Women and men are encouraged to behave according to specific gender Essay

Women and men are encouraged to behave according to specific gender patterns, critically discuss this assertion by reporting on evidence from your collected sou - Essay Example Typically, men hold positions of power even in democracies. Only 14 percent of the countries have achieved 30 percent representation of women in the parliament, as set out in the Beijing Declaration on Women in 1995. Women have less access to and control of economic powers, rewarded for less remuneration than men for the same work, treated differently in global trade. Women receive less education than men; have to walk long distances to collect drinking water in poorer countries, thereby falling vulnerable to violence; sexual and reproductive health problems result in illness and disability to women; more number of women being victims of HIV/AIDS because of restrictions on women being able to practice safe sex and having access to HIV testing and care services; women become victims of gender-based violence and cultural taboos. On the whole, the mainstreaming of gender has generally failed because the approach towards 'integrating' women in the society does not challenge existing powe r equations. Women have continued to be offered stereotyped jobs, not receiving equal training and education and insufficient resources for women's mainstreaming (Oxfam). With globalization, the traditional economic relationships, including gender relationships, are crumbling down. The classical patriarchy, dependent on the male property ownership and family headship notion, had given rise to the urban "fordist gender regime" - male bread earner/ female house maker - in the western world in the 1950s and 1960s, also duplicated in some parts of the developing world. Economic development and increased competition has meant that the male salary earnings are not sufficient for the increasing consumption patterns. Brenner (2003) notes that incorporation of women in the workforce and their increased access to education and literacy has brought feminism in the forefront of organized politics (cited in Dhawan, p2). Women activists are not increasingly becoming more vocal in national politics but also on global issues. At the same time, marginalized women are becoming even more vulnerable to global capital reorganization. Worldwide, women are facing the brunt of longer working hours, impoverishment, economic insecurity and forced migration and urbanization. Working class women find themselves in the crossroad of development and reactionary policy and continue to remain, if not become increasingly so, victims of fundamentalism, economic insecurity and a complex web of power relations (Kaplan, 1999, cited in Dhawan, p3). Pressures of structural adjustments imposed on many Third World countries have given rise to fundamentalism, which stem from the traditional patriarchal powers and victimize women even more. The emerging capitalist structures of many of these societies have eroded the protection of the traditional patriarchy that women used to have earlier. Women in the Third World are at the crosshead of two powerful forces: one, the nationalist agenda that is inherently masculine in which women are expected to follow traditional roles while the men are free to participate in the political arena, and two, global capital, which forces wom en to participate in the economic field, overpowering the nationalist agenda. While in the west, women of color feel that the feminist agenda is essentially white-oriented, in the Third World, the political interests of working class women are marginalized. Over and above this, women from the