Sexism In Military

For hundreds of years men and women alike have been subject to participate in society’s assigned gender roles. Until recently, the majority of cultures have had women performing more domestic work while men have pursued more labor specific jobs (Golden). In today’s society, there continues to be jobs that consist primarily of one gender, such as beauticians, in which women are predominant (Claire). The women’s movement and the second wave of feminism have contributed greatly in eliminating gender-specific employment (Cutler). Today, fewer jobs remain gender-specific.
Language has proven to be a large influence on all of society. By using sexist job titles people encourage jobs to be gender orientated. Society has had a history of changing word
meaning for the worst. For example, the words ‘master’ and ‘mistress’ both started as equally respectable words, but now we associate these words with two very different meanings (Cutler). As a society, if we honestly want to make the employment world open to people of all genders then we should allow our job titles to reflect that (Cutler). There are a few ways that have become popular over the years, in order to eliminate the idea that jobs are for a specific gender. The first solution that is more popular among European languages is to create both a male and female version of a word, such as chairman and chairwoman (Cutler). Another solution is to use gender-neutral words that already exist, by replacing the word ‘fireman’ with ‘firefighter’ or ‘stewardess’ with ‘flight attendant’, we remove the notion that these jobs are for only one gender (Cutler).’”If we’re going to be fair in opening up the world of work to men and women, and make it possible for everybody, maybe our job titles should reflect that”’ (Cutler). This is a step that can be taken by every single person in society, and should definitely be practiced and used in future years.
Women have never been as involved in the military as they are today, especially in the US.
(Huss & Cwikel). In the United States the military is opening up all jobs, including combat, to women by 2016, this is an incredible accomplishment that will hopefully encourage countries worldwide (Losey). Currently the US Air Force has opened 99% of its positions to women (Losey). They still need to open Special Tactics, Combat Control, Special Operations Weather, Combat Rescue, Para Rescue, and Tactical Air Control (Losey). By opening up these six positions alone the Air Force will open 4,350 jobs to the entire Air Force of 600,000 airmen (Losey). In order to open up these fields and create a gender-neutral standard, the Air Force is required to look at everything needed to qualify for that position (Losey). Dr. Neal Baumgartner is helping achieve this by leading a study to develop new gender-neutral requirements. Baumgartner is focused on creating science-based tests that revolve solely on physical ability. ‘”It’s Independent of body size, can that human being perform that physical task.”’(Losey) He continues to explain how the test work. ‘“If we find out that pull-ups is a good test and 12 repetitions is the number then all men, all women will have to do that to maintain their operational standards.”’(Losey) While the United States efforts aren’t going unnoticed, women still make up a small percentage of military personnel worldwide. For example in Canada women only consist of
11.4% of the military, and estimates have shown that women make up below 10% of the military in European NATO countries (Huss & Cwikel). However, there are some countries that do have an impressively large number of women in their military forces, for example, in Israel women make up 34% of the military (Huss & Cwikel). Hopefully with the number of women serving the military growing, other occupations will start becoming more gender equal.
Business leadership careers for women continue to be difficult to achieve.
“Although in recent years women have increased their representation in the labor market, they remain under-leveraged as a source of talent and leadership in employing organizations in nearly every country around the globe” (Festing). In male-dominated organizations, women are under high amounts of pressure to perform and prevent mistakes (Festing). Studies have also shown that women are more likely to search for a job in a career where they are less likely to be discriminated against; suggesting that women are being intimidated by male-dominated organizations (Polavieja). “Women only constitute 4.6% of CEO positions and 19.2% of board of directors at S&P’s 500 companies” (Festing). A large amount of leadership positions have lower salaries for women than for men with the same job description. This disparity is unfounded and most times detrimental to companies. Research shows that women have positive impacts on company performance due to their unique contributions to decision—making processes and their team building and communication skills (Festing). In fact, female managers are more aware of the importance of giving direct and participative feedback to employees and at the same time are also more open to receiving feedback (Festing). Women are more receptive to reciprocal communication and can concentrate on relationship building within a team, whereas men are more competitive and desire individual
achievement and recognition (Festing).
Society’s gender roles are changing, and hopefully there will eventually no longer be gender-specific jobs. For now, however, there are unmistakably less gender-specific jobs then there was a hundred years ago. There also continues to be a variety of jobs that are strikingly similar, but each dominated by opposite genders, however, this is also slowly improving (Olson). The military has repeatedly been ‘Men Only’, but that didn’t stop the women in WWII and it will never stop another woman again, based solely on her gender. Whoever said “it’s a man’s world” evidently didn’t live in the twenty first century. Things are changing, not just in America, but worldwide for all of society, and hopefully one day women like Shelia White will not have to deal with anymore “anti-woman” feelings (John). Throughout history people have been fighting for equality, especially women, and they will continue to do so as long as there remains inequality in the world.