Page 138 - Katherine Ryan press pack 2015-20

use my privilege, to be an advocate and to talk about my own

experience—to be political. That’s not to say that everyone should

be.

BROWN: I was reading some of your interviews, and you talked

about how, at first, you didn’t understand why people kept asking

you what it’s like being a female comedian, because you grew up

thinking that you could be anything and everything. Was there a

point where you realized that, “Maybe I was raised this way, but it’s

not as simple as that”?

RYAN: Yeah. I was really lucky to have been raised in this really

powerful matriarchy where my dad was around but I was with my

mom and my grandma most of the time. They were heavy

influences on me. My mother has a career in technology; my

grandma sold real estate. I watched them around the house and

being really smart. I only had sisters, so I didn’t have boys around to

compare us to. I just took it for granted that we had every

opportunity available to us. I didn’t even consider that I might be

treated a different way as a woman. I didn’t know about the gender

wage gap, about what women in different cultures still experience

today in terms of abuse and discrimination and a lack of a right to

education. I didn’t know about those things because I grew up in this

really sheltered environment in a small Canadian house. Of course,

as soon as I moved into a big city, as soon as I traveled a little bit

and got older, I learned about the world and had a greater sense of

the injustices that go on, not just for women, but for minorities. I’m

really lucky, because I had the best of both worlds. I had this

ignorance, really, about the barriers that I might face, so I just did