CLASS
Of the staggering 1.3 billion people in the world confined by the shackles of absolute poverty, women compose the majority. Two-thirds of the 130 million children worldwide who are not in school are girls. On average worldwide, women receive between 30 and 40 per cent less pay than men earn for the same work.
CAPITALISM
The global economic system has built-in bias� against women by excluding consideration of child care, food processing, meal preparation, housecleaning and nursing the sick in economic analysis. Human resources have intrinsic, not just instrumental, value which women reproduce and maintain without pay. Women most often carry the double burden of work outside the home in production of goods and services along with their unpaid work in reproduction and maintenance of human resources. The global economy is structured by unequal gender relations.
WORK
Pervasive discrimination against women in society was led by economic gender inequality. For instance, while child care wages are very low, (about 30% lower than animal care workers) 98% of workers are women. Two-thirds of child care workers have post-secondary education, whereas only 40% of the general labor force does. The average warehouse worker earns about 60% more than childcare workers.
Reform aimed at equal pay for equal work is a start in addressing gender inequalities, but ultimately, until workers are not excluded from ownership of the means of production, inequality will persist as power, wealth and status are generated and maintained by and for a handful of capitalists.
FAMILY
Work in the home needs to show up in the books. If childcare and household work became purchased services, the calculated gross domestic product, estimated by Stats Canada, would rise by about 40 percent. The industry is worth about $300 billion. Considering two-thirds of childcare and housework is done by women, the undermining of women�s status is obvious.
Marxists cite social organization as the main cause of inequality and the private family is viewed as an economic and status trap for women. Feminists express the role of culture in generating and upholding female subordination through patriarchal ideology: a set of ideas that justify and uphold male domination over women. Patriarchy is not just seen as embedded in economic dominance, but as pervasive throughout culture in language, presentation of sex, and in assumptions about temperament and intellectual as well as physical capacities.
ACTION
By acknowledging the subordination f women and identifying its dynamics, political action can be stimulated to transform society. Examples of international recognition and reform of gender inequalities include Sweden�s formation of the world's first cabinet to have equal numbers of men and women. Taiwanese Parliament orders husbands to pay their wives for housework. Pressure is mounting from feminists everywhere advocating wages for housework.
Global celebrations occur annually on March 8 for the triumphs in women�s rights. However, mainstream papers, like the Recorder and Times and the EMC, do nothing but gloss over the actual causes and effects of gender inequality right here in Canada and Brockville. There are many women�s groups that use the day�s media coverage against imperial war, and to achieve dialogue on a national child care agenda.
INEQUALITY: CONDITION, OPPORTUNITY
Inequality of opportunity is when people do not have similar chances to pursue economic and social rewards. Actual chances to gain conditions of wealth, power and status, for the international woman are bleak.
Just 24 women have been elected heads of state or government in this century. As of 1995 there were only 10 women heads of state. Only 14.1 percent of representatives elected to Parliaments around the world are women, up from 11.7 in 1997. The percentage of female cabinet ministers worldwide has risen from 3 in 1987 to 6.2 percent in 1996. Of the 189 highest ranking diplomats to the United Nations, only eleven are women. Throughout the history of UN peace-keeping, there have been only 2 women in top decision-making positions.
Inequality of condition is undeniable because it is clear to see that some are desperately poor while others possess great material riches. Compare the wealth, status and power of celebrities and business people with that of laborers, the unemployed, and homeless people. Inequality of opportunity, in contrast, is much less obvious. Liberal ideology contends that Canada�s inequality of condition is tolerable because of equal opportunities to attain better conditions: basically, the common view that �the poor are that way because they don�t try�. Sceptics of the status quo, however, understand that there are always alternatives to the way any given society is organized. Some people benefit from existing social arrangements while others don�t. Androcentrism, the habit of talking and thinking as though the world contained only men, is a large barrier to equal opportunities in the context of gender. There are other, more egalitarian ways to construct society.
SEX VS. GENDER
On the surface, sex and gender seem basically interchangeable as words, but the opposite is true. Is it really likely that physiology prevented any woman from becoming a Prime Minister of Canada for 126 years? The distinction between "sex" and "gender" is quite important because it enables discussion on differences between sexes based on physiology, cultural ideas and social organization.
Sex refers to biological distinction. Talk of sex is talk of male/female, penis and vagina. Sex is objective and limited to physiological distinctions and capabilities. Women are all similar as they carry two X chromosomes, most can give birth, have ovaries and a clitoris, are generally healthier than men, have fewer hereditary diseases than men, and, under the age of one, girls have a significantly lower death rate than boys. However, social roles vary and are shaped by societies' definition of gender.
Gender is the cultural elaboration placed on sex. Gender is masculine and feminine, and common is associating the former with motorcycles and the ladder with romance novels. Gender is not objective and has various meanings both from place to place and from time to time. Gender is a social construct that differs from one society to another.
The distinction between sex and gender is important because it gives a better understanding of gender socialization and sexual identity. This could, in turn, help with parenting, professionalism, business, travel, art and even consumerism. Gender and sex can be and are used often for prejudice and therefore an understanding of each can assist the individual and culture in rooting out discrimination based on sex and gender. In reference to the first question posed in the introduction to this paper, after it took 126 years for a female to become Prime Minister of Canada, still just an astonishing one-in-nine Canadian members of legislature are women. Clearly, with the sexual revolution in the past now, and women more and more becoming professionals, inequalities are not a matter of physiology, but, rather, of discrimination.
STATUS AND GENDER INEQUALITY
Gender inequality in Canada is a problem whose cause is unclear to most members of society. Some may argue that it is the physical make up of men and women that result in the �inevitable� inequality. Others, like Marx, would argue that the problem is class, which is easier to identify. However, to adequately explain gender inequality in Canada, status (involving more variables making it more difficult to identify) and status groups, must be the focus, in addition to class.
Biology is a frequent, though outdated, explanation of inequalities between sexes, stating that differences in nature explain social and cultural arrangements. There are many errors in the socio-biological arguments. For instance, if gender inequality is natural and inevitable, then it should have existed in all societies hitherto, but male dominance was not universal and occurred with the development of private property and male seizure of control. Also disproving the biological explanation of gender inequality is the fact that there is more variation in cross-cultural gender roles than there is consistency. Many exemplify the naturalness of gender inequality by claiming parallels between human and animal patterns of dominance and aggression but they are forgetting the fundamental human characteristics of culture and consciousness, as well as the fact that even dominant behavior in animals may be learned and not natural. Although thoroughly unconvincing, the biological argument is important in its recognition that women�s role in child bearing and nurturing can reduce ability and opportunity to develop careers, complete education and compete for resources. However, biology is clearly not the cause of gender inequality.
In finding the cause of gender inequality, studying the ownership of economic resources may be helpful in understanding individual women�s situations, but not women as a group. Karl Marx is the best-known figure on class. Defined by Marx, class is an economic relationship suggesting a definite layering of the society and low social mobility. Women cannot be considered a class because the possibility of movement out of a class is implied in the notion of class. Women cannot change their biological sex, but they can change their class. There appears to be a hierarchy within economic classes predominantly placing women in subordination.
Although women may have varying class positions, they do share a common status position. Women are less valued as a group than men, unequal in the forms of power, authority and economy. In 1993, only eighteen percent of the seats in the House of Commons were held by women; only about nine percent of federally appointed judges in 1990 were women; just eight percent of executive positions and thirteen percent of senior management positions in the federal civil service in 1987 were held by women; and in 1985, all chief executive officers of the top five hundred companies in Canada were male. Even with equivalent educational qualifications, women still have lower placed jobs than men; women�s earnings are still less then men�s in similar jobs; and in women dominated employment sectors, pay is very often low. Women are now using the cause of gender inequality, status, as a tool to fight the problem by mobilizing to transform their social `position.
The devaluation of women, as a status group, is the cause of gender inequality in Canada, not biology or just class. The argument that gender inequality is natural seems like it came from the eighteenth century or Nazi Germany. Marx had little consideration of the position of women when he wrote that ownership of economic resources is fundamental to destroying inequality. Class is solely economic relationships, while status encompasses class as well as honor through power and authority in society. Class is a concept with great uses, but status is better because it includes class and can be used to analyze situations outside of the realm of ownership of economic resources. Viewing women and other marginalized groups of people as status groups instead of classes, brings hope that these people will be brought to equality, by mass recognition of their struggles and identity. Viewing women as a status group is the only way gender equality will evolve through social change. Status is most appropriate for analyzing the situation of inequality for women in Canada.
WOMEN�S DAY IS NOT JUST A WOMAN�S ISSUE!
FAMILY TIME FAMINE
Family should provide for children�s special need for being loved and appreciated. Canada�s children are not being loved and appreciated enough because parents and even teens just work, watch tv and shop.
Often both husband and wife have careers in various positions of hierarchal status, power and wealth requiring a high degree of competence and commitment. Both parents are experiencing new and unique �developmental tasks� and become torn between commitments. Filled up day books along with high work demands and priorities can force parents into panic or crisis mode when anything unexpected occurs, such as a sick child or deceased family member. Overloaded parents may withdraw from family interaction, which could seem to be a satisfactory short term strategy, but parents chronically stressed at work and withdrawn at home, could be seen by other family members as inaccessible and disengaged. Likewise is the affliction on children with a single working parent providing even less parental attention and supervision, overloaded with work duties along with all household tasks.
Many social workers are finding that children being left to eat alone causes emotional problems. Parents� irregular and �full� schedules result in far less time by a parent spent dressing, feeding, talking and playing with their children. Receiving no care or supervision at home, children could easily turn to drugs and crime. Another critical aspect of modern family breakdown is when working parents finally find the time to spend with their offspring, they go shopping. Parents often repay their children, with apologies for leaving them alone, by buying them expensive commodities. This all-too-common form of bribery costs a lot of money and �extra� time is put in at work to pay off these debts. In this vicious cycle of neglect and materialism, corporations are the only ones that win.
MEDIA TYRANNY AND THE FAMILY
Corporations have tremendous power through mass media. Engaged in the media, people are unable to distinguish confidently reality from the interpreted because they are having secondary, mediated experiences. One-way communication gets no interaction from the audience, thus rendering everyone vulnerable to whomever controls the media�s overall purpose and general content.
Big business� biggest role in the media is advertising which intervenes between people and their needs, separates them form direct fulfillment, and urges them to believe that satisfaction can be obtained only through commodities. In regards to families, the consequences of the capitalist media machine are alarming and spreading.
Now, more then ever, children are victims of expensive propaganda preaching simply, �buy this because you need it!� Thousands of psychologists and behavioral scientists, and other professionals have found extremely high salaries and steady work aiding advertisers to find nuances of artificial discontent in consumer, so as to create needs where there were none before. If our children are brought up on selfish individualism and instant gratification, that is what our society will become.
A child�s self-esteem and other aspects of early development are cultivated by parental attention and affection. Watching television belittles family roles in development and is an exercise in self-isolation. This new friend, the corporate socializing agent on the silver screen, consumes more and more of the child�s and parent�s time, until it even exceeds the time families spend together without the television.
PATRIARCHY IS VIOLENCE
Violence against women exists in Canada. More than half of Canadian women have experienced at least one form of physical or sexual abuse since the age of eighteen. The causes and effects persist without mass-appeal for change. A majority of abused women in Canada have been victimized more than once and about 75% of those assaulted were also emotionally abused. To eradicate the tragedy of violence against women in Canada, where we are supposed to be equal, what must be done?
The context of emotional abuse is male possessiveness, jealousy and demands or criticisms of domestic performance. Obsessiveness and the desire to control women is seen through efforts to jealously guard women�s contact with other men and outside support, to control her whereabouts, or to degrade her through name calling and put downs. Sadly, because a new child could represent a threat to men�s exclusive control and her exclusive attention and affection, many of those assaulted are pregnant women. Emotionally abusive behaviour provides important contextual information about wife battering and is actually a precursor to murder.
Single women, common-law wives and married women are all victims of abuse. Young women in new marriages with young men suffer from the highest rates of sexual assault. Men without highschool education assault their wives at twice the rate as men with degrees and men out of work assault their wives at twice the rate of employed men. In households with incomes under $15,000 a year, rates of wife assault are twice the national average. Education, employment and poverty, therefore, must be viewed as causes of violence against women.
Steady and meaningful work, education and paid domestic work could win equal opportunities for women while destroying violence against them.
1The International Woman
---class, capitalism, work, family, action
2Inequality
---condition, opportunity
3Sex vs Gender
---the difference between motorcycles and kitchens
4Status + Gender
---biology, culture
5Family Time Famine
---cleaning clocks with bells and whistles
6Media Tyranny and The Family
---brought to you by primetime capitalism
7Patriarchy is Violence
---Try to deny sexism now: Canada's black eye
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