Theories Of Gender Discrimination

The twenty-first century has brought justice to many social injustices that plague our world. Among these are the injustices seen every day in gender discrimination. The late 1800’s saw the first signs of change for the status of women with the Women’s Suffrage Movement; women had no say in national politics and their opinions were unheard because they did not have any rights. This movement was the first step to change in the battle for equality lasting over 100 years. Since then women have slowly gained more rights, however there is still a long way to go in order to fully change the gender stereotypes and treatment of women. Some of the issues in gender discrimination seen today include unfair payment in the work world and hindered opportunities …show more content…
One of the main elements of this theory is the presence of ingroup bias; it is said that this ingroup bias supports a positive self-concept, feeds favoritism, and fosters outgroup disliking. People often identify their positive self-image with the self-image of their ingroup (DiDonato & others, 2011). So when our ingroup has been successful we often feel a sense of pride, and our identity for our ingroup is strengthened. For this reason men and women are often segregated because the feeling of pride and ingroup identity is strengthened when a fellow man or woman achieves success. Favoritism is also born from ingroup bias, especially when the ingroup is lower on the hierarchical scale (Ellemers et al., 1997: Mullen et al., 1992). The presence of women in the business world is a fraction compared to the presence of men. In a theoretical office space of 100 people with a presence of only 20 women compared to 80 men, the 20 women in the office are going to have a stronger affiliation and favoritism towards their fellow women as a result of them being outnumbered and having a stereotypical lower status than men. On the other side of the coin, the men that largely outnumber the women are going to have favoritism toward each other and in some cases exclude and treat the women …show more content…
By harnessing cross-group friendships, ingroups have the tendency to take on the perspective of the outgroup and become more intimate with them. This involvement and adoption of different perspectives other than one’s own yields extremely improved ingroup attitudes (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008). Pettigrew and Tropp theorized that intergroup contact helps individuals grow and self-expand in a way that allows them to “extend their sense of self to include the outgroup” (2008). Implementing the intergroup contact hypothesis has the potential of making men better understand and even empathize with the struggles that women go through as a minority in male dominant fields. Harnessing empathy can help men to connect better with women and accept them more than they would if there was no emotional connection on a basis of