Amy Calonge

Professor Schwartz

English 170

29 September 2022

Women’s Roles in Society

As one grows up they start forming a belief system based on what they observe and are taught about the world around them. Due to the multiple different situations an individual can go through in a lifetime, everyone can have different beliefs and opinions. One of the first things people start to observe as kids are the people around them, how they act and chose to present themselves, helping us form opinions. These opinions can lead to stereotypes, a generalized belief about a particular group of people, such as the one surrounding gender roles. These gender stereotypes are being fought against now and are finally starting to show evident results. The images provided help represent the biased towards gender role stereotypes while the survey based articles prove them wrong.

Standard gender role stereotypes state that a women’s role in society is to stay at home in order to take care of the household and kids, while they wait for their husbands to arrive. The images provided show a variety of booklets, articles, and manuals which were given out to people around the 1950s. These were some of the many advertisements which were used to reflect the respected household hierarchy at the time (“An Actual 1955”). The top image was published by Housekeeping Monthly which was run by Herbert Raymond Mayes, a man, at the time. Considering 1950s stereotypes it is likely that most if not all publishing boards were run by men at the time, creating a biased. Making these source unreliable, a biased sample.

Gender stereotypes depict women as being less educated and capable in the workplace when compared to men, leading to discrimination. In recent times women have been starting to receive equal treatment in the industry. In the article Beyond the glass ceiling: Why businesses need women at the top it shows how much this change has benefited businesses. The probability of increased profitability and productivity is approximately 63 percent and then over two thirds of the companies reviewed reported having between a 5 to 20 percent profit increase (Sections 6 and 7). The data used for this article was required from UNESCO and ILOSTAT. UNESCO is known as an official and trusted source of internationally-comparable data on education, science, culture and communication. ILO is a specialized agency of the United Nations known as the world’s leading source of labor statistics. This article can be considered reliable because everything stated in the article is backed up by reliable data, both companies use multiple quality assurance processes in order to provide optimal date (“UIS FAQ” and “Data Collection”).

Many believe that gender stereotypes should be maintained due to the negative affects it might have on the children. Stating that if women leave the home in order to work the children will feel neglected, which can lead to future problematic behavior. The article Are Stay-At-Home Moms Better For Our Kids Than Working Moms? is written by Nicole Cuttita, a licensed mental health counselor. In this article Cuttita shows the reader the affects on children based on if their mothers work outside the home. The article is based on a recent Harvard research study, which collected its data from two cross-national social surveys of more than 100,000 men and women from 29 different countries (par. 11). Harvard research data can be considered reliable due to all the precautions taken by the college. The institution requires any human or animal data collection to be preapproved by their board as well as require data collectors to present all required and requested documentation to disprove faulty data collection, a convenience, voluntary or biased sample . Due to Harvard’s strict precautions a confounding variable shouldn’t be present in the experiment, no problems in the data should occur (“Research Data Management”). Results state that children from working mothers are equally as happy as those whom have stay-at-home mothers. It even states that children can benefit from having working moms since it helps provide them with a role model. Children from working moms tend to be better educated; daughters are more likely to be employed, more advanced in their career, and have a higher salary while their sons tend to spend more time caring for their families (par. 11).

Women throughout history have been considered to be less educated and capable of success in a work environment when compared to a man. These thoughts are finally being disproven due to the sacrifices of those who came before us, giving the women of today the chance to shine. The reliability of the given sources help demonstrate why women or any other minority group shouldn’t be discriminated against based on something they can’t control.

 

 

 

Work Cited

An Actual 1955 Good Housekeeping Article from Jim Barricks Alcohol-Free Recipes, https://barricks.com/RecipePage/GoodHousekeeping.html.

“Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Why Businesses Need Women at the Top.” Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Why Businesses Need Women at the Top – InfoStories, International Labour Organization , Sept. 2019, https://www.ilo.org/infostories/en-GB/Stories/Employment/beyond-the-glass-ceiling#introduction.

Cuttita, Nicole. “Are Stay-at-Home Moms Better for Our Kids than Working Moms? – New York Behavioral Health.” New York Behavioral Health – NYC Therapists & Psychologists, New York Behavioral Health Team, 8 Feb. 2022, https://www.newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/are-stay-at-home-moms-better-for-our-kids-than-working-moms.

Data Collection and Production, ILOSTAT, https://ilostat.ilo.org/about/data-collection-and-production/.

“Research Data Management @Harvard.” Data Lifestyle, Harvard, https://researchdatamanagement.harvard.edu/getting-started.

“UIS FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS.” EDUCATION STATISTICS, UNESCO, http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/education-statistics-faq-en.pdf.