Gender equality

GENDER EQUALITY      [pic 1][pic 2]

    I’m going to talk about the women’s place in our society. This subject is part of the notion of idea of progress, progress is a breakthrough, an evolution toward a satisfactory result. We know that women have always played a role inferior to men in our society, mainly due to stereotypes such as the woman in the kitchen, to the household or even to caring for children while the man works hard all day long.

We can then ask ourselves: How have women’s role evolved over the last few decades?

In order to deal with this topic and to answer this question we are going to study three current view documents as well as a personal document, the first one is about "gender equality: why women are still held back" the second is "how women entrepreneurs are changing the world" the third is a video recording that is named " US working mothers struggle daily to balance family and career” and the last one is Emma Watson’s speech.

I - To begin the first document is “Gender equality: Why women are still held back” adapted from The Guardian written in December 2013. It’s an article talking about gender inequalities. It shows how, in our society, women are disadvantaged. It explains in particular the difficulties at work that they have to face off.

Actually, in the UK, they represent 55% of university graduates and 42% of the workforce. That’s not negligible. But that doesn’t mean that they have the same place as men in our society. The main problem is on the work subject. There is a lot of bad things in this world. The first one is the huge pay gap between men and women. They can have the same job in the same company and the same seniority, they maybe will be 15 to 30% less pay than a man. It con be explained by the recognition of the work. The problem of the document is that “Income inequality has risen faster in the UK than any other European country” l. 9-10. This fact is very contradictory because 2,4 million women are in search of a job. The stereotypes are facts that make those inequalities growing up. It reinforces the social status and gender hierarchies. It shows what women are able or not to do. It says that men have more qualities in the leadership than women. Even though women have fought for their rights over the last century and managed to assert themselves on several grounds, they are far from being recognized as equal to men. In spite of what we have just seen, some women still manage to climb the social ladder.

II - The second text is entitled “how women entrepreneurs are changing the world” it was written the 10 June 2011 in “USA today” it shows that women are able to achieve the same career as men like Karen Quintos , Leila Velez and Katherine Sampson.

At the beginning of the text the journalist explain her conclusion after going at the second annual Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network global conference here, she say that she met many women who are becoming economic powerhouses internationally, often overcoming huge obstacles and discrimination. After she started the interview of the first one, Karen Quintos. She is Dell chief marketing officer, she tells how she had discover the amazing opportunity around women and technology at emerging market with no women entrepreneur.

The second woman is Leila. She is also a woman who started at the bottom of the social ladder. She says she started at Mac Donalds while living in a favela, after that she became rich thanks to her 11 hair salons because she knew there was potential in a medium where the women with curly hair of a poor environment was nothing specific to them.

The third woman is Katherine Sampson with her life shows us once again that she was leaving very far but she also managed to have 4 restaurants to her.

The journalist conclude with the perfect sentences: “these women prove to all of us that women can overcome great obstacles to build great business”. Thanks to this text we know that women can do it by themselves and have the same status as a man we go then or they can then bind work and private life even if society is not adapted.

III- The third document is “US working mothers struggle daily to balance family and career”. A growing number of mothers in the United States are joining the workforce, from fewer than 50 percent in the 1970s to close to 75 percent today. And while U.S. labor policies in support of working mothers have come a long way, analysts say they have not caught up to the realities of women who struggle daily to balance family and career.

Alison Barnes is getting her kids fed and ready for school as she gets ready to leave for her job.This busy mother of three says is trying hard to juggle the needs of her family with her work.That position gives her some flexibility in her job. She’s been able to take long maternity leaves and work just four days a week. Barnes is among the most fortunate women who have those options available to them, says Vicky Shavuot (director of work & family programs at the national partnership for women and families in Washington). She is the director of work and family programs at the National Partnership for Women and Families in Washington. Shavuot says that the « American women don’t have access to high quality childcare, they don’t have access to sick days and they certainly don’t have access to paid parental leave or paid leave to take care of an ill family member » but Shavuot hope  that we implement a national paid family and medical leave insurance program to bring ourselves up to the level of the rest of the world.

No matter what their job, working mothers want what all caring parents want: a society that recognizes the value of happy, healthy children.

IV – I’ve chosen a speech from Emma Watson.  On 21 September 2014, 24-year-old British actress Emma Watson was the UN women ambassador the launching of the campaign called “HeForShe”. She makes a brief speech at the UN Assembly in New York, calling men to care about the issue of gender equality and to advocate for women's rights explicitly calls on men: it is time to put an end to gender inequalities - and men are invited to join this political and daily struggle. The famous British actress stresses the benefits of an egalitarian and heterogeneous society for both sexes: men have the right to assert their differences from the traditional norms of virility, which are not only sexist but also trying for the men themselves.

...