Gender Inequality, Functionalism and Symbolic Interactionism

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Gender inequality refers to the inequality between men and women, or the unequal treatment or perception of a person based on his or her gender. Gender inequality is almost always prominent towards a female rather than towards a male. Women are seen as inferior to men in every country in the world. This form of society is called patriarchal and is one of this biggest issues in American society today. Patriarchy means that the country has a primarily male dominated society. Does anyone realize what gender inequality is doing to our country as a whole? Not everyone may think it has a great impact on our society, but gender inequality creates many of our problems today including wealth, income, and status discriminations. I chose to write about this topic because I believe that this is one of the biggest problems that all societies face, not just the United States. Fixing the gender inequality issues in our country could have a bigger impact than what many people may think. Changing something that most consider to be so minuscule could play a very important part of a much bigger picture in our country. If we could close the gap created by the inequality between men and women than maybe we could help influence the way America thinks about many other issues as well.
The term functionalism is used to explain social events in terms of the functions that they perform. The functionalist approach is also used to show how something affects the continued existence of society. A functionalist approach to gender inequality shows us that gender dominant careers help society continue to function, but we can already see the long term effects of how gender inequality has created issues in today’s society. Even after all of the massive...

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...eneral is a terrible issue in not just American society, but in every society in the whole world. America is just a small part of the ongoing trend of gender inequality. The United States is actually one of the countries who has tried to take steps in the right direction on this issue. We have made many advances in work, education, and even politics. Many laws have been put in place to help protect women, but not everything is perfect yet. Although I don’t think that the gender equality issue will ever disappear from our country, or any other country, we still have a lot of forward steps that we could still take. I think that maybe if people saw things from a more sociological point of view than maybe they would understand that even some of the smaller things they did and said could have a huge impact on the future generations of the society that they live in.

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