Sexism Effects On Women

Sexism has been around for as long as anyone can remember. No one really knows how it has started because no matter where you go, it’s just there. Practically, sexism is a stereotype that usually discriminates people based on their gender. Someone can be sexist by saying or doing something that makes them feel powerless due to their gender. For example, if a man were to say that his wife can only stay home and take care of the kids, the man is putting a typical role on his wife because of her sex. Sexism does has many different effects on men women, and children. Believe it or not, men do get affected sexism just like women. Even though males are usually thought of as tough, aggressive, and emotionless they really aren’t. The reason behind

Society/Sexism has expectations for women that set standards and barriers for them to achieve the “ideal woman”. By becoming the “ideal woman”, women have to deal with many effects. One of the most common effects is being more cautious about body image (no author). Women are expected to care about they way they look and are made to believe they need to look like celebrities or supermodels on the covers of magazines. With these kinds of expectations, women begin to deal with physical and mental issues (no author). At Marquette University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology a woman named Debra L.Oswald wanted to know how positive and negative sexist attitudes towards women affect how they feel about their body image. Oswald analyzed how a father with warm hearted sexism beliefs such as classic roles and appearances a female should have, positively affected their daughters (no author). Since these women feel comfortable playing traditional female roles, when trying to step out of these roles they could experience hostile sexism from others and begin to have negative self esteem (no author). Sexism makes people believe that women can only do certain things because of the roles and stereotypes being thrown at them. It is not fair for women to deal with what men only think they are “capable” of. Also, Oswald analyzed that when women experienced hostile sexism from friends and family members they began to

Children and television are a possible root for sexism. It is estimated that kids spend almost 30 hours a week watching T.V (Witt). Since television has a huge opportunity to impact children, they sometimes demonstrate sexism, a lot. Children are taught typical gender stereotypes on expected attitude and behavior. These typical stereotypes make children believe what roles men and women can and cannot play in society. Worst of all, since sexism teaches kids what they need to be, they begin to imitate these roles (Witt). For example, televisions shows for kids demonstrate that only boys can be police officers, firefighters, or business owners and girls can only be fashionistas, maids, or secretaries.Television also teaches children what is considered “appropriate” behavior from both genders (Witt). Ever heard of Saturday morning cartoons? Well, they’re also sexist. It has been proven that female characters are shown less often than male characters (Witt). This means that females aren’t valued even in cartoons! In addition, cartoons often show males as a more dominant character than females. The reason behind this is that 53% of the viewing audience are boys