27-07-2012, 12:06 PM
Women's Rights
Women\'s Rights.doc (Size: 42 KB / Downloads: 25)
Introduction
Women have always been the backbone of society but rarely have been recognized for their full contributions to the workforce. Moreover, women continually have been denied the opportunity to participate outside the home in the public sphere on an equal footing with men. Thanks to countless women throughout history who stood up for equality in the workplace, women have achieved great strides for equal rights for working women. Nonetheless, women still are far from equality in the workplace. In May 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the Equal Pay Act of 1963 very narrowly (Arnesen, 2006). In denying Lily Ledbetter the right to sue her employer for lost wages that she learned about upon her retirement, the Court ruled that she sued too late and would not be able to reclaim lost wages.
This ruling was so egregious that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg not only wrote a stinging dissent but read it from the bench urging Congress to act. Democratic Members of Congress responded immediately and introduced the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to reverse the Court's decision. In the 2008 presidential campaign, equal pay gained attention as then-Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) pledged to support and ultimately cast his vote for it, while Senator John McCain (R-AZ) opposed and voted against the act. When President Obama was elected, the Lily Ledbetter Act of 2009 was the first bill he signed into law (Arnesen, 2006).
Discussion
Women will struggle to achieve management and face limitations spots because many people in society, including women feel that those positions belong to males. They also have limits due to people’s conscious and unconscious sex bias that people have adapted to throughout time. Women who are also pregnant at the time of hiring will face discrimination due to the fact that employers have false assumptions of their ability to work. Women who are also responsible for their families will most certainly be discriminated against because the employers feel that they should be at home taking care of the family business instead of working (Banaszak, 2005).
Not only do women get discriminated in pay, they get discriminated against in various job opportunities. However most of the discrimination was eliminated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which has been facing strong resistance to actually carry out and enforce the Act. Because of this, discrimination has been occurring for some time, it has become a more subtle issue that most Americans have to endure. Women usually have to still continue in jobs that have long been stereotyped as being a woman’s job: sectaries, librarians, elementary teachers, daycare teachers, and etc. In today’s society you rarely see women as being executives, directors, CEO’s firefighters, police officers, construction workers, any type of engineers, and etc. Women are also discriminated when it comes down to management type jobs (McGlen, 2005).
Conclusion
Women are in the workforce to stay and they want both careers and families. Still, they face great difficulty in balancing the demands of both. The challenge is, changing the environment and structure of the workplace, so that family life and work are more compatible. I conducted interviews with women who work for personal fulfillment, women who have to work due to financial responsibilities and single moms.
What I found was women were the ones who were more likely than men to make sacrifices at work in order to keep the balance between work and family responsibilities. Women are the ones who tend to take on the dual roles work and home. Single mothers or women in the lower-income dual earner families, working outside the home is often not a choice but a necessity (Maloney, 2003). They need to work to meet the basic needs of the family. The main key in being able to do it all is to not do it all, but instead prioritize as to what is most important at any particular time.