The Importance Of Inequality In Society

1448 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Gender inequality issue

Currently in society, social divisions feature a lot on the prospects of people within each society. According to the Andersen and Collins: “Race, class and gender still matter because they continue to structure society in ways that value some lives more than others”. Sadly this is so very true. Inequality can be experienced in various ways and sadly gender inequality is one of them. “Making men and women different from one another is the essence of gender. It is also the basis of men’s power and domination” (Andersen, 2015, p. 171).
In the video, Flat Broke with Children, Sharon Hays speaks about welfare reform. She talks about how it has affected the lives of many women. When welfare was originally initiated, it was to help widows as they were viewed as poor since the breadwinner was no longer able to provide. The state stepped in as the husband providing for the mother and children, this allowed women to stay home and raise her children, as a "mother" should. Later reform legislation, pushed mothers out of their homes in demeaning jobs, instead of allowing them to stay home and care for their children. So at the …show more content…

Sadly many people seem not to realize that the images we see on television continue to not only keep women oppressed, but also in a state of inferiority and portrayed as the weaker of the two sexes. In the video Killing Us Softly 3 Jean Kilbourne defines the media as the main cause of oppression towards women. In her video Kilbourne explains that in advertisements women are held to unrealistic beauty standards. Women are expected to look a certain way based on the perfection created by computers. Women are lead to believe that they are only worthy based on their looks. They are also lead to believe that being a sex symbol is the only way to only be successful. There are images where women were shown in victimized roles, they are also portrayed as sex

Show More
Related

  • Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform

    1129 Words  | 3 Pages

    Hays found that initially most welfare workers were optimistic and even excited about the changes. Most workers felt that the Act represented real progress and allowed for positive changes which would positively impact the lives of their clients. Hays spoke to one welfare who said that welfare reform “offered the training and services necessary to 'make our clients' lives better, to make them better mothers, to make them more productive.'” But as she was soon to find out, welfare reform, while it did have a positive impact on the lives of some welfare clients, made the lives of most clients more difficult, not to mention the stress that it caused for the welfare workers who had to deal with the often confusing and illogical new rules.

    Read More

  • Jean Kilbourne Sexism Essay

    1024 Words  | 3 Pages

    In “Still Killing Us Softly,” Jean Kilbourne points out that advertising and media are partly responsible for the behaviors and attitudes expected of women.

    Read More

  • Summary Of The Documentary Film: Miss Representation

    586 Words  | 2 Pages

    Miss Representation, a documentary film produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom released in 2011, presents a contemporary issue which is the misrepresentation of women’s portrayal in mass media. The media is powerful in shaping audience’s belief in how to be feminine. Women are expected to be beautiful, attractive, and even sexual on the media to attract audience’s attention. Also, the film points out the existence of social system in which men are considered more powerful and dominant than women. Finally, the film tries to increase the awareness of female real value including capability, educational achievement, and leadership. Consuming the media wisely to eliminate gendered stereotypes can help young women build their confidence and be successful.

    Read More

  • Social Inequality In Society

    3028 Words  | 7 Pages

    "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And poof-he was gone" (Usual Suspects). Today's devil is not a physicla being, but a metaphorical one. That of inequality on a worldwide scale. Although people would like to think that social inequality has been all, but destroyed in modern society it is still featured heavily within our media. Social inequality is the process of society limiting or harming a group’s social status. Prejudice can be based on class, race, and gender. It exists in all levels of media and reality. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hunger Games show classism while The Little Mermaid and Antigone display sexism. Racism can be seen in The Hotel on The Corner of Bitter and Sweet and Black Like Me.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In The Awakening, By Edna And Leonce

    1359 Words  | 3 Pages

    Gender roles are a staple construct of human civilization, designating the behaviors and lifestyles that society expects out of its participants, with gender as the defining characteristic. Historically, females have been at the forefront of the conversation, with feminism regarded as the principal solution to the well-established issue of gender inequality. However, this is foolish. To truly mend the gender inequalities forged by thousands of years of human interaction, both genders have to be acknowledged. Both males and females are equally constrained by gender roles, however the effects of this constraint are in differing fields. There are studies showing that females are at a disadvantage economically, in the workplace, while other studies

    Read More

  • The Media's Effect on Women

    1110 Words  | 3 Pages

    The media negatively influences the way women are portrayed in modern society and culture. This can severely impact the way a woman views her self worth and beauty.

    Read More

  • Dreamworlds 3: The Role Of Women And The Media

    788 Words  | 2 Pages

    Instead, women are being discriminated and treated as inferior due to the stereotypes that are portrayed in the media. The media creates and reproduces ways of seeing that at a minimum reflect and shape our culture. We can look at the media to understand more about a culture’s values and norms, if we realize the limitations of looking at the media. For example, one may ask, does the news based in the United Sates represent what the American culture is like, or only what stands out from everyday American culture? The answer to that is no. Instead, the media represents what it thinks it will be able to sell and is supported by advertisements. This includes violent acts, the sensationally and inappropriate. Jhally reminds us that “it is this male, heterosexual, pornographic imagination based on the degradation and control of women that has colonized commercial culture in general, although it is more clearly articulated in music videos” (Jhally 2007). Therefore, “media content is a symbolic rather than a literal representation of society and that to be represented in the media is in itself a form of power—social groups that are powerless can be relatively easily ignored, allowing the media to focus on the social groups that ‘really matter’” (Gerbner,

    Read More

  • Brenda J. Allen's Article On Gender Matters

    648 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the book Difference Matters, Brenda J Allen, begins writing about how gender matters in society. One of the main topics that she talks about is how in today’s society the male gender is the more predominate gender. As the reader, she has brought to mind many new ways to view how males earn more money then females, how we classify jobs as masculine or feminine, and also how society excepts males’ vs females to act and preform in the work force.

    Read More

  • Miss Representation Summary

    1350 Words  | 3 Pages

    The documentary Miss Representation identifies the numerous ways women are misrepresented in the media, including in news, advertisements, movies, and television. The title Miss Representation emphasizes that the way we portray women in the media is a misrepresentation, as in it does not do women justice and oftentimes, has a negative impact on the perception of women. Frequently in the media, women lack leading roles and complexity, are held to an unrealistic standard of beauty, and are subject to objectification and beautification (Newsom, 2011). These misrepresentations lay the groundwork for gender socialization, and therefore, shape how women perceive themselves and are perceived by others.

    Read More

  • Values of Miss America Pageant

    2474 Words  | 5 Pages

    It is shocking to see the digression in humanity’s morals and values over the past decade. As cliché as it sounds, the media is the center of it all. The way women are being represented, from our television sets, the radio, pornography and even art has pushed beauty to the top of the list of controversial and widely debated topics around the globe. “Whenever we walk down the street, watch TV, open a magazine or enter an art gallery, we are faced with images of femininity,” (Watson and Martin).

    Read More

  • Sexism and the Media

    1581 Words  | 4 Pages

    In today's world, what we see in the media dictates our world. Media, by definition, is a form of mass communication, such as television, newspapers, magazines and the internet. Since the beginning of this media phenomenon, men and women have been treated very differently, whether it be through advertisements or news stories. As women have gained more rights and social freedoms, the media has not changed their views on women. They are often viewed as objects, whether for a man's pleasure, or for as a group to sell only cleaning products to.The portrayal of women in the media has a highly negative impact on the easily shaped young women of today. Women of power are often criticized, others hypersexualized. The media also directs advertisements for household things at women.

    Read More

  • The Perpetuation and Preservation of Male Supremacy in Mainstream Media

    865 Words  | 2 Pages

    I am a woman. Without the feminist understanding that my education has afforded me, mainstream media portrayals of woman in relation to man would burn holes through the fabric of my mind and dismantle my ambitions. Ignoring the infraction that media portrayals impose on naïve minds gives the impression that it is acceptable to be inappropriately cultivated in gender equality. Television media continues to pose a grave threat; but worse is the deceitful attempt to find something attributable to women, the attempt to lure them with admiration, only to smack them with the patronizing undertone of being incomparable to men.

    Read More

  • Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

    1724 Words  | 4 Pages

    Gender difference as inequality is all shaped by economic, political, social and cultural factors. In the global context these division of the world formed radical difference between economic zones characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty. Yet, these in equal relationships are often reproduced within under developed societies where non-white women often find themselves at the bottom of the hyracial division. Hence the factors which produce different form of oppression consist of class, ethnocentric and racist practices, and heterosexism.

    Read More

  • The Effects of Gender Stratification on Women

    1273 Words  | 3 Pages

    Gender stratification is the cuts across all aspects of social life and social classes. It refers to the inequality distribution of wealth, power and privilege between men and women at the basis of their sex. The world has been divided and organized by gender, which are the behavioural differences between men and women that are culturally learnt (Appelbaum & Chambliss, 1997:218). The society is in fact historically shaped by males and the issue regarding the fact has been publicly reverberating through society for decades and now is still a debatably hot topic. Men and women have different roles and these sex roles, defined to be the set of behaviour’s and characteristics that are standard for each gender in a society (Singleton, 1987) are deemed to be proper in the eyes of the society. They are as a matter of fact proper but as time move on, the mind-set of women changes as well, women also want to move on. However the institutional stratification by the society has become more insidious that the stereotypical roles have created a huge barrier between men and women. These barriers has affected women in many aspects such as minimizing their access on a more superior position in workforce organization, limits their ownership of property and discriminates them from receiving better attention and care.

    Read More

  • Gender in Mother Courage and Her Children and M. Butterfly

    1802 Words  | 4 Pages

    Society has females and males alike typecasted into roles which have basic characteristics that are the reverse of each other. Although this has begun to change over the past thirty years, typically the man was seen as superior to the female. This superior image is one that today, is slowly on its way to being reduced to one of complete equality between the two genders.

    Read More

More about The Importance Of Inequality In Society

Open Document