Summary: Gender Inequality In The United States

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Poverty occurs when there is lack of basic needs to individuals as their earning are insufficient. Poverty often leads to inequality in a society as classes of people differentiate financially, even in this classes exists gender inequality which makes it difficult for women to earn as much as men and statistics show women being poorer than men in every age which is why people try so hard to solve both inequality and poverty. Robert rector is a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and is known to be an expert in poverty, Rector has written over hundred articles including Understanding Poverty in the United States. Rachel Sheffield is an associate researcher and policy analyst in the DeVoS centre for religion and civil society at The Heritage Foundation. …show more content…
In Rector’s article with Sheffield “Marriage is a Solution to Ending Poverty” published in 2011 by The Heritage Foundation conveys that poverty is caused by the rapid growing number of babies born to unmarried children. The authors appeal to the readers through the statistics of children born out of marriage and how likely they are to become poor .The authors come to the conclusion that marriage is the way to solve poverty as it is stated numerous times in the article. In “Marriage is a Solution to Ending Poverty”, the article by Rector and Sheffield (2011) says that the number of babies born to unmarried mothers is the biggest cause of poverty in America. The author writes that four in ten babies are born to single mothers while it was less than one sixty years ago and cites data from the U.S Census Bureau that in Arkansas, it is 46% higher than the national average for babies in such situations. The article states that contradictory to popular believe of most single mothers being teens, they are only 10% of single mothers and most are to women between 18 and 29. The authors mention the issue arises from lack of good relationship between opposite sexes in low income communities. The article also states that although these communities value marriage as it shows they are middle class society having children occurs before marriage which causes poverty and huge welfare cost to tax payers. The authors write that college educated people wait to have children after marriage and the outcome is a society with a two-caste system and is divide by marriage and education. The article goes on to lack of birth control knowledge in poor communities and although the women love motherhood their pregnancies were unintentional. The authors exemplify Georgia and Kansas as some of the states taking action against the increase in unwed births, the article also cites Kay Hymowitz in his lecture at the foundation which he says having children outside of marriage results in a large number of separate and unequal families. The authors state that it is past due for places like Arkansas to take similar action. The article is written …show more content…
The article is makes conclusions based on data in which they assume would appeal to their target which is young men and women, it tries to convince men to have children after marriage and their children would not be poor and tells women that they won’t be able to raise children without the men in their lives. The authors assume that single mothers are incapable of providing for their children and so if the men are not part of their lives they immediately become “economic disaster”, this is a narrow minded thinking as they did not provide evidence that shows women who are initially financially secure can’t have children outside of marriage and the article also ignores the possibility that the women won’t get help from their family members who are not poor. The article might appeal to men and women who are religious as it might encourage them to get married if they want to have children as they would believe when such conservative organizations tell them their children will not be poor if they get married, what the article doesn’t recognize is that, what if both a man and a woman are poor?, also how the marriage changes their lives. The validity of the evidence presented is also in question as the article makes statements of data which cannot be validated and cites lectures by members of their own

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