Gender Equality

Ever since the beginning of history, there is a basic division of gender attributes that are assigned to males and females in the society, which people mostly regard to the ideal of masculinity and femininity in all aspects of sex and gender, there exists individuals that are transgender or genderqueer. Although mainly, there consists of only two core gender, male and female, which is commonly named as men and women. There are also other types of genders such as queer and bisexual. Men and women have had different roles in the community. Under modern civilization and certain conditions, the differences are slowly merging into one. Nevertheless, there still are differences between these two genders due to the genetic inheritance and socio-demographic components. However, women are believed to be treated less equally compared to the men in society due to their traditional role in the home. This statement is proved by the society itself. As for example, discrimination are landed upon those women in traditional societies in Africa who worked and are seen to be neglecting their families. Whereas in Afghanistan, women are only allowed to be a full-time housewife, which she is only limited to do household jobs at home and nothing else. Also, due to stereotyping, men are forced to work and support the family or else they will be treated as a useless being in the society, given their abilities that they could do more compared to women due to the naturally given physical abilities. To prevent gender discrimination and stereotyping, we believed that the governments of every country tried to promote gender equality amongst the community so that both men and women can be treated more equally. Campaigns, advertisements, and even books are written to promote gender equality. However, it turns out that gender inequality happens frequently in workplaces compared to other places and scopes, and therefore it should be focused on. (315)

In older times, women are not allowed to be working at places other than home because of traditional teachings. However, as women are provided with easier jobs and are started to be hired because of certain market conditions that requires the workforce of the women, the workplace community starts to grow and women starts occupying jobs in large numbers since the 1960s. Ever since then, job segregation begun insignificantly and slowly based onto the amount of femininity or masculinity that is required to associate with the job. Such as, for example, that women suits jobs that does not require huge amount of physical abilities, mainly service-based jobs such as nurse and secretaries, and men are to be work as architects and bus drivers that requires certain amount of strength to do so, while risking themselves in dangerous conditions. Ever since then job segregation has been planted as a mindset into the community. The society always thought that men possesses different physical, emotional, and mental capabilities when it is compared to women, which causes the horizontal segregation. Whereas with vertical segregation, occupational sex segregation occurs when certain occupation requires certain amount of power, authority, income and prestige that is needed for the job, keeping women away from gaining such a job. These segregations sums up causing problem, which the pay gap is. A pay gap exists when one group of workers receives less pay than another when both of the group actually provides the same amount of contribution in a work. Historically, it is said that women are paid less compared to men, and based on the census data, this is true, given that it was a few years back where the estimated gender pay gap between men and women hits up to 7% for federal jobs. There are studies that consistently found unexplainable pay differences between men and women that have the same occupation. Still, there are people who criticized about these studies, saying that it was insufficiently controlled, and say that men and women will get the same amount of pay provided that they have the same education level and experience in their jobs. Despite this criticisms, pay gaps actually occurs only when there happens to be discrimination in recruitment. As for example, companies and recruitment managers that discriminate others of their genders, mostly women as the target, tends to reply less to identical resumes that are sent by women than men, However, it is a relieve that in the year 2016, less of these cases tends to happened and the pay gap has been lowered to an amount of 2%.  (432)