Since the world started spinning and grass started growing, women have been making history and doing it unrecognized. Whether that is by actively working as a mother, fighting in wars, building businesses from the ground up, or just plain existing, they do it for no credit or praise but instead to prove to themselves they have the strength to do anything a man can—all while facing oppression and misogyny. Women are in every possible field you can think of, including one’s perceived as “manly” such as business, engineering, mechanics, or being in the army.

Lee Lane, a Chief Warrant Officer serving in the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011, made recent history being the first woman to become a helicopter pilot in her National Guard unit. When asked by a Library of Congress interviewer what her experience was, she said, “Everyone knew who I was and I stood out. But doing what I love was better than throwing away my dream because of some stereotype.”

Another inspiring woman, Amelia Earhart, an American aviation pioneer and writer, was the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean; creating history and making people remember her name for decades to come.

It is because of women like these that Women’s History Month became celebrated nationwide to highlight the contributions and efforts of women who shaped society and the world. The celebration of this month started when a group in California called the Education Task Force of Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women, planned to make a week dedicated to women’s history starting March 8th of 1978. Soon this dedicated week spread all around the country until it was declared for national recognition by President Jimmy Carter. This tradition was continued for years until 1987 when Congress passed Public Law designating March as Women’s History Month. Women all around the nation celebrated this win, marking it as one of the most important moments in history for gender equality.

However much progress females have made for equality, the reality of it is that women are still far from equal to men. A statistic from the United Nations states we are 300 years away from achieving gender equality, a devastating reality. It’s a common fact that for every dollar a man makes, a woman doing the same work only receives 82 cents on the dollar she rightly deserves, showing how men have a leg up in this broken society.

Another common struggle females put up with on a day-to-day basis, is beauty standards. Author Allan Mazur states in his article published to Taylor & Francis Online titled “U.S. Trends in Feminine Beauty and Overadaptation,” “Women’s social opportunities are more affected by their physical beauty than are men’s, so that women are under more pressure to conform to an ideal of beauty,” showing the ideal look for a woman is one of the only ways she can advance in her work place, social standing, and economic status. We are in a fight for gender equality and Taylor Swift, famous singer songwriter, perfectly captures it in her song, “The Man,” by singing, “Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.”