For the past few weeks, we have been investigating on the changing roles of women in both America and China. Through the lessons, I realized that there isn’t much progress that was made through the years and that the women today are still deemed as second-classed citizens and are still receiving much stereotypes and discrimination.
Personally, as I have mentioned in class, it is pretty much impossible to change the views of the people on the discrimination that they have towards females. It is the traits in-born, such as where they get pregnant. This heavily affects their ability to work and contribute to the company as when they go on maternal leave, the company still has to pay them but yet they are no longer contributing to the company which is wasting the company’s resources. Hence, many companies refuse to employ females with this issue in mind thinking that employing female employees would put the company in the losing end.
Also, I feel that even the female themselves feel this as many refuse to marry or have children after marriage as they know that by getting pregnant or having babies would jeopardize their career as they would be unable to contribute actively during their pregnancy and that they have to take care of their children. Also, many resign after having babies which wastes the company’s time in training them as in the end they leave the company where if they employed a male employee, they would most probably not resign so the investment that they put into the employees would not go to waste.
To me, I believe that the only way to achieve gender equality is to change the whole nurturing process of the children since when their still babies. I feel that root cause of the gender inequality is caused by the fairy tales. I can still remember that the kings always get the bigger seat, the queen the smaller one. Servants are always female. The princesses are always waiting for their prince charming to rescue them from the wicked witch. Also, it is always the mother who takes care of the babies since young and the father works. All these creates a mentality in the kids since young that the male are of a superior being and that female are of a weaker being who needs the protection and help of the male.
By changing all these, hopefully the newer generations would no longer feel what most of us are feeling now, which is that male are of a superior being, and that they would start off in the society on equal footing.
I believe that Hillary Clinton is a strong modern day example that the female are slowly gaining power in the world, namely in the political sphere. However as we argued in class, she is successful mainly because of her husband’s economic power and political influence for being the former First Lady. However, she still is an example that female are able to be on equal footing with males. Also, another example would be the Germany Chancellor, Angela Merkel who with her in power, Germany remained unaffected by the euro zone crisis. This just shows how the female have the power and ability to achieve great feats but it is just the traditional stereotypes that are pretty much overshadowing their achievements.
Examples of successful females such as Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel send us a very strong sign that the female have the ability to do great things. I believe that this is merely the start, where more powerful females will come into the spotlight and do great things. Hillary is a role model to many of the female today, where it shows them just how it is possible for female to climb to great heights and achieve great feats and have great achievements. Hillary has proved to them that it is possible for the female to shine and even overtake males in their field.
However to me, I personally do not think that just by looking at the figures really shows us just how the roles of the female have changed. It is not like “Oh, now there’s 20% of female business women, their role has changed”. This merely shows that there are more female going into the work force but it does not show the change of roles of the female in the society. To me, I feel that the only way to see that the role of the female has changed is when we look at the family structure, of whether the father has the same power as the mother in the family, where they have an equal say in the family.
Hi Terry,
ReplyDeleteI would like to say that you have done a good job in trying to explain the difficulty that society faces in tackling the problem of the discrimination of women.
On top of the points that you have made to show why women face discrimination, I would also like to add a point that the society makes women to be expressed as the ‘weaker’ gender. For example, in sports, there are always the female and male categories. This thus create discrimination towards the females as they are seen to be ‘not as good’ as men and have to be split up for even competition. In most of the cases, men also seem to perform better. In track and field, men always have better timing or scores than women, in soccer, men are always deemed to be able to play more exciting matches, and in golf, the men always garner more viewers than the females. These are only a few examples of the kind of perception society have on women because they always seems to come in second best as compared to men.
However, I do not agree that by the nurturing process, gender equality can be achieved. I feel that it is the gender inequality that pushes women to try and strive to do better and match up with the men. This will then result in some form of gender equality.
Also, I disagree that by looking at statistics, we cannot see that the roles of women have changed. For example, if we use the example you have given, “now there’s 20% of female business women, their role has changed”, we can infer that since there are more women in the business sector, they are no longer staying at home to work and do chores, thus their roles have changed from one of doing household chores, to one that plays a part in contributing to the income of the family. Also, in United States, there was an increase of stay-at-home dads from 98,000 to 158,000 from 2003 – 2009, which can clearly show the changing roles of women as they get to go out to the workforce and take on the role of breadwinner which is usually done by the males, while the males get to stay at home and take care of kids, a job known to be done mostly by females.
Overall, it was still a good entry as it explained different factors that contributed to the changing roles of women.
Cheers,
Si Jian
“Hi Sijian,
DeleteThis is a very astute comment, I especially like the way you disputed Terry's point that figures alone are insufficient to prove how women's roles are changing.
However I have a bone to pick with your following point:
‘However, I do not agree that by the nurturing process, gender equality can be achieved. I feel that it is the gender inequality that pushes women to try and strive to do better and match up with the men. This will then result in some form of gender equality.’
You claim that the problem itself will birth a solution. This is not entirely wrong - gender inequality in itself is a motivating factor for many feminists to fight for equality - but bear in mind the fact that women need to fight for gender equality, whereas men do not, itself violates the ideal of gender equality.
Another fundamental issue is that women's supposedly noble struggle for gender equality is in itself mostly futile because it fails to target the underlying problem. Most feminist efforts begin too late and target the wrong people, the wrong demographics, which is to say, mature, adult men who have from young had chauvinist mentalities instilled into their minds. Such hard-headed methods are unlikely to yield real solutions.
Terry does have a point - the way a society turns out depends on how its people think, and how its people think is affected in a big way by education, which Terry refers to as ‘the nurturing process’. Indeed, the countries with the most developed education systems – Singapore and the US, but more pertinently Scandinavian countries like Finland, Norway and Sweden – tend to display the highest levels of gender equality. Sweden ranked 4th, Finland 3rd, Norway 2nd, and Iceland 1st in the 2011 Global Gender Gap Report (http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-2011/). (Singapore came in 57th, so the Scandinavian nations probably also had the added advantage of not having chauvinistic, male-dominated, Asian cultural roots.) It is also worth mentioning that
Sijian uses the statistic that ‘there was an increase of stay-at-home dads from 98,000 to 158,000 from 2003 – 2009’ to prove that in the US, gender roles are changing, and statistics can adequately show that. Similarly, statistics show Sweden, as a quintessential civilized Scandinavian country, beats the US hands down in terms of gender equality. 85% of Swedish fathers now take out parental leave, something that could have resulted from the compulsory 2-months leave for fathers out of a total 480 days available to both parents. Interviewing one such father on why he chose to subvert traditional gender roles, he says simply: ‘Everyone does.’ Swedish wives go as far as to call the blossoming trend ‘a new kind of manly’. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.html?pagewanted=all) In the 2011 Global Gender Gap Report, Sweden scored nearly a perfect 1.00 – meaning practically ideal equality – in terms of educational attainment. Education is inextricably linked to many facets of a society, with gender equality being just one of these.
Once again, sorry for the long post. Hope you find my input useful.
Cheers,
Jole”
Hi Terry,
ReplyDeleteI enjoy reading your post and I would to share with you some of my thoughts after reading this.
First of all, you mentioned that the root cause of gender inequality is due to the stereotypes of fairytales. I somewhat agree with you on this point but I would like to rephrase this as the stereotypes that the media portrays. Since young, different medias like books and TV shows portray women as the one that are "weaker" and need protection from the male. However, this situation has been improved from the past. One example is the channel 8 TV drama few years ago. The show was about a story of a stay-at-home dad and a working mom. This broke the traditional belief that women should be at home taking are of the family while men should be out working and earning money. From this, we can see that the society is making an effort to advocate gender equality.
However, I do not quite agree with your point that statistics does not have much significance. The fact that statistics shows that more percentage of women are entering the workforce means that the role of women has changed to just being a housewife to be more involved in the workforce and become a career woman.
That's all for now. Until next time.
WenHan.