Gender Inequality

I worked for a unit in the United States Marin Corps in 2004-2005 as linguist and culture advisor in Iraq, called “Recon Force” and our administrator was a female captain. She was very active and hard worker, but many personal in the unit looked at her presence in that unit as an unusual, and they gave her hard time. I had conversation with many of those personal to ask them the reason behind their behavior toward that captain, the response was “this unit is aggressive unit for special tasks and women has no place at this unit.”

Gender inequality refers to the deference between individuals due to their gender. Gender composes both socially through social interactions as well as biologically through hormonal differences. Gender inequality stems, mostly, from social role in the society.

 During hunting and gathering era, men went out for hunting and women stayed home to take care of anything else in the house. The men task was always associated with kind of risks because of the dangerous animals that might confront, but the women jobs were safer because they were away from dangerous risks. Another task was dedicated to men was protecting it is house if there were attack from outsiders by fighting outsiders. The women were upbringing kids more gently because they were attached to the kids more than men.

These physical-grounded tasks gave men upper hand in other aspects of the life, which made women think they are in the protection of the men and they obligated to follow men’s orders. There is two important points I would like to mention; first the physical capability of men is always admired by women even if it makes men have upper hand. If the men are more powerful physically, the women feel safer. Second, the desire for independency makes people to eliminate the need of others and women were always, in the past, felt that they need men’s presence and men took pride of that.

With evolutions of life, women start to involve in every aspect of life, this involvement was challenging for men whom are about to lose upper hand positions. Men continued to fight back to bring back that position by making assumptions about women; men are better drivers, men are smarter, women are good in certain jobs, and many others. Gender inequality come to surface more at this point by not letting women having certain jobs “stay in your lane.”

There are many things in current day are men’s favor; for example names in the United States and other countries are man oriented. When someone talks about, for example, babysitter, or nurse women’s image come to our mind, but when we talk about commander or solder image of men come to our mind. In many occasions women were able to play many rolls that were dedicated for men throughout history, such as the French defense minister Michele Alliot-Marie 2002-2007. However, the gender inequality will continue but it will be different according to careers, cultures, and countries.