David E. Newton - Gender Inequality

by Sandy Becker

by Kathleen Frost

by Emily Hirsch

by Carolyn Hoemann

by Lila Leatherman

by Maeve McCarthy, Stephen Cobb, Claire Fuller, Paula Waddill, and Robin Zhang

by Alyssa Kara Miller

by Kimberly A. Probolus

by Jay Sorensen

by Marissa Williams and Martha Rampton

In elections held in November 2018, 93 new members were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and 9 new members to the U.S. Senate. Of that number, 31 new House members (33%) and 3 new senators (33%) were women. That brought the total number of women in the House and Senate to 102 out of 435 (23%) and 24 out of 100 (24%), respectively. At the same time, 12 out of 36 (33%) newly elected governors were women. During the time the 2018 election was taking place, women made up 50.8 percent of the population of the United States. One might say that there is a condition of gender inequality in U.S. politics. That is, the fraction of women involved in national politics is not equal to (or even close to) the overall fraction of women in the nation.

Gender inequality is by no means strictly a political phenomenon. In almost every section of society, women do less well by a variety of measures than do men. For example, the average salary for women playing in the Womens National Basketball Association in 2018 was $71,635. By comparison, the minimum salary for a player in the mens version of the game (without his having played in a game) is $838,464 and (with one year of experience), $1,349,383. In yet another field, Nobel Prize awards throughout history, men have strongly predominated. Of the 180 prizes in chemistry given over the 117 years of its existence, 5 have gone to women (2.7%). For the other prizes, a similar trend exists: physics: 3 women among 210 winners (1.4%); physiology or medicine: 12 women among 216 winners (5.6%); and economics: 1 woman among 80 recipients (1.2%).

Or one can choose a very different measure of gender inequality: What is the average pay for men and women doing essentially the same job? In 1960, that pay gap was 0.61. That is, women received 61 cents for every $1 earned by a man doing the same job. Over time, that gap has improved slowly in the United States, reaching 81 cents to $1 in 2017. (In some countries that pay gap is much larger, almost 30 percent in Estonia and 25 percent in Japan.)

Neither women nor men need to be made aware of gender inequality in this country, or almost anywhere else in the world. The problem is not a new one, having been around throughout essentially all of civilization. One can find references to differential treatment of men and women in the earliest written records of laws and court cases. By the Middle Ages, denigrating comments about the abilities, morality, accomplishments, and limitations of women had become part of the scholarly tradition. At the time, many of these comments came from the writings of the most venerated saints and other church leaders, whose ideas were also being carried out in the structure and function of all Western religions at the time. of this book summarizes this long history of discrimination against women throughout history.

A comparable discrimination against men is a more difficult story to tell. There certainly have been times and situations when women exerted privileges unavailable to men in similar situations. But those instances have been few and far between, and their history would constitute a much shorter chapter than the one found here.