Kultur 5 - Andrew McBride

The article "Excerpts from 'Women in Germany'" showed that, overall, though women's rights have leaped forward, the struggle for gender equality has rendered somewhat of a mixed bag. One way to see this in comparison to the United States. In some respects, women are doing much better in Germany than in the United States. Germany has gender equality written directly into its constitution. The U.S. constitution has no such protection. There was a struggle in the 20th century, particularly in the 1970s, to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/overview.htm) which would add gender equality into the U.S. constitution. Unfortunately, due to anti-feminist activists and groups, the ERA was not ratified by enough state legislatures. Constitutional protections are extremely important; they show that the nation as a whole cares deeply about the rights of women. Additionally, it provides an ultimate legal recourse for gender discrimination at the highest level of the law.

Though this may be enshrined in the law, equality on the ground can be a more complicated issue. Much like the United States, there is drastic income inequality in Germany between men and women. This is primarily due to the fact that women and men tend to do different jobs and the jobs that men tend to do are better paid. One way that this can be explained is that society places a higher value on traits and activities related to men, as it places a higher value on men in general. Therefore, those jobs typically done by women are valued less by a patriarchal society, even though they are just as important and require just as much intelligence and as many skills. Valuing the work that women do similarly to the work that men do, even when they are in different professions, would go a long way toward remedying this situation. Related to this is the "second shift," or the fact that, even when women work jobs outside of the home, they are still expected to be the primary caregivers and homemakers. This overly burdens women with more work overall than men, even though much of that work is unpaid. By spreading out child and home care more evenly, men and women could be given more equal chances in society. Germany, though off to a good start in terms of gender equality, still has a ways to go.