Southern hospitality and the village-protection mindset make the South the best place in the country to be a woman. Strictly stratified gender norms make the South the worst place in the country to be a woman. The privileges of womanhood live alongside the curses in the modern South and create a dynamic that forces the intelligent, capable women produced by schools like The University of Alabama to choose between living in the lovely village or emigrating north or west to escape those here who will always respond to your achievements by saying, “That’s great, but how will you balance your family with that?”

The benefits of being a Southern woman are so ingrained into our collective psyche that they become cliché: The doors magically open for us, the heads tip at our passing, the hands help us down the stairs and the “misses” and “ma’ams” never cease. Heck, if God blessed you with a pretty face, you’ll even end up paying less than men! Merely possessing an extra X chromosome south of the Mason-Dixon line is like possessing a small superpower: every day you can use a well-placed smile and slight drawl to bend the world closer to your will.

That is, unless your will is to excel in your line of work, especially if that line is already male-dominated. To be taken seriously as a working woman in the South sometimes seems to take an act of God. Nowhere else will a woman be patted on the head like a dog or a favored child for receiving a promotion. Nowhere else will a woman in a position of workplace power be called “baby,” “honey” or “sugar” by a subordinate. Nowhere else will a woman who isn’t married by 24 be considered an “old maid” or worse,
“damaged goods.” All of these demeaning situations are lived out every day by Southern women who have the gall to go beyond what is expected of them.

Raising a family as a stay-at-home parent is a blessing and an honor for anyone, male or female, who chooses to do so, but so is rising to distinction in a profession. Both contribute to society, and yet both are still not wholly accepted as reputable options for a Southern lady.

Even worse, women who challenge these notions are told implicitly or explicitly that the privileges of Southern womanhood come at exactly that price. Thus, we have an exodus of many of our best and brightest to New York, Chicago, D.C. and Los Angeles. Women who love the South are fleeing their homeland to pursue their careers unhindered by its 
outdated prejudices.

When they do this, we all lose. We lose our tax base, the human 
capital we need to attract cutting-edge employers, and even a little bit of our pride. The South must adapt to stop this brain drain. To do this will require both men and women taking a hard look inward to see the burden our society places on women and taking proactive steps to remove the plank from our own eyes. If we can do this, maybe we can convince working women that the privileges of staying here outweigh the price.

Leigh Terry is a junior majoring 
in economics. Her column runs biweekly.