Gender Disparity in Employment - Research Paper Example

The society is usually highly structured and stratified based on social hierarchies which have both dominant and subordinate groups coexisting together. As such, the gender disparity seen in matters pertaining to labor or employment can be traced back to a highly patriarchal and discriminative society (Donahue, 2007). This paper will try to tackle the two dominant causes of gender disparity in the social sphere which are patriarchal systems, and gender discrimination. Patriarchal systems usually refer to male dominance in which gender hierarchy favors the male over the female gender.

The males are usually endowed with power, material and status advantages over their female counterparts. Despite advances and profound structural changes within the society, the gender hierarchy is still propagated today in different forms. These structural changes include such things like increasingly venture of women into male dominated careers and more women opting for careers as opposed to formative days when they stayed at home. Currently, there is no one single way through which the patriarchal system can be analyzed and understood as a possible cause of gender disparity, those interactional processes that are taken for granted may be the solution.

These interactional processes are usually mediated through gender stratification which is an old time sociological practice (Elliott & Smith, 2004). The reasons for male dominance in patriarchal societies has been attributed to different factors and key among are culture, religion and capitalism. Through the industrialization and modernization of man, the culture of male dominance has been the norm whereby in forms of mass production that existed in the agrarian civilization, man was favored as the dominant figure.

This is because it was the duty of man to perform strenuous tasks like fighting while women were allocated lighter duties like taking care of the homes. In that way, division of labor developed which later became entrenched in the society. In a way, capitalism propagated paternalism further by favoring men who seem not to overindulge in work in the society according to the cultural settings while it is they who own everything. In a way, that is exploitative but that is way that things have been moving on but slowly they are changing as more parity is being introduced in the previously skewed gender disparity (Donahue, 2007; Ridgeway, 1997).

Discrimination simply refers to prejudice based on perceived traits that may be biological or otherwise. When one is discriminated against, it does not necessarily have to be based on race but also gender discrimination exists especially in matters pertaining to labor or employment. Currently, the trend is slowly changing but there are those jobs or careers that are dominated by the male gender at the expense of the female gender. Reasons attributed to this can be traced to individual perceptions of the key players in the field which naturally discriminate against the female gender in holding some positions.

Take for instance the issue of women representation legislation or politics which remains a largely male dominated affair globally even in the US. Although the last word has to come from the voters who by the way comprise a bigger women representation, they discriminate aga