Gender Inequality Essay

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Intersectionality is describing the system of inequality people experienced due to their intersecting statuses including race, class, gender, sexuality and so on. The discriminations or advantages they face are the result of the mixture of their multiple statuses. For example, for a black woman, her gender is female and her race is African American, so she experiences discrimination for being black and female simultaneously. For African Americans, they face social stratification, and therefore they experience discrimination regularly. In Joe Feagin’s paper “The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places,” he interviewed a group of black middle-class people about their experiences of discrimination. An African …show more content…
In Irene Padavic and Barbara Reskin’s paper “Gender Differences in Moving Up and Taking Charge,” it talks about the different treatments women received in work place. In firms, even though men and women both have the same position that give them the power to make decisions, men are always the one who is making the decision, and women is just their “glorified secretaries” (Padavic 2002). Based on the social stratification, women are considered inferior than men, so they are thought to have less ability and less intelligence to make the right decision. At the same time, they experience the system of inequality of having no symbolic rewards of being trust with the capability to make important decisions. The employer made the decision based on the stereotype of women being less capable. Another example is that female coal workers cannot get promotions to a higher position, because they were considered a “weaker sex”; they can become mother one day, so they are considered “soften” in many cases (Padavic 2002). The stereotype of women being weak and lack of leadership causes problem for women to move up the promotion ladder. It comes from the same idea that women have lower position than men in the social stratification, and women are not granted with the symbolic rewards of trusting their capability in leadership. Because of the stereotype of female, women still have lower status than men in the society right

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