Society's Realstic and Idealistic Expectations of the United States

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Society’s Real and Ideal

Have you ever looked forward to something, but ended up not being what you were expecting? To many people, living in the United States is no exception. An outsider most likely views the United States by our ideal culture, the American dream, where Americans pride themselves in representing equality and justice. People from all over the world associate words such as freedom and hard work with America, and immigrate to the US for opportunities to create a better future. We believe that the American dream is not partial to whom or what your are, but a well informed citizen understands that who you are does matter, and that there is a huge disparity between real culture and the ideal America just described. Unlike any other place in the world, we have greater access to education, career opportunities, and freedom to choose whom we love and marry, but the realities of these subjects are far different than we expect.

The first example of ideal culture differing from real culture in the U.S, which may be shocking to many, is gender inequality. Equality is a staple of the constitution, yet gender inequality often exists in the workplace illustrated in the types of jobs women attain, their salaries, and their treatment in the workplace. According to the US Department of Labor, women mostly occupy administrative support and service work. These jobs are more often then not at the low end of pay, have male supervisors, and have limited opportunities to advance. Only 15 of the fortune 500 companies CEOs are female CEO, (Macionis, 278) and the highest paid woman only makes as much as the ninth highest paid male. Additionally, sexual harassment remains a serious problem even for women in high busines...

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...s rising, and our higher education system seeming to support social inequality. The future hold much hope and promise in closing the ideal and real cultural gap, and in our age of information and technology it will be difficult for our cultural “glass ceilings” to stay in tact for long.

Guttmacher Institute. "Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954-2003." National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, Jan. 2007. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

Macionis, John. Society: The Basics. 11th Edition. Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2010. Print.

Mathews, T. J. "Trend Analysis of the Sex Ratio at Birth in the United States." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 15 June 2005. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.The

Sandroff, Ronni, Sexual Harassment in the Fortune500, WORKING WOMAN, Dec. 1988,

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