Cultural Differences Between Men And Women

973 Words2 Pages

Think about the men and women in everyday life and compare their actual successes to their aptitudes, drives, and intelligences that would theoretically enable them to achieve success. Excluding factors such as differing social backgrounds and upbringings, it does not seem that an ‘aptly prepared’, ‘decently intelligent’, or ‘hard-working’ sort of woman will always achieve in the real world. No, many females are deterred from scholastic and professional achievement by social expectations, many of which are outdated because they are ‘standards’ that have been set too low. When asked about what they wanted to be when they grew up, many of my female classmates responded that they would like to be stay-home-at-home moms. I was puzzled. I believe …show more content…

Really and truly, they can do anything and everything, but it is just a question of whether it is socially acceptable or not. This scenario is really no different from when a mathematically gifted person asserts all the reasons why he or she could not be simultaneously adept at both math and literature, and vice versa. Some exceptional human beings, like the polymath Leonardo DaVinci, decided to pay these social expectations no heed. If these limits were removed by disregarding what society expects, then real progress could be made since there would be infinite possibilities of favorable outcomes. Sure, it is true that generally speaking, there are a few psychological differences between men and women, but those differences are slight and insignificant. It is generally true that men speak to help people or to fix problems while women speak to form social bonds; it is generally true that men judge themselves by what they have achieved while women judge themselves by the quality of the relationships they are in; …show more content…

That thinking is similar to Daisy Buchanan’s when she thought that her daughter could only be a “beautiful little fool”(Fitzgerald 21), but Daisy cannot be blamed since she had lived decades back in the 1920s when much social change had yet to happen. Since I am an Asian girl, my parents don’t set extremely high scholastic expectations for me---sure, they expect me to do moderately well, but not for me to be solely obsessed with studying. Some Asian boys, however, are academically pressed to the breaking point. Nick Carraway’s father had a reasonable idea: Nick was not to judge anyone because “all the people in this world”(5) had not had the advantages and opportunities that a boy born into a well-to-do-family had had. Intelligence and reasoning tests tell us that women are just as smart as men, but surveys of education, income, and living conditions show that they do not achieve as much because social construct tells us that it is wrong for women to have a strong sense of independence, extremely technical skills, and confidence as opposed to self-deprecation. Social stereotypes have made Judith Ortiz Cofer publically humiliated a multitude of times. Though she was a highly educated Latina “earning some graduate credits” (Cofer 74) from Oxford University, she was serenaded by cheesy men who thought it would be

Open Document