American Culture Argument

Quote: Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women

When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences.

Introduction

Every day, people who live at variance to expected gender norms face violence, abuse, rape, torture and hate crime all over the world, in their home as well as in the public arena. Though most cases of violence never get documented, we know that in the first weeks of 2009 alone, Tran's women have been murdered in Honduras, Serbia and the United States. Tran's men are equally victims of hate crimes, prejudice and discrimination despite their frequent social and cultural invisibility.

Thesis Statement

This is to devise a measure of gender identity, to investigate the development of gender identity in female adolescents, and to examine the relation of gender identity to self-esteem.

Discussion

Self-esteem is strongly and negatively correlated with distress and depression, and individuals who have high perceptions of self-worth and self-esteem are thought to cope better with stress. Hence, to understand distress and depression, one needs to understand the factors and processes that contribute to low self-esteem. Although there are many correlates of self-esteem, this paper focuses on gender, age, and social class and whether these factors intersect in their influence on self-esteem.

The strong and consistent finding regarding gender and self-esteem is that compared with men, women have lower levels of self-esteem in adulthood. Although boys and girls start with very similar levels of self-esteem in early adolescence (between ages 11 and 13), they gradually diverge throughout the teenage years and adulthood with boys gaining a sense of positive self-worth and girls losing that sense. Lower levels of self-esteem help to explain the fact that girls and women are more likely to experience higher levels of distress and depression than boys and men. Although there are several explanations for this relationship in the mental health literature, is compelling. She argues that men and women have different social structural experiences that begin in early childhood and are reflected in the relative power that men and women have in society. Relative power, in turn, influences self-appraisals. As a result, Rosenfield suggests that “Given the power, the responsibility in the public domain, receipt of support, and value placed on masculine pursuits, males generally tend toward high self-esteem”. Although Rosenfield uses this argument to explain gender differences, it can also be extended to explain differences in self-esteem among men. Working class men, for instance, have considerably less power than do middle and upper class men, and with increasing age, the likelihood of men engaging in valued masculine pursuits declines considerably (e.g., working for pay and playing football).

Other compelling explanations for gender differences in self-esteem focus on issues related to reflected appraisals and social comparisons. Girls and women, more than boys and men, are socially judged based on what they look like. If they diverge from socially constructed cultural ideals of beauty, others may think poorly of ...