Political ideologies Modern
social conservatives tend to support traditional gender roles.
Right wing political parties often oppose
women's rights and
transgender rights. These
familialist views are often shaped by the religious
fundamentalism, traditional
family values, and
cultural values of their voter base. Modern
social liberals tend to oppose traditional gender roles, especially for women.
Left wing political parties tend to support
women's rights and
transgender rights. In contrast to social conservatives, their views are more influenced by
secularism,
feminism, and
progressivism.
In political office Even though the number of women running for
elected office in the United States has increased over the last decades, they still only make up 20% of U.S. senators, 19.4% of U.S. congressional representatives and 24% of statewide executives. Additionally, many of these political campaigns appear to focus on the aggressiveness of the female candidate which is often still perceived as a masculine trait. Therefore, female candidates are running based on gender-opposing stereotypes because that predicts higher likelihood of success than appearing to be a stereotypical woman. Elections of increasing numbers of women into office serves as a basis for many scholars to claim that voters are not biased towards a candidate's gender. However, it has been shown that female politicians are perceived as only being superior when it comes to handling women's rights and
poverty, whereas male politicians are perceived to be better at dealing with
crime and
foreign affairs. That view lines up with the most common gender stereotypes. It has also been predicted that gender highly matters only for female candidates that have not been politically established. These predictions apply further to established candidates, stating that gender would not be a defining factor for their campaigns or the focal point of media coverage. This has been refuted by multiple scholars, often based on
Hillary Clinton's multiple campaigns for the office of
President of the United States. Additionally, when voters have little information about a female candidate, they are likely to view her as being a stereotypical woman which they often take as a basis for not electing her because they consider typical male qualities as being crucial for someone holding a political office.
Feminism and women's rights Throughout the 20th century, women in the United States saw a dramatic shift in social and professional aspirations and norms. Following the
Women's Suffrage Movement of the late-nineteenth century, which resulted in the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment allowing women to vote, and in combination with conflicts in Europe,
WWI and
WWII, women found themselves shifted into the industrial workforce. During this time, women were expected to take up industrial jobs and support the troops abroad through the means of domestic industry. Moving from "homemakers" and "caregivers", women were now factory workers and "breadwinners" for the family. However, after the war, men returned home to the United States and women, again, saw a shift in social and professional dynamics. With the reuniting of the nuclear family, the ideals of American
Suburbia boomed. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s,
middle-class families moved in droves from urban living into newly developed single-family homes on former farmland just outside major cities. Thus established what many modern critics describe as the "private sphere". Though frequently sold and idealized as "perfect living", many women had difficulty adjusting to the new "private sphere". Writer
Betty Friedan described this discontent as "
the feminine mystique". The "mystique" was derived from women equipped with the knowledge, skills, and aspirations of the workforce, the "public sphere", who felt compelled whether socially or morally to devote themselves to the home and family. One major concern of feminism, is that women occupy lower-ranking job positions than men, and do most of the housework. A recent (October 2009) report from the Center for American Progress, "The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything" tells us that women now make up 48% of the US workforce and "mothers are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in a majority of families" (63.3%, see figure 2, page 19 of the Executive Summary of The Shriver Report). along with other Parisian
suffragettes in 1935. The newspaper headline reads "The Frenchwoman Must Vote". Another recent article in
The New York Times indicates that young women today are closing the pay gap.
Luisita Lopez Torregrosa has noted, "Women are ahead of men in education (last year, 55 percent of U.S. college graduates were female). And a study shows that in most U.S. cities, single, childless women under 30 are making an average of 8 percent more money than their male counterparts, with Atlanta and Miami in the lead at 20 percent." Feminist theory generally defines gender as a social construct that includes ideologies governing feminine/masculine (female/male) appearances, actions, and behaviors. An example of these gender roles would be that males were supposed to be the educated breadwinners of the family, and occupiers of the public sphere whereas, the female's duty was to be a homemaker, take care of her husband and children, and occupy the private sphere. According to contemporary gender role ideology, gender roles are continuously changing. This can be seen in
Londa Schiebinger's
Has Feminism Changed Science, in which she states, "Gendered characteristics – typically masculine or feminine behaviors, interests, or values-are not innate, nor are they arbitrary. They are formed by historical circumstances. They can also change with historical circumstances." One example of the contemporary definition of gender was depicted in
Sally Shuttleworth's
Female Circulation in which the, "abasement of the woman, reducing her from an active participant in the labor market to the passive bodily existence to be controlled by male expertise is indicative of the ways in which the ideological deployment of gender roles operated to facilitate and sustain the changing structure of familial and market relations in Victorian England." In other words, this shows what it meant to grow up into the roles (gender roles) of a female in Victorian England, which transitioned from being a homemaker to being a working woman and then back to being passive and inferior to males. In conclusion, gender roles in the contemporary sex gender model are socially constructed, always changing, and do not really exist since they are ideologies that society constructs in order for various benefits at various times in history.
Men's rights The men's rights movement (MRM) is a part of the larger
men's movement. It branched off from the
men's liberation movement in the early-1970s. The men's rights movement is made up of a variety of groups and individuals who are concerned about what they consider to be issues of male disadvantage,
discrimination and oppression. The movement focuses on issues in numerous areas of society (including
family law,
parenting,
reproduction,
domestic violence) and government services (including
education,
compulsory military service, social safety nets, and health policies) that they believe discriminate against men. Scholars consider the men's rights movement or parts of the movement to be a
backlash to feminism. The men's rights movement denies that men are privileged relative to women. The movement is divided into two camps: those who consider men and women to be harmed equally by sexism, and those who view society as endorsing the degradation of men and upholding female privilege. Men's rights groups in India have called for the creation of a Men's Welfare Ministry and a National Commission for Men, as well as the abolition of the National Commission for Women. In the United Kingdom, the creation of a
Minister for Men analogous to the existing
Minister for Women, have been proposed by
David Amess, MP and
Lord Northbourne, but were rejected by the government of
Tony Blair. In the United States,
Warren Farrell heads a commission focused on the creation of a "White House Council on Boys and Men" as a counterpart to the "White House Council on Women and Girls" which was formed in March 2009. These individuals contest that societal institutions such as family courts, and laws relating to child custody and child support payments, are gender biased in favor of mothers as the default caregiver. They therefore are systemically discriminatory against males regardless of their actual caregiving ability, because males are typically seen as the bread-winner, and females as the care-giver.
Gender neutrality Gender neutrality is the movement to end discrimination of gender altogether in society through means of
gender neutral language, the end of
sex segregation and other means.
Transgender and cross-dressing , a transgender activist at a demonstration for transgender people in Paris, 1 October 2005 Transgender is the state of one's
gender identity or gender expression not matching one's
assigned sex. Transgender is independent of
sexual orientation; transgender people may identify as
heterosexual,
homosexual,
bisexual, etc.; some may consider conventional sexual orientation labels inadequate or inapplicable to them. The definition of
transgender includes: • "Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex." • "People who were assigned a sex, usually at birth and based on their genitals, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves." • "Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the sex (and assumed gender) one was assigned at birth." While people self-identify as transgender, the transgender identity umbrella includes sometimes-overlapping categories. These include
transsexual;
cross-dresser;
genderqueer;
androgyne; and
bigender. Usually not included are
transvestic fetishists (because it is considered to be a
paraphilia rather than gender identification), and
drag kings and
drag queens, who are performers who cross-dress for the purpose of entertaining. In an interview, celebrity drag queen
RuPaul talked about society's ambivalence to the differences in the people who embody these terms. "A friend of mine recently did the
Oprah show about transgender youth", said RuPaul. "It was obvious that we, as a culture, have a hard time trying to understand the difference between a drag queen, transsexual, and a transgender, yet we find it very easy to know the difference between the
American baseball league and the
National baseball league, when they are both so similar." ==By country==