Throughout the course of my life I have seen several movements, or sifts in society take place.
I realize that I am not that old, but from birth until now, I have seen many changes that I don’t think I ever anticpated
I know the question on everyone’s mind is how old I am, I will be 23 in March.
Throughout those 23 years and before, the debate of whether men and women are the same, has been hashed and rehashed.
As I have mentioned before, I grew up in a conservative home where my dad worked and my mom stayed home to care for their brute.
I have four sisters and one brother, me and my sisters were not raised or encouraged to be “girly.”
We all played sports, my oldest sister even played professional softball.
It did not occur to me, until I was around 10, that people thought me and my sisters were good at sports, at least for being girls.
But the other thing that did not occur to me, was to compare my abilities to the boys.
We were good, and honestly, I can say this applies more to my sisters, because of the time that was put into working on those skills.
I have found that over time, we as a society have focused too much on men and women being 100% equal as defined by numbers. We no longer celebrate difference between them because heaven forbid they exist.
In an article for the HuffPost, the author claims inequality within politics. She points out that the house consists of 80.6% men and 19.4% women and the Senate is 80% men and 20% women. (Bahadur, 2015)
When you look at those numbers, it is easy to think we have an inequality crisis on our hands.
When I considered the number of women who ran for a verity of offices in 2016, numbers tell a different story.
In 2016, 212 women ran for a variety of offices, 112 won while 100 lost, leaving more than half elected to fill the positions they ran for.( R., n.d.)
The question remains, are there less women in house or the senate because of inequality? Or are there other factors leading to these differences in numbers?
In an article titled “The Confidence Gap,” the authors looks into the effects that lack of confidence in women has had on their presence in the workplace.
"A growing body of evidence shows just how devastating this lack of confidence can be. Success, it turns out, correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence. No wonder that women, despite all our progress, are still woefully underrepresented at the highest levels. All of that is the bad news. The good news is that with work, confidence can be acquired. Which means that the confidence gap, in turn, can be closed"( Shipman, 2015).
Is the inequality we see due to oppression, or is it from the women themselves?
We also know through countless studies that have been conducted, differences do exist between men and women.
Many for years, many have refused to believe in the possibility that men and women could have significant differences that give them greater strength and weaknesses.
While there are, as always, outliers, the research is clear.
Men’s and women’s brains differs, giving them a leg up in some areas and not in others.
There have been several studies done using animals to demonstrate the differences between men and women.
34 male and female monkeys were given toys to play with. The male monkeys gravitated toward the toys with wheels, while the female monkeys preferred the plush toys. (DuBois,n.d.)
In this same article is states,
Halpern (past president of the American Psychological Association) and others have cataloged plenty of human behavioral differences. “These findings have all been replicated,” she says. Women excel in several measures of verbal ability — pretty much all of them, except for verbal analogies. Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They outperform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They’re more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory. Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two- or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects and at aiming projectiles (DuBois, n.d.).
When we refuse to acknowledge the differences, we are saying that one set of traits is better than the other.
Being a woman, I love that I am different from men.
We are not in opposition to each other, but complement each other.
Sources:
R. (n.d.). Election 2016: List of Women Candidates for U.S. Congress and Statewide Elected Executive Office. Retrieved October 14, 2017, from http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/election-2016-women-candidates-us-congress-and-statewide-elected-executive
Bahadur, N. (2015, September 10). 7 Things To Know If You Think Women Are Equal To Men. Retrieved October 15, 2017, from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/7-facts-that-show-women-still-arent-equal_us_55db334be4b08cd3359c8e5a
Shipman, K. K. (2015, August 26). The Confidence Gap. Retrieved October 15, 2017, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/
DuBois, B. G. (n.d.). How men's and women's brains are different. Retrieved October 15, 2017, from https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html