The globalizations of the world markets and the increase of free trade and deregulation that has been a result of capitalism, seems to benefit only the elite. The poor and the manual labor of the system continue to have to fight for subsidies and regulations that benefit them. The poor women of those communities are the one that get more disproportionally affected thru gender stratification. Many feminists who have critiqued the economic system have suggested business cooperatives that allow all the people to be steak holders and benefit from the business wealth. One example of a business cooperative is Mondragon, whose website is easily available and I will analyze with a feminist critique.
The President's message includes a general customary message that fails to communicate much. The wording seems
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The slogan of their company, "humanity at Work" seems to want to express that the cooperative has a humanitarian level of consciousness, but fails to convey that. The president’s message seems vague and fails to actually explain what the company does. The company consists of 261 companies and cooperatives, where 74,335 people work and have 15 technology centers. The cooperative started in 1956, when Arizmendiarrieta, and Ormaechea went to a piece of land plot they had bought and built a "two-story concrete structure". The seven initial founders were all men, and the history of Mondragon is managed with male leaders. In 2005 the workforce increased in more than 7,500 people while sales rose. The image connected with the positive description of the cooperatives growth is five white males that seem to be in a position of power with suits and ties. The 50-year-anniversary was celebrated, which was met by only
Gimenez, Martha E. "Capitalism and the Oppression of Women: Marx Revisited." Science & Society 69.1 (2005): 11-32. ProQuest Central. Web. 29 Apr. 2014. .
In America today, race/ethnicity, class categorization, and gender inequalities are just some of the most controversial issues that have created social division in every facet of our society. Gender inequality for one, remains a significant issue from the past up to this day. Looking at history, women have struggled to gain equal rights as well as equal pay against their male counterpart. As described in her book, “Cutting into the Meatpacking Line”, Deborah Fink detailed the inequalities against women and ethnic groups in the meatpacking plant where she had a first-hand experience as a worker. Furthermore, capitalism played an important role in the inequalities in race, gender, culture, and ethnicity, and it has also legitimized the disparities
main points in his letter that clarify some of the actions that have been enforced
The once male dominated, corporate, "white collar" America has seen a phenomenal influx of women within the last thirty years. Although a female lawyer, physician, or CEO is no longer considered a rarity in our times, women still face quite a deal of oppression in comparison to their male counterparts. In retrospect, some professions have always been controlled by women, and men have not made a noticeable advance in these fields. In 1970, finding a female lawyer to represent you would be a difficult task, since less than five percent of the profession were women. Today, that number has risen to almost thirty percent. The percentage of female doctors has almost tripled in the course of thirty years. African Americans have not made such a conspicuous progression within the last fifty years, while women have made a tremendous impact on the corporate world. One may wonder, how did women make these extraordinary advances? For the most part, it is due to the education they receive. At the present time young girls are encouraged to enroll in classes dealing with math and science, rather than home economics and typing. As pointed out by Nanette Asimov, in her essay "Fewer Teen Girls Enrolling in Technology Classes", school officials are advocating the necessity of advanced placement, and honor classes for teenage girls, in both the arts and sciences. This support and reassurance than carries over onto college, and finds a permanent fixture in a woman’s life. While women are continuing their success in once exclusively male oriented professions, they are still lacking the respect and equality from their peers, coworkers, and society. The average male lawyer, and doctor make twenty-five percent more money than their female equivalent. Women have always lived with the reputation of being intellectually inferior to, and physically submissive to men. This medieval, ignorant notion is far fetched from the truth. In 1999, high school men and women posted similar SAT scores, being separated by a only a few points. In addition to posting similar scores on the SAT, the average males score was a mere two-tenths of a point higher than an average females score on the ACT. Even though a woman maybe as qualified as a male for a certain occupation , women receive unwanted harassment, and are under strict scrutiny. A good illustration of this would be the women represented in "Two Women Cadets Leave the Citadel.
Capitalism as an economic system has not been around for a very long time. Stanford indicates that this economic system began in the mid-1700s in Europe . For a considerably young system, it almost seems impossible to imagine a different way of living. Capitalism has become deeply embedded in our social structures; it is naturalized as a way of doing day to day things. If this is the case, then we as humans have a long way to go if we are to achieve social and economic justice. The question I aim to explore is whether capitalism is capable of achieving socio-economic justice. I am arguing that it cannot achieve justice because there is too much focus on profit rather than people and it dislocates the consumers from the modes of production which indirectly promotes social inequality. Our current economic system which I will be interchangeably using as capitalism throughout the paper will examine why the focus on profit is detrimental to the social well-being of people and explain how capitalism is divisive and why this can pose negative outcomes for individuals and communities. It is with these arguments that outline the need for a fundamental change to how our economy is structured and managed.
It was the research of Dobash and Dobash, a husband and wife team from Wales, that first posited that “intimate partner violence is the result of male oppression of women within a patriarchal system in which men are the primary perpetrators and women the primary victims” (McPhail, B. A., Busch, N. B., Kulkarni, S., & Rice, G., 2007). According to Lawson (2012), feminist theories treat the problem of intimate partner violence as fundamentally related to the patriarchal domination of men over women. Historically, patriarchy was the dominant social structure from early Greek and Roman civilizations where women were considered to be the property of their father, if unmarried, and their husband if married. As such, women were often beaten, burned, and killed for not being obedient to a man’s
Modern feminists might gasp if I assert patriarchy once allowed efficient economic organization, but the tools of modern political economy unveil the mystery of why inegalitarian gender norms were once economically efficient. Evolving modes of production and material constraints necessitate an efficient division of labor guided by socialized gender norms that adapt to economic macroconditions. Gary Becker and Torben Iversen understand an economic division of labor differently given their different historical-material conditions. In his “Theory of the Allocation of Time,” Becker models an ideal economic division of labor with the household as a single entity seeking maximum utility. Men specialize in marketable skills due to a comparative advantage in hard labor; women specialize in general household skills and motherhood. Iversen’s concept of an efficient division of labor does not view the household as a single entity and instead views the individual as the basic economic unit—less gendered social norms result. Thus, as society evolves from agricultural to industrial and then to postindustrial modes of production, gender norms adapt to society’s needs and wants to yield efficient divisions of labor. When material macroconditions advance, households restructure gender norms and behavior out of demand for a more efficient division of labor. In this paper, I argue the evolution of the modes of production alters power dynamics in household bargaining, which force gender norms to conform to market demands for a revised division of labor.
Recently the concerns of women around their equality in society has become a hotly debated topic in the public spot light. Much of the debate concerns women and the ingrained sexism that permeates most cultures. Many women's activists feel that this ingrained sexism has widened the gap between men and women in a political, social, and economic sense. And for the most part they do have strong evidence to support these claims. Women have suffered through millennia of male dominated societies where treatment of women has been, and in some cases still is, inhuman. Women are treated like subhuman creatures that have only exist to be used for procreate and to be subjugated by men for household use. It has only been very recently that women have become recognized as equals in the eyes of men. Equals in the sense that they have the same political and social rights as males. While the situation has improved, women still have to deal with a male oriented world. Often women in the workplace are thought of as inferior and as a liability. This can be due to concerns about maternity leave, or women with poor leadership skills. But also in part it is due because of the patriarchy that controls all aspects and dynamics of the culture, family, politics, and economy. Even developed countries like The United Kingdom, United States, Germany, and France, could be classified as a patriarchies. These countries may not agree with this notion because of expansive, but not complete changes, that have gradually equalized women in society. However, there are developed countries that openly express a patriarchy and have enacted little societal changes to bring equality to women. Japan is one such country, and t...
One important question that needs to be asked is, “what is equal?” Equality between sexes and race has been stressed and made law in the late nineteenth century, but even though laws have been made to protect woman from this discrimination, it still occurs frequently. Equal is being treated the same way and having the same opportunities no matter who one is. Big business has not given women the chance to be equal with men. One does not normally see a woman as the owner, or even the manager of a major corporation, these jobs consistently go to men. Traditi...
Reaching equality in the business world is the main idea feminism was built around several centuries ago. Women have fought for equality since the creation of America under the idea of feminism, or true equality between the sexes. In the 18th century, women had little to no rights; they could not vote, serve on a jury, or work in many professions. The jobs that women were allowed into were small and menial tasks, for which they were paid nearly half of what a man was paid for the same work. The initial feminist movement is often overlooked since it was tied to the abolition movement, or the fight against slavery. The first women’s rights convention was held in 1848 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an ...
There are nearly as many women as there are men working, yet, as it was discovered in 2011, on average, a woman will only earn seventy-seven cents for every dollar that a man earns. Women owned businesses make up for over a quarter of all national businesses and earn more than one point two trillion dollars (“Assessing the Past, Taking Stock of the Future” 6). Since many women are now becoming are the primary sources of income in the household, making less that a man does not only negatively affect families, but also the overall economy suffers as well. These women, among many others, are the ones who end up purchasing the supplies that go toward improving communities and stimulating the economy. There is no reason that the general public should stand for this. Women should be treated equally to men in today’s American society based on their biological compositions, psychological profiles and contributions to history.
Feminists are constantly trying to decrease the wage gap through activism. Women are more educated now than they have ever been, but even women who are university graduates are earning less than men. Frenette and Coulombe reached the conclusion that this was often due to their degrees being in gendered fields of study, such as the arts and humanities (as cited in Gaszo, 2010, p. 224). Women also tend to work in fields associated with lower pay, which includes service and sales work (Gaszo, 2010). In the garment industry, women, especially immigrants and women who work at home, are routinely taken advantage of by companies such as Wal-Mart and paid far too little (Ng, 2006).
Gender stratification is the cuts across all aspects of social life and social classes. It refers to the inequality distribution of wealth, power and privilege between men and women at the basis of their sex. The world has been divided and organized by gender, which are the behavioural differences between men and women that are culturally learnt (Appelbaum & Chambliss, 1997:218). The society is in fact historically shaped by males and the issue regarding the fact has been publicly reverberating through society for decades and now is still a debatably hot topic. Men and women have different roles and these sex roles, defined to be the set of behaviour’s and characteristics that are standard for each gender in a society (Singleton, 1987) are deemed to be proper in the eyes of the society. They are as a matter of fact proper but as time move on, the mind-set of women changes as well, women also want to move on. However the institutional stratification by the society has become more insidious that the stereotypical roles have created a huge barrier between men and women. These barriers has affected women in many aspects such as minimizing their access on a more superior position in workforce organization, limits their ownership of property and discriminates them from receiving better attention and care.
Gender inequality is present in all aspects of human society, from culture, politics, and economic stand point to personal relationships. Gender inequality can be viewed as a major problem especially within the business world (Corporation, 2016). In the past, men are seen as leaders in all aspects. For example, men could work without any criticisms, they could participate in political issues and were given higher education. Women on the other hand, were given no political participation, criticized for working outside the household as they were responsible for chores such as takes care of their children, cooking or cleaning and given limited education compared to men. Although there are claims rights equality of women in 21st century and much has been written about it in the field of business (Player, 2013), but there is still a gap between male and female. This essay aims to explore the impact of gender inequality in business and will analyze the details in terms of the men are given high pay and specific jobs over women.
Women’s subordination within the labour market is seen by Marxist feminists as suiting the needs of capitalism as women are considered a ‘reserve army of labour’ as they are a more disposable part of the workforce. According to Beechey (1986) women are a cheap ‘reserve army of labour’ that are brought in during economic booms but then thrown out during slumps. Women are often not members of trade unions and are prepared to work for less money as their wage could be a second income. This benefits capitalism as a group of unemployed people looking for work creates competition and exploitation. Employers are given an advantage which allows them to reduce wages and increase the rate of exploitation. Benston (1972) supports this as women are used to benefitting the operation of the capitalist economy by carrying out unprepared work in the home. This proves that patriarchy dominates women which leads to women’s subordination. Hartmann (1981) believes that patriarchy and the economy both play a crucial role in explaining and understanding gender inequality. Historically, men have controlled women especially by control of labour power. This can come through legislation that operates economically to the benefit of men, for example Maternity and Paternity Rights. This proves that patriarchy and economics together explains gender inequality. However, Walby (1986) argues that women staying at home can actually harm capitalism because if women were to compete for jobs with men this would lower wages and increase profits. Women who earn also have superior spending power which would boost the economy and benefit