Minority Status Of Women Essay

Throughout history, women have experienced great amounts of equality issues based on their gender. We have seen this in many different ways such as women were not able to vote, not allowed to work in military jobs, did not experience equality in the workplace, and many other ways. Women are not a numerical minority though they are a sociological minority, meaning that they are a group who are under a dominant group by education, employment, wealth, political power, and social status. Although women have received a lot of the rights that they did not receive in the past, they still are experiencing minority status to this day. Society creates a minority experience for women through social structure and techniques of socialization. Stated

The way they are portrayed has a major effect on the self-esteem of Women and young girls. Women compared to Men are not represented equally in media, this is shown in many ways. How Genders Work: Producing the J. CREW Catalog by Paul Muhlhauser and Kelly Bradbury represents how both Women and Men are portrayed in their magazines. What was found that the font used to describe the models clothing was significantly different between Men and Women. A skinny small font was used for the Women and a big and bold font was used for the Men. This was meant to emphasize that it should be kept skinny for Women and not to emphasize curves or shape in body type whereas the Men’s font was used to represent the work that men do, implying they do some sort of physical labor (Muhlhauser and Bradbury). The way that Men and Women models pose and are photographed also has a significant difference. Women are posing to appear fragile and off balance as if they need a prosthetic or Man to rely on. The Men however are posing with their bodies posing strong and stable (Muhlhauser and Bradbury). Women often should be photographed with other girls to represent how “women are social beings who work at being dreams or developing playful girl-friendships”. Also women are photographed sometimes not showing their faces or only showing fragments of their bodies to “Emphasize how fragmented Women’s lives are without Men” (Muhlhauser and Bradbury). The differences between how Men and Women are photographed set a very disempowering feeling to Women. A commercial starring talk show host Kelly Ripa sets am example on how Women are being portrayed. This commercial is for kitchen appliances and it shows her running around the house cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her children. In a certain part of the commercial she says how the appliances help her “be the charming co-host” implying that her husband is