SEXISM

06 April 2010 00:29

Sexism.  

Society has progressed into the twenty-first century improving and self-assessing itself constantly. The concept of “what I conquer is mine” is no more and order has slowly found itself in the world. The more economic developed countries have found order first and subsequently showed the world how to live, or rather suggested an alternate way to live. Unfortunately at times, these alternate ways of living are enforced rather than adopted and this has cause in a loss of culture within history.  

One concept that has caught my eye most recently is equality between men and woman. These two genders hold different roles in society and recently this used to be appreciated from both corners. However recently, in the pass decade or so, society has tried to bring together man and woman to be exactly equal in that when a woman has a “powerful” job, somewhere male dominated, she is seen as the first woman to do so and people see it as an amazing achievement to the oppressed woman around the world. In addition, the amount of female managers is much less in offices than men, is this sexism? No.  

These statistics always irritate me in there existence alone. Every time the underdog wins, it is widely noted and commented on. But the fact that people comment on the rising numbers of women in top positions is implying that woman are an underdog. For example, when Oprah Winfrey became the first black female billionaire, the press went wild but merely saying that look at this underdog who is black and female is racist and sexist in itself but is paraded as applauding equality in the world. Another example is Halle Berry being the first black female to win an oscar award and most recently Kathryn Bigelow was the first female director to win the Best Director award – well best directress I suppose.  

The fact that we do have Best Actor and Best Actress awards separately shows in itself that men and women cannot even compete in the same level which is sexist and this is seen across the board and not just film awards but in sport and job titles such as waiter and waitress. What infuriates me the most is that the woman sees the man as a bench mark to peak of social existence i.e the woman will always try to go and do what the man does but will never start her own trail or break new heights that man has not achieved. Instead, the woman will try to be the first in what man has already done. Now of course this is no way an insult to woman but rather to men who look down to woman and women who try to equal men.  

Recently the tables for best companies to work for were released and Nandos high-street restaurant won by some points. Strangely, one of the indices that measured whether the company was good or not was the ratio of woman to man and if this ratio was greater than one, the company held a high rank in the league table. Now to me, this is the prime example of how we think we are doing good but doing something entirely the antithesis. A company is not better if more woman are working there but nor is a company better if it has more men working there. The fact this ratio exists shows that racism and sexism still exists so when you hear people say “look how society has evolved” – they are just ignorant.  

Extracted from yourtwocents.co.uk, 29th March, 2010