Gender in the United States

Hello All,
 I’ve not been updating this blog as much as I intended, primarily because school, work, and Center commitments have consumed me, but I’ve re-evaulated how I spend what little free time I have and have decided to put more effort into this blog because it helps me as a person get things off my chest and I just think blogging in general is pretty nifty.
 Today, I want to blog about gender, in particular the role women play in our society. I’m taking a Women’s Study class about the international perspective of women and how they are perceived in various cultures (mostly deplorable and I personally can’t believe what has not been done to address these issues, like bride burning and rape in schools), but what about our society? For example, at my place of work, about 90% of management are men and the majority of women are working in customer service or cashiers. It is almost impossible for any woman to obtain a job on the sales floor or in upper management. For instance, I have been trying to move to the sales floor for the majority of the two years I’ve worked at Lowes Home Improvement. I have taken the initiative to get educated on products in a number of departments. I’ve gotten power equipment certified (yes, watch out for me on the forklift), have near perfect attendance, volunteer to work on the floor for experience, sell those bogus extended protection plans, help customers when they approach me, yet they refuse to move me to the floor and have given no reason at all. In fact, they told me all the time that I would be moved to the hardware department and even outside lawn and garden, but I’ve still not after all of my hard work and ambitious attitude. So why is it that as a woman, I can’t move to the sales floor? The answer I just received a little over a week ago: ‘You need to have great selling skills.’ Well, how can I prove that if I’m not on the floor? It’s a lost-lose situation in that I they should have told me a year ago when I did all of these tests that I would never be moved to the floor because of the simple fact that I am a woman, I am not assertive nor want to rip people off with their terrible gimmicks, and I am a student so my availability is not as open as someone who doesn’t go to school. It’s discrimination and it happens here all the time even after President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Act that amends to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that women can take longer than the initial 180 days to appeal a pay discrimination. Think about it: if you, as a woman in particular, find out seven months down the road that you were doing the same work as a your male counterpart, you could do absolutely nothing about it until early 2009. How terrible is that? And how much more terrible is it that nearly every Republican voted it down because they think unnecessary lawsuits will come out of it? Well…duh. If I found out that a male cashier was making two dollars more per hour than me and we were on the same level, you’d better believe I’d sue Lowes for discrimination.
 Another aspect of gender is the role in which women place themselves in. I’m not going to mention particular names because this story relates to numerous girl friends I have, but it seems that my circle of friends want nothing more than to get married and find “the one.” Why? Now I’m not trying to say that finding a suitable companion is bad because it’s not and I’d love for nothing more than to [eventually] get married myself and raise a family, but we are young. My friends are young. Why are you going to bog yourself down with unnecessary stress and anguish over a boyfriend and how he treats you badly or how you can’t manage school, work, and relationship issues? I sometimes ask my girl friends why they are in school if they have no passion about something. I still haven’t gotten an answer…
 Is this just the way society functions? Are we indoctrinated at a young age to think that we as women need a man in our lives to fulfill us, to make us happy? I’m going to have to take a gander at this question and say yes. Not until the early twentieth century were women even allowed to vote, and many states (including my own) were forced to comply with this because it was a federal amendment to the Constitution. If the Nineteenth Amendment had not been passed, would the less progressive states still not allow women to vote? What about the obvious pay discrimination we see between men and women. A blog that I follow posted the numbers on what women make compared to men. In it, the AFL-CIO reported that a woman makes $.78 for every $1 a man makes. To make things worse, educated women are also highly discriminated against. In fact, a woman with a bachelor’s degree earns over her lifetime $713,000 less than her male counterpart. How did Americans just introduce the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act a year ago when we knew these statistics, and even, how can conservative members of the Senate, including Sen. Dick Lugar, vote AGAINST an amendment that sets no time limit for a woman to sue for the money that she is owed!?
 I will leave my frustrations and own analysis at that, but I’d love to hear thoughts of your own. Feel free to leave comments.
Also, I will post the numbers put out by the Women’s Policy Research below.
I’m slowly turning into a feminist…

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