Firstly, if you want to have the same opportunities in life as everyone else, you are a feminist. Full stop.

If the word feminist plants a picture in your head of a hairy armpitted, manhating, placard carrying hippy woman as seen below, then you’re wrong.

Here’s the thing, for the most part, we have it good. We can do pretty much anything that a man can do, if we so choose. Its not that long since women who worked in government jobs had to, I kid you not, quit their jobs if they wanted to get married.

But, if you look a little closer, you will see that we still have a long way to go. Women in Europe earn 84c for every euro that men make. Shockingly, there are more CEOS’s called John in the UK’s top 100 companies than there are women CEO’s called anything!

But we can’t just blame men for this. Us girls graduate with more degrees then boys do every year, and yet we just kind of give up. We have so much to contend with in our lives with pressures to fit in, pressures to look a certain way and pressures to be all things to all people. And those pressures are often put on us by ourselves and other girls.

A feminist wants girls to put the same value on themselves as boys do, to believe that they have just as much to say as boys do, and to truly feel that how they look will not dictate the opportunities that are available to them. A feminist will do everything in her power to ensure that every girls she raises, educates or employs will have an easier path than they did.

And that’s all of us here at Shona are hands up, if-you-don’t-like-it-bite-me, stand-the-hell-up-for myself feminists.

You can read more about how famous Irish faces define feminism here.