Research Paper

Female Discrimination in Education

Many people today, don’t feel that discrimination will be a problem for them as they graduate from college and enter the real world of work. Many assume that discrimination is a thing of the past and it will be something that they will not have to endure. They could not be more wrong. Discrimination is still a very big part of why women are receiving lower wages than men and slow advancement within their fields of work, especially academia, medicine, and law. People may not see this as discrimination and see it as “this is how it is supposed to be”. Men are just naturally more successful and intellectual than women. This is what we call a gender schema. A gender schema is how you perceive someone based on their gender. Gender is the sole factor that hinders potentially successful women from breaking that “glass ceiling”.

Before I conducted my research, I, along with many, assumed that while discrimination may exist, no matter how subtle, it really wasn’t a big issue, and I as a female entering the male dominated field of science, would have no problem rising to the top and shattering this so called glass ceiling. The more I read articles and interviewed experts in this matter, I realized that discrimination is so powerful that it actually causes many women to leave male dominated fields. According to Virginia Valian, many young women enter the fields of science, math, medicine, engineering, and law, thinking that they will not have to face such discrimination, but end up leaving those fields for something more “feminine” if you will, because they are simply not accepted and criticized for their work. In such a futuristic society, I find in very interesting that we still accept men as the generic human being, and assume they are the only ones who deserve to be successful. In further researched conducted by Valian, she showed graphs depicted the difference of wages between men and women in the same fields post PhD, as well as the percentage of men and women in that particular field PhD. While men and women usually start out at the same salary 1-5 years post PhD, there is a drastic increase between the pay for men and women 6-10 years post PhD. It also showed the percentages of men and women in the same fields. One example was of men and women as assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors. The graphs showed that men’s rates of advancement were much more than that of women. Most women did not become associate or full professors anywhere from 6-29 years post PhD, whereas men would be promoted between 6-15 years post PhD. These graphs were similar to graphs depicting the same information in law and medicine.

Why is it that there are different rates of advancement for men and women even though their work is the same? And/or the women could be dominant intellectually? Our society today overvalues and overrates men’s work, while they undervalue and underrate women’s work. It’s not as simple as promoting the person who does better than the other, it’s a matter or promoting the individual whom society has deemed as the most likely to succeed, and that too often is the male. This is where gender schemas come into play and is exactly why gender causes a hindrance of the advancement of females in the work place.

There are many excuses made against why women experience discrimination. One is that women can’t focus just on their career because they have children at home and those children take away from their focus at work. So why is it that woman who don’t have children aren’t advancing either. Non-legitimate argument. Others claim that women do not advance because they refuse to do things that need to be done in order to advance. For example, if traveling is required to complete a job or advance that that is what needs to be done, obviously. However, in most cases the women who want to travel are not allowed to and a man is brought in to replace them with the claim that they refused to travel. It is very confusing and backwards and not fair towards women.

However there are exceptions to this rule or men being the dominant human being. For example take Madame Marie Curie, the founder of radium and plutonium. Or Amelia Earhart. These were women who went against societies standards of how a lady should act and what a lady should do and they showed men that they were just as capable of achieving success in male dominated fields. A very famous study conducted at MIT, by an organized group of female professors, shows that if women can come together for a common purpose things can change. In this study the 22 female professors, which was the total number of all female professors in the six departments of the school, compared to that of 252 men for those same six departments, became dissatisfied and conducted a poll among those female professors. These professors came together and addressed the problems they were currently facing. They decided to write a letter to the dean, and this is how it started.

“This proposal has been developed by the tenured women faculty in the School of Science. It speaks to our serious concerns about the small number of women professors at MIT, and about the status and treatment of the women who are here. We believe that unequal treatment of women faculty impairs their ability to perform as educators, leaders in research, and models for women students…”

The letter went on to outline the discrepancies the women had with the current situation at MIT. After doing quick research the dean realized that this was a serious issue and quickly made accommodations for those women. This study shows that even though women can be and are treated as subordinate it is not impossible for them to come together with a common goal and bring about change.

Gender schemas take place not only in the work force but also in the household. Because women are seen as subordinate, males feel that women need to cater to them. In the article Maid to Order by Barbara Ehrenreich women on average did 26.7 hours of house work per week, compared to 9.7 hours oh housework their male counterparts had done. Is this fair? Are women only good for housework because of our “nimble fingers”? Are we not capable of doing other things, and that said are we supposed to take the brunt of the work and let men get away with not helping out? According to author Pat Mainardi author men say one thing and quite often mean another. For example if your spouse were to say “We have different standards, and why should I have to work to your standards? That’s unfair.” Translation: You might as well do all the housework yourself since I will just complain or do a poor job and you’ll just end up doing it yourself anyways. Another common example, “I hate it more than you. You don’t mind it so much.” It’s degrading for someone of my intelligence to do such crap work, but for you it’s no big deal. When did this happen? When did women all of a sudden be expected to do everything in the household? Our friends, family, and neighbors expect us women to take care of the household responsibilities which is completely unfair. After leaving your house, which at the time was a sty, you wouldn’t hear them say HE is a lousy housekeeper, no it falls on the women.

Women are expected to do so much without any rewards. They get lower salaries and their advancement rates are much lower than that of men. We are expected to go to work, take care of the cooking and cleaning at home, as well as the kids if there are any. And to top it all off we are expected to do it without any help, blindfolded, running backwards in high heels. Why is there no pressure placed on men? Being the generic human being, men want to make sure it stays that way and so their masculinity isn’t threatened. Our patriarchical system should be changed to the extent that not only makes women and men equal, but offers them the same opportunities on all levels as men.