Analysis Of Patriarchy And Gender Inequality

Patriarchy and Gender Inequality: A cross cultural analysis Patriarchy is a system where father (or another male member of the family) is the leader of the household and this leadership role is descended through the male line (Hunnicut, 2009; Tracy, 2007). According to Tracy (2007), patriarchy leads to many current societal problems as it inherently promotes gender inequality, with males dominating the social system and females not receiving equal status/rank. This breeds a multitude of problems such as violence against women, domestic violence (Payne, 2009), female feticide (Srivastava, 2014), infanticide (Oberman, 2002), mental abuse, malnourishment, intimate partner violence (Rennison & Welchans, 2000), son preference (Clark, 2000; Mitra, 2014), dowry, honor killing (Deol, 2014), rape etc. (Madan and Sinha, 2013). According to the WHO (cite, 2013) 35% of women worldwide are the victims of violence either it is sexual or physical. Add more data/numbers. …show more content…
The developed countries (e.g. Spain) exhibit a greater degree of egalitarianism as compared to the poor/developing countries (e.g. India). To cite one example comparing Spain and India, if we consider the representation of women in the national parliaments as a proxy of gender inequality/equality, the table below (based on World Bank data, cite) clearly shows that historically, the percentage of women in national parliaments in Spain has been higher than in India (Table 1). The latest numbers (2015-16) are 40% for Spain and a mere 12% for