Gender Inequality According to Functionalist and Marxist Feminist Perspective

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Contrary to popular believe, gender is referred to the attitudes, behaviours and emotions linked with a specific sexual group. There are two dominant perspectives that illustrate two different viewpoints of gender inequality. The functionalist perspective, by Talcott Parsons, believed that both men and women possess specific qualities that make them excellent at specific events, and these qualities are not interchangeable (Brym, 2014). The Marxist-Feminist perspective; however, viewed qualities for men and women as to being dependent on social conditions rather than being inherited (2014). In order to further illustrate the presence of gender inequality in the present society; the film Missrepresentation, by Jennifer Newsom reveals the lack of female presence in lead or authoritative roles in media, in comparison to men (Newsom, 2011).

The film Missrepresentation, by Jennifer Newsom, is about the underrepresentation of women by the media (2011). The film challenges the viewpoints of media that are constantly depicting females as to being dependent on males. Furthermore, even when females are displayed as lead characters, the plot will ensure that their life’s will surround the life of a male. Examples of these include, a lead female falling in love with her “prince charming” as he saved her from great dangers. We rarely see a female character saving a male in the media (2011). According to the film the media continues to encourage the ideology that a women’s power is associated with her youth, beauty and sexuality, instead of her knowledge and intelligence (2011). The film also provides starling statistics, for instance by the age to 18 78% of females are unhappy with how the look. Also of the 8 million people with eating disord...

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...present today. Both the functionalist and Marxist-feminist perspectives provide reasons for this inequality, however, none of them provide a solution. The functionalist perspective believes men and women have distinct qualities that separate them thus the inequality. The Marxist-feminist perspective believes the inequality between men and women in due to the power gained by men as a result of the surplus of their crops. The film Missrepresentation, by Jennifer Newsom exhibits these inequalities and provides disturbing statistics that illustrate how bad this inequality is in reality.

Works Cited

Brym, Robert. (2014).[Sexuality and Gender Stratification] In, Whittington-Walsh, F. (Ed), Introduction to Sociology: SOCI 1125: Introduction to Society (269-270). Toronto: Nelson Education.

Newsom, Jennifer. (2011). Miss Representation. Ro Co Films Educational.

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