Name: Hayley Grace Whiley
Community/State: Parkes, New South Wales
School: Parkes High School
Age/Grade: 15 Years, Year 10
Overcoming the odds – how can we push through barriers to achieve gender equality?
How can we push through barriers to overcome gender equality?
For years gender equality has been a massive issue especially for women of all ages and there are many ways to break through these barriers and the main step is to let women have a voice! A woman’s voice can change the world one woman at a time.We can start slow by empowering the younger generation; this is important to give women the comfort of financial independence and access to employment and education.
Why should we try to push through these barriers? Well
Gender inequality has been determined through society’s standards, which means those standards are always changing and are eventually changeable overtime. Let’s talk about employment and wages. From 2019; women earn 79 cents to every dollar men earn. It seems that discrimination towards women in the workplace is increasing even though the wage gap is slightly narrowing. Women have been put towards this disadvantage due to them having these stereotypes enforced on them.
Education for women has changed dramatically over time but still holds-up a lot of issues relating to this topic. For many past generations education was not an option; instead of staying at home and raising their family was the next step in life. This led to harmful stereotypes, child marriages, and unintended pregnancies. All of these factors increased the rates of domestic violence; inadequate levels of education and even poverty.
Religions and culture can have a big effect on women’s employment systems due to their beliefs but when it comes to employment many business owners and managers become very discriminative towards other cultures and their beliefs. The LGBTQ+ community also suffer a lot of discrimination and unemployment. 20% of LGBTQ+ employees have reported that they have been discriminated against in hiring, promotions and in pay. 50.8% of the LGBTQ+ community have reported harassed or ridiculed against in front of colleges. Discrimination can lead to mental health issues by providing more support to members of LGBTQ+ in the workplace will make them feel more welcomed into the environment.
These are all of the barriers stopping us from living in a gender-equal world. Pushing through these and enabling new rules and regulations and help prevent/protect those suffering from these gender bias problems and by putting this in action no it will be giving the younger generation many opportunities to go on through life in a gender-equal setting.