Gender inequality introduction essay

Women barely had any rights. Their husbands could abuse them and get away with it easily. Fortunately, over a period of time, things have slowly changed. However, this is still a very serious and widespread problem. Women are still at the bottom of the chain. What was the cause of this inequality and what will be the consequences if this problem continues to linger? Gender inequality, in my definition, is the unequal and biased treatment between the two sexes.

I strongly believe that the unequal treatment of women is something that should have stayed in primitive times.

Gender inequality in the workplace essay

We are in the present now and we are far more advanced than we ever were and yet we are old school in our thinking of how men and women should be treated. I can strongly identify with gender inequality because many of my closest friends have faced it or still face it. Materialist theories define gender inequality as a result of how men and women are tied to the economic structure of society. Gender inequality is definitely something that we often take for granted; it is accepted and seems so normal in society.

These differences often seem invisible to us even though it happens in our everyday life in everything from employment and education to politics and the media without us being aware of it. Before we look at the gender inequalities in paid employment, it is vital to look at unpaid labor and the discriminations that women face. History has shown us that the roles and responsibilities for men and women were already chosen for them. In the United Kingdom, there was a trend of male dominance in employment until World War II where women gained male-orientated jobs for the first time whilst the men fought in the front line.

Before this, the males were often the breadwinners and therefore provided for their family. On the other hand, the females were more inclined to be involved in unpaid labor often labeled as housewives who performed chores around the family home and looked after the children. Office of National Statistics, It has to be said that in recent times, the division between males and females is less evident but inclination towards male dominance in employment is still shown.


Office of National Statistics, In the United States, the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. Over the years, there has been an increase of women in the workplace with women working in a larger number of senior positions. This reveals that even though there have been improvements in some areas, men often still have the upper hand in employment.

Today, this gender inequality is accepted in society which reveals a strong unfairness against women in employment. Men and women still follow very different career paths. Men are much more likely than women to be employed in skilled trades whereas women are more likely than not to be forced into working lower paid labor jobs such as cleaning.

M, As well as this, they address the problem of low female representation in such work. Although there are organisations such as the WAMT who support women working in skilled trades the likeliness of women to partake in such a job is still very low and shows little improvement. This, yet again, reveals the strong dominance of men in employment worldwide. The notion of being a female is considered to have more challenges than male within the mass media. There is an unbalanced and stereotyped representation of women in the media and a lot of the time they are dominated by men in their roles.

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Gender inequalities traditionally were greatly enforced in media output with women being used in advertisements to sell anything from cars to tobacco. For infants, benefits were greatest when other foods were unsafe. Infants fed human milk had far lower mortality than did unlucky ones given food that often sickened adults.

Essay about Gender Inequality - Words | Bartleby

In modern areas, maternal milk reduces allergies, inner ear infections, and other ailments and contains antibodies that ward off infection. The bottle-fed suffer more ailments as they grow. The maternal benefits of frequent and prolonged breast-feeding became known only recently. The huge decrease in frequency and duration of lactation in Western women floods their bodies with hormones over a much longer period. Modern patterns increase the exposure of reproductive tissues to estrogenic hormones, which increases cell proliferation Maynard Smith et al. Cells that divide more often are more likely to become malignant.

Rates of diseases linked to chronic hormone exposure are rising for both sexes: breast, colon, endometrial, and prostate cancer as well as coronary heart disease Micozzi ; Whitten , p. The incidence of cancers likely reflects the transformation of human biology entailed in the profound ecological changes of modernization Ellison , p. Meanwhile, abundant calories and fats increase exposure to gonadal steroids by lowering the age of puberty Worthman a. Adult behavior does not suffice to explain the rising global prevalence of chronic conditions like cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and obesity Worthman b.

Let us hope. The social costs of breast-feeding were otherwise: costs to infant were nil; costs to mother, high. After the advent of agriculture, lactation in the ancient mode barred women from the activities that bring prestige and power. Political elites, all male owing to the links of war and politics, made laws to protect male privilege, shoring them up with ideologies that justified control of female sexuality. Wet-nursing dates from this period. The rise in food production after grain domestication is ordinarily defined as progress, but people do not turn the soil or collect manure unless they must Netting , p.

Hungry people invent ways to produce more food but only with more labor. A surplus tempts the strong to grab all they can, making ordinary people worse off than their forager ancestors Lenski A grain diet stunts growth, and village living spawns infection Cohen Foragers had been as tall as the affluent today Eaton et al. Peasants shrank Larsen , p. A poor woman could be induced to suckle an infant not her own. Wet-nursing appeared in classical times when slave women suckled elite infants, and it became common among rich Europeans in the Middle Ages.

Wealthy parents more often than not bought their child's life with the life of another Fildes , p. The huge drain of lactation on the maternal system made it unlikely that one woman had milk for more than one child over a prolonged period Stini , p. In early modern Europe, church and state hired wet nurses for infants abandoned by poor unmarried women Golden , p. Later, when male wages were very low, abandonment was related to a rise in women's opportunities for employment: Of 30, Parisian newborns, 8, were abandoned in Braudel , p.

Gender Inequality Essay

By , bottle-feeding was widespread in the West Stuart-Macadam , p. Today, more than half of U. Women who continue to breast-feed schedule fewer feeds.

Gender Inequality

Modernity ended the ancient mode of lactation, while low fertility and safe bottle-feeding increased the supply of women workers. The increasing demand for their labor was a consequence of the transfer of political and economic power from elite households to business and political interests Jackson Physiological sex differences matter politically. Some scholars, ignoring the effects of technology on fertility and lactation, still believe that physiology settles women's status forever. As historian Gerda Lerner , p.

Sex differences thus need explication.

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They are of two kinds: categorical and statistical. The only categorical human sex differences are those of reproduction, and they can mark only one sex: insemination, lactation, menstruation, and pregnancy. All other human sex differences are statistical. Men tend to be larger and stronger, although some women are larger and stronger than most men. Studies of physiological sex differences now flourish in two areas of bioscience. Evolutionary psychologists study statistical differences that correlate with gendered behaviors and see male dominance as hormonally induced Mealey , p.

They tend to deal inadequately with social variables Freese et al. By contrast, biological anthropologists examine the effect on human behavior of the interaction of the food supply, statistical and categorical sex differences, and culture. Such studies meld readily with social science.

For example, Smuts sees patriarchy as stemming from the reproductive strategies of male primates that are much elaborated in humans owing to cultural inventions like agriculture, animal domestication, and ideologies that language makes possible. Genes are selected in a highly variable environment. Traits are exquisitely sensitive, not fixed. In humans, male control of resources and political power yields more control over female sexuality than is usual among other primates.

Several sociologists elaborated a similar theory. Influenced by Lenski , Collins et al. Domination was based on male control of resources stemming from the gendering of production and reproduction and the tendency of all-male groups to become solidary around masculine erotic identity. Men monopolize violence owing to size and strength and the nonfit of warfare and reproduction. Yet, women could not enter the public arena in large numbers until after For nearly all of human history, gestation and prolonged lactation in the ancient mode barred women from warfare and politics, which were inextricably linked since the invention of metal weapons years ago.

But no longer.