Civic Issues: Wage Gap Isn’t Our Only Gap

“In all countries, men have a higher self-esteem than women do, but the gender gap varies. Confidence gap between men and women were smallest in the developing world.”

The beginning of this post is based around an article called Money Can’t Buy You Self-Esteem (if You’re a Woman) from Time‘s online magazine, published very recently in January. The article starts out by stating how overused the word empowerment is, how people can use it to refer to things both economically and emotionally, and how having one does not necessarily mean that the other follows.

As most people know, it has been seen through many surveys word wide that women tend to rate themselves as worse than men in almost any topic when rating themselves. For example, women tend to report that they are not as good at math as they actually are, where as men tend to oversell their own mathematic abilities (it was even mentioned that parents tend to think their sons are smarter than their daughters!!). This stems from the fact that men in general have a much higher self confidence.  

The smallest gender differences were actually seen to be in Asian countries; “Women in Western cultures are more likely to compare themselves to men, whereas in Asian countries, women compare themselves to women.” In many Asian countries, women are expected to handle both the responsibility of the house and a job, which leads to them looking at other women who are able to handle both and feeling like they are not doing good enough.

yippywhippy international women's day women feminism feministWhen it comes to jobs, women report that they lose 50% of their confidence in reaching top management positions, where as men report a mere 10% less confidence. The fact remains that when people are told to picture someone in authority, the majority of people still picture a man in a suit.

I asked some of my friends to describe what they picture when I asked them to close their eyes and picture someone powerful. “He’s big… and they’re muscular,” explained a friend of mine who would like towomen feminism feminist girl power womens day remain anonymous. She immediately said he, meaning that the first thing she thought of was a man. Another friend responded confidently, “Strong jawline, independent, Superman or Batman.” This reminded me that we are so easily influenced by the things we see as a child, especially on TV or in movies.

In America, we grow up with lots of strong male figures — from TV to movies to your own home. It is expected for children to need a nurturing mother, but more importantly a strong stable father figure. Women are actually outnumbered onscreen by men three to one.

This post was a lot of everything, but I think I touched on how important feminism is and how women empowerment both economically and emotionally is needed globally. I think that once we establish more emotional empowerment, stemming from including more positive women role models for young girls in countries around the world, economic empowerment will follow because women will be more and more confident.

Further Readings on Women Empowerment:

Rwanda’s women make strides towards equality 20 years after the genocide

 It’s not lack of confidence holding women back, it’s the myths we tell ourselves

5 responses to “Civic Issues: Wage Gap Isn’t Our Only Gap

  1. Mary Lawrence

    This is a great post! The men in my life have all been super traditional “strong” maybe a little egocentric…lol. But I find it interesting that while the women role models in my life have been just as (if not more) intelligent than the male role models, they don’t seem to be convinced of their greatness. I think its interesting how women from different cultures view themselves.

  2. I really like the way you used a variety of different approaches, and cultures, to analyze this issue of self-esteem. Your blog has been excellent.

  3. Mary Kate Moran

    I’m always surprised how often our civic issues blogs overlap! My post was also based on a self-reporting study where women reported worse confidence than men. I’m really interested in your examples with your friends and your concerns about female role models. I recently had a conversation with my cousin last weekend about how she’d never once described a male as “strong” (in an emotional, mental sense) – as if it’s implied that males are strong but females aren’t strong unless they’re an exception to a rule. It seems like such an odd description when we think about it! I think your conversations with your friends were a really good way of calling out that social norm. Such a cool post!

  4. Eleanor Wing

    This is very interesting, especially the fact that in developing nations there is a smaller discrepancy in the developing world. This really shows that a lot of society has a gender gap engrained from a very young age. A lot of our media shows strength as a masculine quality and timidity as a feminine quality. Definitely this should be changed as we continue into the future.

  5. Krista Grennan

    It is critical that as a society we start empowering women by having more media representation of strong women. One of the greatest factors that opposes equality is media representation. It is hard to imagine a society with power equally distributed when most television shows dress women in revealing clothing and have men as the strong powerful businessman. It is frightening that women and young girls underestimate themselves and their abilities. As women, we need to acknowledge that we are just as capable as men at being powerful or succeeding in life.

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