Personal Experiences Of Being A Woman

Being a woman in earlier centuries was unquestionably more difficult from being a woman now. Despite all the laws and rights women have currently, we continue to see inequality amongst the genders. Being a female has shaped many of my life experiences. Growing up I never really noticed gender inequality or the way my parents treated me differently from my brothers. Now I realize my parents expected very different things from all of us, and mainly based upon gender. My brothers were taught at a decent age to change tires, use power tools, and other useful skills. Meanwhile, when I turned the same age I was only taught to cook. I hated to cook even though it was a beneficial skill and wanted to learn everything that my brothers had been taught …show more content…
Men dominate the business world, whether it is in accounting or executive positions. I have been applying for business internships this past year and I have sadly noticed that there is a clear gender preference in the field. Many of the companies I have applied for have a plethora of men working for them, have men doing the interviews, and almost all the applicants for the internships are men. I recently had an interview with Wells Fargo, and when I walked in I felt extremely uncomfortable. Every person in the department was a man, and the interviewer even asked me “as a woman do you feel you can bring a new perspective to the company?”. He made it seem like they have no women working for the company and the question itself was very bias. For the first I time, I felt very unequal to men. We can link this back to Heidi Hartmann’s argument that “ before capitalism, a patriarchal system was established in which men controlled the labor of women and children” and “in doing so men learned the techniques of hierarchical organization and control” (138). I agree with her that the system in place before capitalism made this inequality in jobs grow into a social norm we see today with men being in control in the business world. I had never experienced anything like that before, but it made me realize that the sex segregation in jobs is all because “male workers have played and continue to play a crucial role in maintain sexual divisions in the labor process” (Hartmann 139). The interviewer called me not more than three hours later to say I unfortunately was not getting the job due to “lack of experience in financials”. I feel as if the only reason they did not hire me was because there was a preference for men, since if he were to look on my resume he would see that I had an internship before in a financial department. But this experience did not put me down, it helped want to