Reading a recent Stuff article about a 26 year old woman leading the East Cape flood response, I felt two things at once. The first was admiration. In the middle of chaos, she stepped up, coordinated people, trusted her instincts, and helped her community through a genuinely frightening weather event. That deserves recognition. But the second feeling was discomfort, not with her, but with the framing. The article treats her age as the most remarkable thing about the story, as if competent leadership at 26 is an anomaly rather than a perfectly ordinary human possibility.
