To better understand gender inequality, one must first know what it means.
Gender: The roles and expectations that society attributes to women and men because of their sex; or we can call it all the conditions and behaviors regarding being a woman or a man that are added onto the biological sex and taught by the individual’s family, environment, and the society they live in.
Gender inequality: The discrimination, lack of equal opportunities, and structural problems that women and men face due to their gender roles.
But we see that today, whether in society or in professional life, generally everywhere, it is women who are exposed to gender inequality. One of the reasons for this is the patriarchal system coming from the past. In this system, there is the idea of the man being dominant, and there are still segments that highly internalize and maintain this idea and patriarchal system. If you ask “How?”, we can list many examples such as those who maintain the idea that “the man should be dominant” in the family and society, those who say “women cannot work in income-generating jobs,” “women cannot own property,” or those who say “women’s social rights are limited”. In short, there are segments that continue these thoughts today; we cannot say they don’t exist, they just cannot express them openly in public.
This inequality is not limited to the family and society but is also evident in social spheres and professional life. When we examine data from the past to the present, we see an increase in women’s participation in the workforce; however, today we also see that women face obstacles such as the glass ceiling, glass elevator, and glass wall in professional life.
Glass ceiling: Invisible barriers that women face in professional life.
Glass elevator: Men rising faster in professions where women are the majority.
Glass wall: Preventing women’s access to certain professions and jobs.
Women encounter these obstacles in professional life quite frequently, even without realizing it. While both genders should actually be under equal conditions, blatant discrimination is practiced with the thought that women cannot work for a long time due to reasons such as maternity leave or marriage; at the same time, they do not give women equal rights and opportunities with men in professional life by putting forward reasons such as “men make better managers, they take more rational decisions, women think emotionally and take emotional decisions” or “women cannot work while dealing with housework and childcare”. This clearly shows us gender inequality.
In addition to these, social pressure also causes inequality between women and men, and we hear these pressures quite often in our daily lives. For example, stereotyped sentences such as “a woman should dress like this,” “a woman stays at home,” “don’t interfere in men’s business with the dough on your hands,” and “a woman’s place is the kitchen” have taken a place in our daily lives. There are also such stereotyped sentences for men: we see and hear sentences like “men don’t cry,” “you couldn’t even become the handle of an axe,” “let the one who gives birth to a boy boast, let the one who gives birth to a girl grieve,” which even appear before us as proverbs. Similarly, there is pressure through colors and toys: many things like women wear pink, men wear blue; girls play with dolls, boys play with cars. And we have normalized these more than they are; we approve of them every time we hear them, as if they were very true.
In short, as we can see, gender inequality occupies a significant place in our professional lives, within the family and society, and in our daily lives. These roles, mostly assigned to women and men, prevent individuals from being free and comfortable in their lives. The day we, as a society, do not see this gender inequality as normal, do not accept it, and oppose it, we will have gotten ahead of and prevented gender inequality.
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