Gender Inequality In The United States: A Gender Analysis

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The United States of America is a capitalist patriarchy. According to Eitzen, Zinn, and Smith (2014) this is where “male supremacy keeps women in subordinate roles at work and in the home” (p. 216). There is not much evidence to debunk this fact. As it would go, there are many reasons how this came to be and why it persists today. This is not only an issue that affects America, but worldwide. However, as the world continues to improve, America as a country lacks when it comes to fixing the gender problem it faces. This phenomena can be explained through various sociological ideas and theories and is a topic with multiple facets. These ideas will be explained in the paper and what is being done to fix this problem of gender inequality.
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This means it is a mechanism that society created, so gender is not based on biological factors, but how society deems what the female gender and what the male gender is. While there is a biological basis to gender, it is not necessarily married to sex. As Eitzen et al., explain, there is an immediate casting for gender roles that takes place after determining the sex of a baby (p. 216). After this has been decided how the baby’s place in society is cemented by this decision and will affect them for the rest of their lives. These effects are determined by the gender roles approach which is “traits that individuals acquire during the course of socialization” (p. 216). Then there’s the /gender structure approach which “emphasizes factors that are external to individuals…social actions that reward men and womanly differently” (pg.216). These two approaches explain a lot when it comes to how the patriarchy continues to strive and how sexism is inevitable when these two things come into play. These approaches also parallel the person-blame approach and the system-blame …show more content…

Women tend to be smaller than males, but this does not necessarily mean the same jobs cannot be done. It could also be said that women are to blame for the position they are in, that they need to be come more aggressive to be able to compete, but as Linda Peterson and Elaine Enarson (1974) pointed out, “by focusing on the victim, responsibility for ‘the woman problem’ rests not in the social system…but in the socialized sex differences and sex roles” (pg. 8). It is safe to say that with gender inequality it needs to be looked at with a system-blame approach. With the social construct of gender lending to most of the problems, the roles that are forced onto women in society can easily be said to cause the lack of equilibrium in power. Language, interpersonal behavior, and mass media all contribute to male dominance in their own ways be it with portrayal of genders, that men are expected to control most conversations, and how language in itself ignores, trivializes, and sexualizes women (p. 223). For example, the words with which refer to men imply power and success where with women it implies promiscuity and subordination (p. 223). Just these few things explain how gender inequality has persisted even in our forward-thinking

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