The Pros And Cons Of Gender Roles

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Introduction:
In the United States, there are many policies that are seen as women’s issues and this puts them at a lower priority for those in power. The issue that I want to highlight is maternity/paternity leave. This is defined as: “The Period when a woman can legally be absent from working the weeks before and after she has a baby”(“Cambridge Dictionaries online,” n.d.). Women’s bodies go through a lot of changes when they have a baby including hormonal, physical and psychological (Dunkel Schetter, 2011). These can be exasperated by financial burdens due to lack of pay while on leave, social expectations for the parents to both return to work and the cost of returning to work. I would also like to touch on the kind of wording that is …show more content…

Traditional family units are mostly things of the past, where a bio-man and a bio-woman would have children and the wife would stay home to care for those children. Currently we have many different of non-traditional family units such as; single parents, same sex parents and transgender parents(Huang, 2009). These types of non- traditional family units do not conform to the current policies, which make it hard to them to function within the system. Same sex bio-female couples at times use one of their own eggs to create a fetus and one partner will carry the baby. The way that the policy is written it does not allow for these couples to both use maternity leave unless the other partner adopts the baby at birth which can be costly. The costs come from lawyers and court paperwork when there is a private adoption. This is even harder on couples that do not conform to gender binary. The non-traditional family also struggles later in life if a parent chose not to work when their child/children were young. In the United States you ‘earn’ credit that goes toward Social Security income for retirement when you work(United States Government, 2015). Traditionally women or the parent who doesn’t return to the work force just after having a child will have less social security credits due to them not working, this also cuts into the amount of time this person will have to add income to their 401k retirement account. Much of the time people who identify as women including those not biologically female have a smaller retirement fund due to taking time off for child bearing and rearing (“Perceptions of Financial Well-Being among American Women in Diverse Families - Springer,” n.d.). This makes being a stay-at-home mom difficult when thinking of your

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