Gender Roles

Recently in English class we had to find an article that focused on Gender roles and how they play out in society, summarize it, and either agree or disagree with it. The article I used was As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force by Catherine Rampell. Anything that is taken to be offensive was not intended to do so, so here is the paper:

In the recent recession that we are experiencing, many people have been facing unemployment. Unexpected trends show that more men are losing jobs as opposed to women who, according to studies have higher jobs that are more recession proof, as discussed in the article “As Layoffs Surge, Women May Surpass Men in Job Force” by Catherine Rampell. This trend does correlate with the findings that, “the percentage of families supported by women tends to rise slightly” and poises women to possibly surpass men in the work place (Rampell). Prior to the recession, women made up 49.1% of the workplace, and after the layoffs, which men made up 82%, women now seem to be the dominant force in the job market. Because of this shift, more women are becoming the, as Rampell says, breadwinner of the household. Rampell also provides plenty of examples to prove her point, that although women have become the main source of income, men have not picked up the slack at home, and have instead devoted most of their time to finding jobs; a task that society dictates men do.
Rampell has said that although the job market has now shifted in favor of women, they are still being resisted in the workplace. She states facts about specific individuals who make 80 cents to the dollar of their male counterparts, or do not share the same benefits as men. However, the reason why men are being laid off over women is because women are in more white-collared jobs, which seem to be more recession proof than the blue-collar jobs that most men have gotten laid off from. This alone would imply that women now hold more power in the workplace: the fact that they have replaced men as the business people of America. Yet Catherine still complains that women only make 80 cents to the dollar of their male counterparts…who are currently getting sacked over them.
So why is Rampell complaining that women are allowed to keep their jobs over men, but at a 20 cent lower rate? This is because Rampell, like most women, want to be “equal” to men, or at least claim that. In reality women such as Rampell want to be separate but equal to men, or even superior to men. Rampell remarks at the apparent disregard for family life that unemployed men have as opposed to women, whose time with children nearly doubles when unemployed. Yet “Many of the unemployed men interviewed say they have tried to help out…but they have not had time to do more because job-hunting consumes their days” as it should because, as Rampell has stated, when make more money in the same job as a women (Rampell). So why should men, who had been making a 6 digit income for their family, take backseat to their spouse, with a lower paying job, and stay home and take on the family oriented roles? In my opinion, the answer is they shouldn’t; if women want to be equal then they should protest for men to partake in equal amounts of time doing household chores and having equal types of jobs. This means men should spend more time at home, but women, as a whole, should enter more blue-collared jobs and become just as susceptible to the recession as men.