Women Are More

In Lana F. Rakow's writing involving feminist approaches in response to patriarchal attitudes and actions involved in modern media, she dives into discussing certain questions that have been raised in how women are being treated and portrayed. She states that some of women's opportunities for creativity are being constantly evaluated and dictated by mean, this is in some way silencing and restricting women who may be interested in certain creative outlets. This is interesting to me because these actions taken by the patriarchy can be either blatant or subtle, and even some of these actions are so "normal" that we don't even view them as restricting.

The video above is a perfect example of how some of these actions taken by the patriarchy can be subtle, but can cause long lasting damage to young girls who inspire to be creative women in the future. The video is a Verizon commercial that shows young girls constantly being mentally and physically restricted from mental and physical discovery in science fields and once they get to a mature age they decide to go down different career and educational paths. The statement being made is that young girls are being conditioned into believing that the "messy" and "hard" science experiences are for boys and not for them. This goes along with the theory proposed by Rakow that I brought up in the previous paragraph in that there is a restriction being placed on women, but the scary part is that it has become so "normal" that we as a society don't even recognize that we are doing it.

National Public Radio (NPR) came out with an article three years ago that pertained precisely to the issue of women being steered away from the science communities purely because of their gender. This article involved many examples of scenarios of how gender stereotyping of "men being better at math or science" affected young girls' test scores and overall self esteem, and the effect was definitely measurable. There was also another article released by the New York Times that discussed the topic of women not receiving Ph.D.s at nowhere close the rate of men receiving Ph.D.s, why is that the case? It is stated that it is because from a young age and even still in college women are being brought down or restricted because of their gender, which backs up Rakow's thoughts/writing on the topic. There is clearly an issue of gender stereotyping and gender restriction occurring in our modern day society and it needs to be addressed and brought to light.