Gender Inequality: Compare Past to Present - Essay Example

This courageous attitude has enabled women to be dominated thereby presenting themselves as an easy meal for men. Despite of going through the complexities of gender issues over the two decades, which have developed awareness of gender, the evidence of gender inequality remains prevalent throughout the world. Even in advanced industrial nations, women's share of the labor force is lower and their unemployment rate is still higher than men. Moreover, on average, women earn less than their male counterparts.

Occupational sex segregation places women in jobs in which their pay may be less than that of "men's jobs" requiring similar education, training, skills, and responsibilities. In addiction, women's non-labor market contributions tend to be undervalued or ignored, especially in developing countries where a systematic and organized concern with the economics of gender equality is new. (Yousefi, 1997) Even in the highly industrialized countries (HICs), women's issues did not come to the forefront of the public agenda until the 1960s and even today, the debate in these societies about the proper form of gender equity is far from settlement.

Thus, it is not surprising that some newly industrialized countries (NICs) have only set in motion to pay attention to women's issues in recent years. So the comparison between the past and present gender inequality does not seem to highlight any particular difference except for the awareness that one can feel has just commence to develop. Yesterday's women was unfortunate to get a better job due to the lack of education, parents perception was to ultimately marry their daughters in a younger age.

There was no concept of educating a female as parents considered it wastage to invest in their daughters' education. Today, State policies and women's access to paid employment have to some extent offset the patriarchal tendencies that inhibit women's educational attainment relative to that of males. Hong Kong is the best example where, the government moved to provide compulsory and free education up to the early secondary level in 1970s. This lowered the costs of educating daughters and led to a narrowing of the educational gender gap (Yousefi, 1997).

Moreover, parents have become aware that daughters' future is much ahead of the 'access to factory jobs and clerical positions' by educating them, and that therefore; an investment in their daughters' education is likely to provide a concrete payoff. There is also evidence that some women in labor-intensive manufacturing industries have used a portion of their earnings to fund their own educational advancement. As a result of these shifts, women's educational attainment relative to that of men has continued to rise, leading to an increasingly skilled female labor force.

In Singapore, there was a time when women were not subjected that much towards literacy when compared to men, today women's average educational attainment in Singapore has surpassed that of men (Yousefi, 1997) while in Hong Kong the matter is of great concern that gender educational gap has been much widened today as it was over three decades ago. That refers to the dramatic increase in gender wage differentials leading to inequality not only in Hong Kong but also in all of the NICs over the past three decades.

The dramatic changes witnessed by the past decades in the economic role of women in Western