Gender Paper

                           Gender Justice

    I believe that gender justice is ensuring that all people, regardless of 
which gender they are, should receive the same access to cultural, economic, 
and social resources.  Neither gender should be unfairly advantaged or 
disadvantaged based on which gender they are. 

    I think that Tyler believes gender injustice is wrong because it is both 
a group relative deprivation and a moral exclusion, which could be passive or 
active depending on the context.  Women can be victims of relative deprivation 
because they can attain the same educational level as men, yet do not make 
the same salary corresponding to their education level as men do.   

    Women can be excluded from positions in companies based on gender as well 
as excluded from certain "male-dominant" jobs or interests.  They feel 
pressure to conform to society's stereotypical roles of staying at home and being 

the nurturer while the male is the breadwinner.  Then, society and the media 
contribute to their feelings of guilt for being a working parent and trying to 
juggle the demands of home and work.  

     If justice is a human characteristic, as Tyler and Plato suggest, then 
it should be our human duty to ensure that there is justice for both genders. 
Resources and opportunities should be equally available to both genders 
ensuring distributive justice.  Both women and men should receive fair and 
equal treatment at their jobs ensuring procedural justice. 

    If we are to eradicate gender injustice, we need to look at the 
underlying assumptions that we place on each gender.  We raise our boys to be 
tough, competitive, and give them gender biased toys that promote these 
traditional male ideals.  We raise girls to be leas active and competitive, 
more nurturing and emotionally expressive.  We also give them gender biased 
toys that promote these ideals as well. 

    Boys and girls grow up with media images and stereotypes that feed them 
the norms for how they should act and what they should be interested in.  If we 
are to start tackling the problem of gender injustice, we need to start when 
the children are small and teach them that men and women are equal and it is 
okay for boys to play with dolls or girls to play with trucks.  Girls can grow 
up to be engineers, scientists, and pilots and boys can be nurses, teachers, 
or other female dominant professions.  

    Gender stereotyping leads to gender injustice so first we need to start 
there.  Then we need to engage in collective action to repair the injustice of 
lack of equity with salaries.  We need to act as a society when women or men 
are victims or active or passive moral exclusion. 

    I chose an article to read online that further examines the issue of 
gender justice by looking at gender equity in the schools and how this impacts 
both girls and boys.  The article can be accessed by going to 
http://www.menweb.org/sommersboys.htm.  In this article, Christina Hoff Sommers criticizes the 
gender equity movement and says we should let boys be boys and stop trying to 
feminize them.  She doesn't believe that there is gender injustice, rather boys 
and girls are different and there is nothing wrong with treating them differently. 

    She starts off the article by citing early pioneers of the girl crisis 
movement.  She mentions pinnacle scholars who caused a popular uproar about the 
plight of our adolescent girls and the gender inequity or injustice they were 
receiving in schools and in society during adolescence.  She goes on to 
mention key scholars in the 90's who are speaking of a boy crises and also causing 
alarm that our boys are in trouble, and they are disconnected, unable to relate 
to people and unable to express emotions. 

    The author criticizes these scholars' works and the subsequent lack of 
scientific evidence to back up their claims. The author also states her position 
emphatically that she denies such a crisis is happening in our schools.  

    The author went to a conference by the National Coalition for Sex Equity 
in Education (NCSEE) and disagrees with their practice of "raising boys more 
like we raise girls" and thus resocializing boys.  The author states that boys 
need to be civilized, they need discipline, direct moral instruction, but they 
don't need to be feminized.  

    The author then discussed differences between boys and girls and the 
types of play they engage in and toys they like to play with.  The author states 
that the different personality traits that boys and girls have are not due to 
oppressive gender stereotypes but they stem from an innate hardwiring that 
causes these differences.

    The author concludes her article with the plight of this resocialization 
of boys and the new methods they are being subjected to in schools which are 
contributing to their academic failure as compared to girls. 

    I thought this article was interesting and the author made some good 
points.  She wrote it more as a persuasive essay because she was very emphatic on 
her position and was persuading the audience to adopt her viewpoints.  She 
brought up some good criticism toward the scholars that first started this 
girl-crisis movement.  She illustrated that none of their findings were published in 
peer scientific journals nor did the studies follow rules of scientific 
research. 

    Although she provided facts to disprove their claims, I thought she was 
weak in the area of providing facts to base up her claims that we shouldn't 
resocialize boys to play with dolls and be more feminine.  The reader could tell 
the author was passionate and opinionated about the topic, but was weak in the 
area of facts to back up some of her opinions on teaching methods and how 
they are failing boys. 

    The second article that I chose to read was article entitled, "Gender 
Equality and Justice in Islam" by Riffat Hassan, who is a professor at the 
department of religious studies at the University of Louisville in Louisville, 
Kentucky.  I chose this article because I have long been interested in women's' 
rights in Muslim countries and have done a lot of reading by women on this topic. 
This is the first article I have read by a theologian and a Muslim man so I 
thought it would be interesting.  The article can be accessed at 
http://www.religiousconsultation.org/hassan.htm.  

    In this article, Hassan intends to prove that the Koran does not promote 
gender injustice towards women, despite popular belief in both Muslim and 
non-Muslim countries.  Women suffer great injustice in many Muslim countries and 
Islam is often used to justify the denial of women's' rights.  This author does 
an excellent job of citing actual text from the Koran and essential 
theological background for promoting gender justice and equality.  

    He states that the Koran seeks to liberate all people and that men and 
women are equal in the eyes of God.  He also states that the Koran guarantees 
all human rights to both men and women. 

    He goes on to examine the reasons why, if the Koran explicitly states 
that women should be given the same treatment as men, that they are one of the 
most oppressed groups in the world?  He cites convincing theological reasons to 
explain why this is happening in these countries. 

    He also provides challenges to theologians and Muslim women to take 
collective action and study the Koran and work to change the injustice that is 
occurring around the world to women.  

    I really enjoyed reading this article and I recommend it to those 
concerned with women's rights.  I thought that the author clearly stated his position 
and organized his points effectively.  He also backed up each of his points 
with facts and theological citations I couldn't find any bad points about this 
article.  I thought it was well written and well organized. .  

    Many people want to help change injustices in the world but they don't 
feel like they can make a difference or they don't know where to start.  
Hassan's article could help empower women because it gives them facts and powerful 
information to start with as ammunition to start a revolution.  

    As stated earlier, gender injustice can come in many forms.  In the US, 
it can come in the form of gender stereotyping and exclusion,  lack of 
distributive justice relating to equal pay, and pressure to conform to expected roles 
in society.  There is also the large problem of domestic violence which is 
gender injustice as well.   

    Internationally, gender injustice occurs in many different forms with 
varying levels of severity. .  Women are denied access to education, careers, and 
choices of spouse.  In some countries, women cannot leave their homes without 
being escorted by a male and they need to be covered from head to toe with a 
mesh opening for their eyes.  
Their children are taken away from them if they divorce their husbands.  

    They are subjected to genital mutilation,  rape, torture, false 
imprisonment, honor killings,  and are victims of HIV infection that is spread during 
war by soldiers who use HIV as a weapon and rape groups of women.  This has 
been used in some Slavic and African countries.  

    Women and girls are forced into prostitution as sex slaves in many 
countries. There are 2.5 million human trafficking victims worldwide according to 
Amnesty International.  The likelihood that a trafficked person is a woman is 4 
out of 5.  

    United National Special Reporter Yakin Erturk stated in Amnesty 
International's magazine that the statistics in violence against women in Guatemala 
have surpassed those of any country he knows.  In comparison to the well 
publicized murders of Mexican women in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua Mexico, which total 
417; the death toll in what some scholars have called Guatemala's feminicide 
has exceeded 1600 women.  Domestic violence and sexual harassment are not 
crimes according to Guatemalan law.  Many of the murderers are going free and 
justice is not resolved in most of these cases. 

    Gender Justice is an important topic to be knowledgeable about and to be 
involved in.  I belong to Amnesty International and the ACLU to support and be 
knowledgeable about gender justice and injustice and what I can do to help. 

   

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