Progress Towards Gender Equality

Ever since the 1970s, the ratio of female to male students enrolled in college has been steadily climbing. From 1985 to this year, the percentage of female college students has increased from 46% to 56%.  Those numbers would have been inconceivable just a few decades ago, however, today girls are dominating education, surpassing their male counterparts in standardized testing in reading, writing and science, and closing the gap in math (The Economist). 

According to a recent article in The Economist, "The Weaker Sex", this shift in academic performance and college enrollment is not caused solely by girls. The reality is that teenage boys are falling behind in school, living in a social environment where it is "not cool for for them to perform". Boys are "50% more likely than girls to fail to achieve basic proficiency in any of maths, reading and science". It is predicted that the number of girls in college may surpass boys even further, "rising to 58%" of all students.

The most pressing question that The Economist article raises is: "So are women now on their way to becoming the dominant sex?" Based off of these numbers, one might jump to the conclusion: Yes. However, though the numbers show great progress for women in education, the battle for gender equality is not necessarily over. It is essential to consider that school is not the only area in which women must overcome injustices.

There is a glaring gender disparity in income that seems entirely unexplained. The truth is that women only earn three quarters of what their male counterparts are paid. If women are superior, more ambitious students, then why is that? Assuming a high level of education translates into job performance, the income difference is ridiculous.

Also, of all the C.E.O.'s of the Fortune 500 companies, only 24, or 4.8%, were female as of last year. Although I do not mean to suggest that that is the best factor to measure with, it is certainly telling about women's leadership rolls in business. The lack of females in charge of big companies may show how women are still discriminated against when it comes to expressing authority or leadership, despite the fact that women are more academically qualified as a sex.

Are these factors ones that will change fairly soon, as an older generation of men and women are replaced in the workforce? Or will the unjust inequality persist if nothing is done to correct it?

Are Our Veterans Being Cheated?

In order to partially repay veterans who have sacrificied years of their lives to defend our country, the government created the Service-members Civil Relief Act, or S.C.R.A, in order to protect veterans from repossession or foreclosure without a court order (New York Times). However, the brutal truth is that this law may have been infringed upon more than 15,000 times in 2012 alone. This means that in a single year thousands of war veterans returned home from duty to find that they had not just lost their innonence, and maybe one or more of their limbs, but also their cars or homes. 

As explained by The New York Times, this injustice occurs because of a law policy known as arbitration, a system "where the courtroom rules of evidence do not apply". Though, supposedly, abitration is "more efficient and less expensive than court", the reality is that the law tactic is a way around the United States' typical justice system (i.e. no judge or jury is involved) and, because of simple economics, arbitrators (the stand-in judges) are more likely to side with large companies than individual. Also, many use arbitration reluctantly because of the high costs of court. Even though regular civilians can be legally subjected to it, veterans are protected from arbitration and the legal disadvantages that come with it by the laws of the S.C.R.A. (New York Times). 

A former Air Force attorney, Colonel John S. Odom, was quoted in the NYT article, saying "mandatory arbitration threatens to take these laws [of the S.C.R.A.] and basically tear them up". The phrase "tear them up" suggests that the military doesn't just feel that arbitration avoids or circumvents their laws but actual insults or dishonors veterans returning home. And I agree with that viewpoint. Thousands of U.S. veterans come home from wars abroad every year, many of them carrying a host of new life challenges, including P.T.S.D., physical injuries, and financial struggles. Any company, such as Nissan which was exemplified in the article, that uses arbitration as a means to strip service members of their legal rights is certainly dishonoring them. 

  

The Hypocrisy of American Values

America was a country founded by colonists looking to escape the oppressive aristocracies of England. It was a nation that believed "all men are created equal". It was a nation that once took in "huddled masses yearning to breath free", desperate immigrants looking for equal opportunity and a fresh start. However, ironically, America is now ranked last, among developed democracies, in equality.

According to a a recent article in The New Yorker, "Richer and Poorer", economic inequality in the United States is greater than "any other democracy in the developed world" (as measured by the Gini index, a scale from 0 to 1 used to measure income inequality). The Gini rating for the United States has steadily climbed from ".397" in 1965 to ".476" in 2013. According to the article, "it's no longer possible to deny that [this change] exists". The new key question is why. Why is America becoming more unequal, and what does it mean for the future?

The article provides one answer that I did not at all expect: Congress. Sure, the approval rating and the productiveness of Congress are near all time lows, but is it also causing or creating inequality?

As explained in the article, the data from a series of international comparison studies shows that it might. Based on the findings of Alfred Stepan and Juan  J. Linz, there is a strong correlation between a a given country's Gini rating and two other political factors: a nation's number of "veto players" (branches of government able to check and balance one another), and a nation's ratio of citizens to representatives in legislature. The higher the number of veto players, the higher a nation's Gini rating tends to be. Similarly, the higher ratio of citizens to representatives, again, the higher the Gini rating (The New Yorker). The United States is no exception to this pattern; it is the leader in all three factors.

The United States is the only democracy in the world with four "veto players", and also has the most "malapportioned" representation in the legislature.

What is interesting, however, is that all of that information about Congress and inequality is included in the last two paragraphs of the seven page article. Though it says that "the problem . . . lies with Congress", the article barely explains it at all. Apart from the fancy, complex statistics, I do not see the connection between the United States' general political formation and heightened economic inequality. Therefore, at this point I don't buy it. The article presents an interesting idea: the effect that general political structure has on equality. But, I do not believe that The New Yorker definitively identified what is making the United States the most unequal democracy in the world. That criminal still desperately needs to be found.