My peer, Taylor Martin, conducted research about gender inequality on college campuses. In her most recent post, she discusses the results of her survey. The results she shared with me were that she found that men generally did not feel limited within their major because of their gender. She then asked questions about the relationships between gender and major. For instance, one question asked if people associated engineering with a certain gender, and the response was that 64% of people associated engineering with males. To be quite honest, the results aren’t that shocking.
Gender roles and gender norms are a common part of our society’s everyday lives. Not everyone may be able to acknowledge or notice them but they do, in fact, exist. However, what I did find interesting about Taylor’s research was the fact that men view women to have a superior social experience in that they can go to any party they wanted. I found this fact to be shocking and disturbing because it suggested that men just wanted to hook up with women while partying. This also, as Taylor suggested, contributes to the idea that men see each other as possible competition and “by allowing more men into parties, the less likely a hookup would occur.” Women are hypersexualized by media, affecting and contributing to the gender norm that women should be beautiful to the standards of men.
Women are not treated equally to men which effects the way both men and women see themselves, which connects to my own research paper about business ethics and that gender can effect the effectiveness of the class. I hope to possibly use Taylor’s research and incorporate it into my own about gender inequality that affects classroom participation and major views.
The most challenging part of this research will be to clear any assumptions that I make about the reader’s knowledge. I am very passionate about feminism and promoting solidarity, and not everyone is familiar with those terms so I have to be careful that my language is not only neutral, but also clearly defined.
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