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Caroline Mendez

PhD. Dustin Morris

English 110

20 September 2020

Why should gender discrimination be defined as a social problem?

Although viewers might assume gender discrimination is not a topic or

problem to solve in our society, I believe it is indeed something we all need to

worry about, because our society is being blind to all the problems and injustice

that is put upon our women, and is also making our future generations careless

about equal rights.

“I would like to be able to take my pocket constitution and say that the

equal citizenship stature of men and women is a fundamental tenet of our

society”, said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an interview to The Aspen Institute

in 2017 (The Aspen Institute Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Equal Rights

Amendment). Justice Ginsburg was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of

the United States, and advocate for the passage of the ERA (Equal Rights

Amendment), which on January 15, 2020, was passed by the 38 th state (Virginia)

needed for it to be a step closer to ratification. This amendment could be a

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steppingstone for our society as a country because even though we have a

fourteenth amendment which “guarantees all citizens equal protection of the

laws” (History.com Editors 14th Amendment) women, the LGBTQ+ community,

and all other gender groups that are not men are still being denied their rights

and suppressed from their power in employment, education, households, and

mostly all everyday life activities, which up to this point seems unfair because we

always refer to the United States as the “land of the dreams” when is nothing like

that because we have not fought for what is right to make this the land of our

dreams, and to do that we have to accept that our society is broken and infected

with patriarchism and mostly manly thoughts.

If we keep thinking about what is wrong with our society and why is there

so much problem with the discrimination we should take a look to our

constitution, the body of fundamental principles that have been shaped along

centuries only by man, with no women involved that could advocate for the

wellbeing and justice of women. Our constitution is one of the things that need to

be radically changed to make our society conscious of gender discrimination,

because as my great grandfather used to say “people do not do what is right if

there is no law telling them to do so”, I think that is very wise because indeed

there are more than dozens of gender discrimination cases in the United States
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and most of them have been taken to the Supreme Court, have they won the

cases? Yes, they have, but is still happening, and will keep on happening if we do

not teach our younger kids up to the elderly what they can do, and how they can

help to stop gender discrimination. There are no laws that are strong enough to

make people listen and understand and act against injustice.

There are many ways to help gender discrimination be eliminated from our

society, the first point is to start from zero and think about what has happened

for us to get to the point, to this year 2020 after nearly being fighting for more

than 40 years for equality between genders; the second one is to “make gender

visible to men” just like Michael Kimmel said in his TED Talk Why Gender Equality

Is Good for Everyone — Men Included (Kimmel Why Gender Equality Is Good for

Everyone — Men Included). In his TED Talk presentation, he mentioned various

points of why feminism is good for men, and how gender equality can help in the

growth of a business, lifestyle, and love life by making men understand how

everything works and get him involved in every moment happening around him

like taking care of children, studies show that if men are involved children are less

likely to suffer any disease, are more likely to be good in their academics and even

in their social lives. Professor Kimmel also made a great point when he said,

“without confronting men’s sense of entitlement, I don’t think we’ll ever

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understand why so many men resist gender inequality” (Kimmel Why Gender

Equality Is Good for Everyone — Men Included) referring to the title of a film in his

book called “Angry White Man”, the name of the film was “A Black Women Stole

my Job”, and this was very curious because the sense of empowerment and

ownership of the men in the book was so much that they thought the job was

theirs when it could be for anyone, and this is what happens in real life, men

always try to take ownership from what is not theirs, only because they have not

being exposed to the real truth of life where nothing is theirs and everything is

taken away from them. This makes our third point, teach men how to see the

world with our eyes, the eyes of thousands of women and the thousands of eyes

from all the other communities and groups that have always been looked down at

and not appreciated as much as men do with themselves.

If we make our society more conscious, open, and understanding of what is

happening around them we will be able to make gender discrimination be

described as a social problem and between all of us fix it. We could stop the

Supreme Court cases from happening, we could make the sexual harassment

victims and events have closure, and finally make our society not harm

themselves only because they are not equal when not being equal is what makes

a society perfect and happy. The government would start making laws that are
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considerate of all genders and fix the wrong ways we had been following for

years.
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Works Cited

1. History.com Editors. “14th Amendment.” History.com, A&E Television

Networks, 9 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/topics/black-history/fourteenth-

amendment.

2. The Aspen Institute, director. Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Equal Rights

Amendment. 5 June 2017, youtu.be/h-y4nzjxgwA. Accessed 20 Sept. 2020.

3. “Why Gender Equality Is Good for Everyone — Men Included.”

Performance by Michael Kimmel, YouTube.com, TED Talks, 6 Oct. 2016,

youtu.be/7n9IOH0NvyY.