Essay On Barriers To Women

Women and Barriers

From the world having no civil rights for women at all to women being equally or more educated than men, the scenario at workplace has not undergone a drastic change which can be concluded from the above discussion and statistics. There is no doubt that women have the skills to lead in the workplace. In United States, girls are increasingly out-performing boys in the classroom, earning about 57 percent of the undergraduate and 60 percent of the masters’ degree. In India men still outnumber women in higher education, but women are increasingly outnumbering men at some elite institution. But this has not lead to a substantial progress for women. The real question here is why? Equality in education has not lead to equal treatment at workplace for both genders. There are various obstacles or barriers that a woman has to face while trying to make a place professionally because integrating professional and personal aspirations proved far more challenging than imagined which lead to less value of women.

External barriers are those erected by the society while internal barriers are those obstacles existing within women which refrains them from exploiting their own full potential which can lead to a fully fledged career for them. One can see how these barriers collectively affect the women. A woman can get to the top only when the institutional barriers are gone. This is an ultimate chicken and egg situation. The chicken: women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles and the egg: we need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into those roles in the first place. Both sides are right in their own way.

Various external and internal barriers which affect the position of women and their unequal treatment are: Gender Role Socialization, Family and Culture, Harassment, Male domination, Child Care, Ambition lack, Success and likeability of each gender and many