How Gender Roles are Enforced Through Poor Employers and Misogynistic societies
Although many men will argue that gender norms do not exist today the harsh reality is that gender norms still exist. The main cultural norm that effects women today is the expectation that women should take care of children. They are expected to accept stereotypical female jobs like nursing or teaching. As a result of this norm, women tend to give up any potential career they could have pursued. Society and employers fail to support women who want to pursue a career that will require them to take time away from child bearing. Consequently, women have given up forwarding their career as a result of their children bearing capabilities or starting new careers in industries that are dominated by males. Icelandic fisherwoman have and are experiencing this right now as the number of fisherwoman has slowly diminished over the past thirty years. Today, women are leaving the work force and accept the aforementioned gender roles due to society bullying them for working in the numerous male dominated industries and employers consistently failing to accommodate the needs of their female employees; with this being said, there is still light at the end of the tunnel for female fishers as the government can implement harsher punishments and stricter laws regarding equality in the workplace.
Time and time again women in the workforce have been abused by their co-workers and not accommodated by their employers which often times will cause them to feel extremely uncomfortable at work. These men do so because they believe that women should be at home taking care of the children instead of going to work in a ‘male’ job. In Iceland, fishermen would take part in this as Kwok states that,” “…women faced everything from mild hazing to sexual harassment—Willson heard stories of men attaching condoms to the woman’s door or playing pornographic movies.” (Kwok,2017). These events are also comparable to events that occur in India as in India many men have a similar thought process as the Icelandic men as they believe that women should be reduced to housewives and care givers instead of business women or farmers. For example, a family friend of mine who lives in India was assaulted by her family for deciding to get an office job instead of immediately getting married after University. This is because families in India believe that women deserve to be punished if they do not decide to conform to typical gender roles. This can be attributed to religion as a peer reviewed journal written by Dollar and Gatti states that many Indian Hindus adhere to Hinduism set gender roles (Dollar & Gatti, 1998). As a result, their society decided to also views down on women who do not follow them. Unfortunately for working women, employers don’t seem to be concerned with stopping this misogynistic behavior as they seem to turn a blind eye to this issue. Employers could easily tell the men that if they do not treat the women with respect, they will be suspended or fired. To add on, employers can also find a way to accommodate the schedules of women with children. Employers can offer women contracts that only send them out to sea for a few days rather than a few weeks. Thanks to this, women will be more inclined to accept these contracts as now they will be able to watch their children while having a job. Although men would like to argue that women are not good at doing a ‘man’s’ job this is completely false as many of the CEO’S of today’s top businesses like GM, Starbucks, Pepsi co. and more are all females (Howard, 2017). Believing that the only role for women in society is a stay at home mom occurs a lot in extremely religious countries like India and Iceland.
Another reason that women tend to avoid working is because of the way society treats them if they decide to work. Many parents, aunts and neighbors tend to shun working women. An explanation for this occurring in Iceland may be due to the impact of Christianity and the acceptance of Western values in Iceland. For example, in India many families typically stop educating their daughters because they do not want her stock on the marriage market to drop. Consequently, parents who want their daughters to be married off would go to great extents to stop their daughter’s education beyond the tenth grade. If a daughter decides to run away from her family in order to pursue further education, they will be harassed by their parents. In a similar fashion, many fisherwomen in Iceland are often verbally and mentally harassed by their neighbors and family members for pursuing a career in fishing. An example of this given by the article was of a girl named Gudny Hagalin. Hagalin decided to stop fishing after her aunt scolded her throughout her child hood because she would part take in fishing and hunting foxes instead of participating in womanly activities like taking part in-house hold chores (Kwok, 2017). The reason for this attitude towards women working outside of their traditional roles is religion. A journal written by states that Christians, “ … hold more traditional gender tole attitudes than women who belong to more moderate denominations of who have no religious affiliation…”(Read, 2003). Although these societies believe that the only way for their society to thrive is by reducing the role of women to that of a house wife, studies suggest otherwise. Although Iceland is a European country, a perfect illustration of this is Europe as it has some of the richest countries in the world. An article written by Sandra Tzvetkova of ‘Our World in Data’ states that in some of the richest countries in the world, the female workplace participation rates are the highest thus proving that women in the workplace is beneficial to society (Ortiz-Ospina, Tzvetkova, 2017). The majority Christian population follows their religion and believe that by harassing women, they will be able to follow it to a higher degree.
Even though society and men may be against women stepping out of their gender roles, the government can do a lot to help women in the workplace. The government can step in and help women get through the struggle of finding work and their families not supporting them by setting up a number of social safety nets for women who are trying to find a job. For example, governments can give unemployed women with children who are actively trying to find a job government benefits or give them temporary housing. By doing so, women will feel more comfortable with their parents banishing them from home and would lead to an increase in women in the workplace. Another thing that the government can do is provide training to women for certain jobs. For example, my sister, who is now going into programming instead of becoming the doctor my mother wanted her to be, was able to learn code thanks to a school run programming training week. She benefitted from this as she was able to join her school’s primarily male programming club over some of the males who were selected the previous years by their male friends. Another way that the government can help females in the workforce is by setting up higher and more harsh penalties to punish harassing men. By doing so, men would fear the sever punishments set up by the government and let women work. If the government decides to take actions, they will enable females to bolster their resume and employers to feel more obliged to hire females.
Although social norms may be holding women back as employers are not willing to accommodate women and their male co-workers tend to be very sexist leading them to resign from their job, the government can do a lot to help women in fishing. Icelandic women have been a major part of fishing history and can once again be a part of it even though they must struggle to do so.