Gender Stratification
Gender stratification is a problem everyone will face eventually, no matter who you are or how it affects you. You may eventually be placed in a gender that receives the benefits or the gender that is being oppressed. This site is to help raise awareness about the problems of gender stratification and hopefully bring about a change to make this world better. It will also inform everyone about what gender stratification is, some of the influences it has and how it is seen. Maybe you have been experiencing it this entire time and you didn't even know it. Today is a great day to build your knowledge and start bringing about change.
First off, in order to better understand this problem, here is a definition of gender stratification. Gender Stratification is "the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and privilege between men and women" (Macionis 119). Gender in particular is "the personal traits and social positions that members of a society attach to being female or male" (Macionis 119). Right now, our country has deemed men to be superior to women in what we call a patriarchal society. This creates many biased, sexist and racist kinds of thinking. One type of thinking we often hear and think about with gender stratification is sexism or "the belief that one sex is innately superior to the other" (Macionis 119). This kind of mentality is a good reason why women can not move forward in life. It is why we can not earn the same amount of pay for equal work. It is why our "mommy tax" is so much higher. In order to strive for equality, we must eliminate this gender stratification. This site is designed to simply raise consciousness about this problem. This site is also a way to express the injustice of gender stratification.
How we think about gender...
We often learn who we are and our gender through socialization. Socialization is the interactions we have with people and that results in how we are put into our social groups. “Thus, socialization teaches us the cultural norms, values, and skills necessary to survive in society” (Lorber 119).
Gender is routine for us. “Talking about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water” (Lorber 119). Gender is taken for granted and we often make generalizations about it. Some may feel it is what we are born with, when in fact it is created and re-created everyday (Lorber 119). Gender is something we “do”, not what we were born into (Shaw and Lee 126). “gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly “doing gender” (Lorber 120). We are uncomfortable when we can’t place someone in a certain gender (Lorber 120).
Since we learn gender from the time that we are born to now, we often learn how to place people within a gender as well. Like I mentioned earlier, we are uncomfortable when people don’t fit a gender. That is why when women start to show independence, assertiveness, and a sense of control, they are often frowned upon in the social world because they are portraying masculine characteristics. We often label them. Now, think of a woman that you may look down upon because she portrays these qualities. I’m sure if you think about this a little more, you will find many men have these same attributes, but don’t catch as much criticism for it. That is because they actually fall into the norm. That is how we constructed their gender. Our society is very patriarchal like I had mentioned earlier. We value masculine traits much more highly than feminine traits. We see women as passive, dependent, and weak and we don’t value these traits in our society. This is the root of gender stratification. By thinking, acting and “doing” gender this way, we are ultimately enforcing gender stratification. Not many people think about gender this way. So before you go judgmental about someone’s attributes, think about what kind of norm or thinking you are enforcing first.
