Gender And Gender Inequality

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Being a feminist today has altered from a political position to a more general position. Contemporary feminist is shaped by the past, but now is integrated in popular culture by popular figures. The definition of feminism is the belief of social, political, and economic rights, especially with regards of equality of the sexes. There are many dimensions to being a feminist and we have a tremendous number of people supporting the feminist movement. The need for feminist movements is because gender inequality still exist. Gender inequality is very broad and complex topic. Both men and women are unequal in various ways. However, the big question is why? The purpose of this paper is to understand gender inequality in the sociological framework of …show more content…

Inequality was now present more in the schools and workplace. Teachers expected boys to be better at math and girls better at reading. In school stories, boys were shown to have more adventures and activity than girls. On the contrary, girls were show as passive, dependent, and bored. College enrollment study by the U.S. bureau showed about 20 percent more men than women went to college in 1960 through 1970s. Then by 2010, men enrollment was around 43 percent, while women’s was 55 percent (Conley 2013). In the workplace, 31.5 million women entering the labor force in compared to 70 million in 2008. Now there is about an equal number of men and women in the workforce. However, there is inequality in wages based on gender. Women earnings are about 81 cents to every dollars that men makes. Feminized and male-dominated jobs started become prominent by the 1970s. Feminized jobs included low-paid secretarial or service industrial jobs” (2013). Some jobs were reserved for women, such as, real estates clerical work, pharmacy, public relations, and bank telling. In contemporary magazines women were portrayed subordinate to men in advertisements,such as, kissing a man’s shoe. From a content analysis, women are portrayed as sexual objects 70 percent of the time in fashion magazines. In home goods magazines women are portrayed to have domestic roles such as cooking and baking(Conley …show more content…

By the 1980s, Marxism, the economics forces define the political and cultural realities in society, mixed with feminism claimed “that gender is not class but a driving force of history.” This created the notion that “when women are subordinate men benefit” and that women had a disadvantage to men in the workforce (Conley 2013). Marxist feminist would called this gender conflict. The nuclear family has gender roles which are “set of behavioral norms assumed to accompany one’s status as a male or female.Gender roles is more general term,but Parson’s sex roles is more of an ambiguous term. Sex roles theory states that men are work oriented, while women are domestic oriented to form the ideal nuclear family. “Sex roles created by society was formed for structuralism functionalism, which is the theoretical tradition claiming that every society has certain structures that exist in order to fulfill some set of necessary functions(2013). Even though functionalist supported this theory in the 1960s, it was flawed. Sex role theory only provided one way of how a family could function. Essentialist would describe Parson’s theory as the social phenomena of the nuclear family based on the biological factor of sex. R.W. Connell described the condition in which men are dominant and privileged and that it is invisible, which is Hegemonic masculinity. Even though hegemonic masculinity is what some theorist impose, it clarifies

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