the argument collapses.The trouble is that human behaviour is not a straight line. It is influenced by a multitude of factors such as culture, upbringing, personal experience, emotional maturity, and individual choice. The moment we can point to just one man in the world who genuinely celebrates, supports, and is inspired by a woman's success, the word "always" is broken.And we can point to such men. They are the fathers who raised their daughters to be independent. Husbands who moved for their wife's career. Mentors who advocate for women in their fields to their own professional detriment. In history, we cite John Stuart Mill, who wrote The Subjection of Women in 1869 and argued passionately for full female equality at a time when almost no other man did.To reduce all of these experiences to a singular genetic response does not gain any real insight. It's simply stereotyping, and it applies the same reductive logic that has historically been used to limit women themselves. And so the rumor dies the only death it deserved, with a simple truth.There will always be a Daniel, someone building walls they never questioned, and shrinking what they cannot contain. But the claim was not that some men feel threatened. The claim was the average man. Always. And ‘always’ is a very long time.Because Kofi existed. Mill existed. The fathers, mentors, and husbands who moved their lives around a woman's greatness existed too. They were not anomalies. They were proof.Maya, it's worth noting, never needed the rumor to be true. She did not build her success on the assumption that every man would try to diminish her. She built it on something far more durable.She built it on herself.After all, the rumor was never about her anyway.

Final score

Average from 2 judges

96.3%

Judge 1 — 95.5%

Judge 2 — 97.0%

Average — 96.3%