Reflective Tag

Often people think of gender being binary, either being male or female, but in actuality there are certain forms of gender that can neither be described as male or female. There are also countries pushing for gender neutrality that is a complete equality for boys and girls in terms of treatment. There are several countries that recognize third gender on official documents such as India, Pakistan, and Nepal.

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In society people often think of somebody as either being male or female but what about the people who do not fit in either. In the United States there is a huge sense of the idea of gender being binary. For just being a transgender women in the United States there is a 1 in 12 chance of getting murdered. On top of that there is a 49 percent chance that they commit suicide.

In Sweden it seems like they are trying to create a neutral gender in order to create gender equality. Sweden doesn’t regulate what toys are given to the children and using gender neutral labels to address people such as instead of using han for male or hon for female they created hen as a new pronoun to take the place of the other two.

There are also other forms of third gender such as berdache also known as two spirited, hijra, and kathoey. Two spirited is the native american term for those who are neither gender. Women were the most common to become two spirits and in some tribes women could only become two spirited. The hijra is the transgender term used in south asia particularly India. Hijras in India typically live in communities of hijras where they commonly work as sex workers for survival. Kathoey is the Thai term for a transgender or ladyboy. Some of these ladyboys go through the surgery and injections in order to get the full transformation while others just wear women clothing.

Different cultures look at gender in different ways, while in some places people are condemned for it others find it completely socially acceptable. I personally think that in order to get complete equality between the genders that gender neutrality is the way to go. Often when kids grow up they are told what they should be based on their gender. In order to get passed these differences in equality they have to be treated equally.

Reflective tag

Men and Women are both different externally and internally. So it only makes sense that there are a few differences in health and diseases between the sexes. When it comes down to surviving men are beat in about every category when it comes to health. This is because some of the biological, social, and behavioral factors effect men more than women.

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Men and women are different in many different ways which cause a gender gap in life expectancy in males and females. The gender gap in america went from 2 years in 1900 to 5.1 years in 2007. In other places the gap is even wider but pretty much everywhere it follows the same trend of females living longer then males. This gap is due to the biological, social, and behavioral differences between males and females.

Men and women share 22 chromosomes together but that last pair of chromosomes known as the sex chromosome is why we are so different. In females the pair of sex chromosomes are both X in a male there is an X and a Y. If a women has a disease on one of her X chromosomes it has the possibility to be counter balanced by her other X chromosome, a man doesn’t have that same possible protection. One thing that keeps the gap of life expectancy from being even bigger then it is the reproductive anatomy. Men and women prostate and breast cancers are pretty closely matched but women are 45 percent more likely to die from their disease then men are.

Looking on the more social side of things, women have a larger network of support then men by about 2.5 times. Men are stereo-typically seen as the worker who earns for the family which increases the amount of stress. The amount of stress from work also increases the risk of hypertension, heart attack, and stroke. As more women are entering the workplace the gender gap is closing.

Finally looking at things from a more behavioral side, men tend to do more risky things which increases there risk for trauma, injury or death. On top of the risky side of males they are also more aggressive which puts the people around him in harms way. A man is about four times more likely to die of a homicide then a female. But females are more likely to be victims of domestic abuse.

Reflective Tag

India has a huge gender gap between men and women brought about by specific gender roles within the culture. India is definitely based off a paternal society where women are seen more as objects then people. These ideals cause a dangerous environment for women through neglect, abuse, and murder.

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India has a very noticeable gender gap between males and females which causes problems primarily for women in that country. The women are seen as subservient to men and are meant to do work in the house. When women violate these roles they are often subject to threats, harassment, and murder. In some areas women do agricultural work, in these cases the women have a higher status then the domesticated women. It seems like there is a link between economic productivity and social status which is similar to chieftain and tribal communities.

The negative feelings toward females also leads to the neglect of girls through insufficient feeding and ignoring illness. A lot of the time these unwanted females die because of the neglect. Now that there is new technology such as ultrasound which can determine the sex of the baby inside of the womb the rate of abortion of female fetuses has increased. There are laws that make it illegal to use sonograms but those cases are rarely looked at so it doesn’t really stop doctors from administering the test.

The government has been trying to get rid of child marriage, sati, and dowry but these practices still remain problems even today. There are numerous reports of these outlawed practices especially having to do with dowry’s in spite of the Dowry Prohibition Act. Literacy rates are also very low in India being 24.8 percent of females can read and 46.5 percent of males. This makes it unlikely that these people are aware of the law and the people who are aware are given social pressure to follow with traditional behavior.

Reflective Tag

The gender gap is something that typically effects women over the world in different ways. The gender gap can effect whether a women can get a job or an education and can even be dangerous. The reason for this gap is usually a culture issue brought about because of a society dominated by men.

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The gender gap is an issue throughout the world which typically effects women. The gender inequalities include whether they can get a job and how much they get payed, arranged marriages, violence, and discrimination. The United States is pretty good when it comes to discrepancy in education but places like India and most of Africa have more then a 16 percent difference between male and female secondary education levels. These numbers mostly have to do with the cultural role of females in those countries, “the female is meant to stay at home and do house chores.”

India and Africa also have a high maternal mortality rate, physical abuse, and trafficking of females. This probably stems from a lack of care for the females in the country and because of their roles as females which causes them to be seen as inferior to men. This idea of superiority causes negative feelings toward the opposite sex which is seen in how people dealt with people of a different race back in the day. The only real way to fix this gap is to make it so women aren’t considered inferior to men which is easier said then done considering the usual noticeable differences in physical strength and speed, pregnancy, and genitalia.

The one common thing between most of the countries is the preference of boys over girls. On a global gender gap report on May 2015 the United States was ranked #20, #1 being the best place to be a women. The top 10 in order from #1 to #10 were Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Australia, and Belgium. A majority of those countries are northern European countries and all the bottom 10 are southern countries. This could be because a lot of the culture is based on region, looking at the European countries women are treated more as people instead of objects. Realizing women as equals instead of as inferior creatures would fix this gap in gender but that would require fixing an entire nations way of thinking.

Reflective Tag

Sex is a genetic difference in a species which characterizes them as either male, female or other. Gender is more of a social or cultural difference which can be determined by your physical appearance. Gender leads to constructed gender types based off of what people perceive that gender should be like, do, wear, or who they should be attracted to. As a child most parents tend to the conform to the idea of boy and girl colors and toys so that the child can shape into the roles they are given.

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Gender has many dimensions to it such as the psychological side which is how the boy or girl feels on the inside. Then there is the social side which are the beliefs that are held with each gender and the roles and responsibilities that come with it. The behavioral side deals with how a boy or girl expresses their identity in the way they dress or act.

Gender can vary over time such as the chinese foot binding or the corsets which damaged the body in order to fit the standard for women at the time. There are also varying gender roles in our own time between different cultures such as the Muslim garments which covers the women’s faces. For the people who go outside the lines of gender ridicule and threats of violence can be accompanied. Cross dressing can be done by both gay and straight people because of either social reasons or because they like wearing those types of clothes. In Afghanistan the cultural practice called bacha posh is when in a family without boys they choose a girl to live, dress, and behave like a boy.

Sex is what a person is born as based on his or her genes while gender is a cultural thing. A person born a male can have a female gender because of the way he acts or dresses. People who are born a certain sex have a lot of pressure to fit the gender roles that are supposed to be specific to them (boy play with cars while girls play with dolls). This separation at an early age tends to brainwash the kids into believing that the gender roles they were given are what they should aspire to be. This causes the separation of males and females socially which has been shown to cause a favoritism of males over females.