Teaching boys that masculinity requires hardness, dominance, and the suppression of fear or vulnerability caged them into fragile egos that must constantly be propped up by female deference. The same rigid gender script that constrains girls also damages boys by equating self-worth with financial provision and emotional concealment.
Girls are raised to aim for a smaller presence: to have ambition but not too much, to succeed but not more than men, and to cater to the fragility of the male ego by pretending to be less than they are. The result is that women internalize self-diminishment as a feminine virtue rather than recognizing it as a learned constraint.
When told that something is not permitted by her culture, Adichie argues that culture does not make people; people make culture, so a practice that dehumanizes women can be discarded without ceasing to be the culture. Culture is treated as a changeable human product rather than a fixed inheritance that excuses injustice.
Adichie insists on calling the problem gender inequality specifically rather than softening it into vaguer terms like human rights, because naming women as the group affected is what the diffuse language is designed to avoid. Accurate naming is a precondition for addressing the problem, since euphemism quietly denies that a gendered harm exists.