#4 Post: Final Summary/Reaction

The objective of the survey was to find out what people today really feel about the topics which I researched during the semester. Also to discover if the majority of people were aware of the issues facing women today and if they agree with the conclusions I reached from my research. In general I wanted to know how informed are people today on the topics of most interest to those who champion the rights of women to be equal. Some of the information I wanted to verify with the survey is based on deductions from my research this semester:

·         Not everyone believes that feminism and the charge for equal rights is relevant today. Many people ‘on the street’ believe the inequities have been remediated.

·          Women are still not paid as much as men are for the same job. It is difficult for them to discover how much men performing the same job as them are making.

·           Women do not reach the same heights in their careers - a greater % of men make it to the corporate level jobs. Some corporate level women say that we are not helping ourselves in this matter – some say a lot of women have a hard believing that they deserve high level jobs or that they have time for that level of commitment due to tradition and the amount of work they have at home. Women don’t try as hard.

·         Women have to work twice as hard as men to get the interesting, high paying jobs. They also bear more of the burden than men for taking care of things at home – running the household and taking care of the children.

·        Many people think that women are inherently not as intelligent as men are in math and science.

·         In some professions, women are still very much discriminated against and harassed for even trying to be treated equally. Some sectors (especially those that are traditionally male roles) have a long way to reach the goal of everyone being treated equally based on a standard and their ability to perform the work.

My initial prediction was that the majority of women would think that feminism is still relevant today and that the issues that feminism tries to deal with and solve are crucial issues for the modern world. I thought that although a portion of the men taking the survey may find some feminist issues as relevant today, the majority of the men will find the issues to be irrelevant and find the feminist cause to be outdated. At first the data seemed to be supporting this theory, but as more people responded, the theory that men would respond a lot differently than women was not proven – the difference was not that significant.

63 people took my survey called “The Relevance of Feminism Today”. Here is an analysis of the results:

·         37 of the respondents were male (almost 60%)

·           22 had a household income of over $200K

·           Everyone who responded was over 20, 16 of them were over 60, 27 of them were below 40

·            It is interesting and satisfying to me to learn that the Feminist movement is relevant to most people today – men and women of all ages and status. My assumption of how relevant feminism would be to men vs women was incorrect. 85% of all people surveyed considered the movement to be moderately relevant or more. 70% of men answered the same way which is still very high. When looking at the people who thought it was very or extremely relevant, 39% of all people thought it was and 35% of all men thought so.

·          Of note is that a majority of the people that responded that their income was over $200K were men. 54% of men responded that way and only 9% of the women. This might support the theory that men make more money than women for the same jobs and/or that they reach higher level jobs and therefore make more money than women.

·         It is also interesting to see that according to my respondent audience, less men thought that women were frequently given equal opportunities and salaries in the workplace. Only 8% of the men felt that way whereas 20% of the women felt that way. This goes against what I thought would be the results. However, No-one believed that women were excluded from opportunities. That shows progress – at least the impression that women are given more opportunities these days, even if the majority response was “sometimes” at 2/3 of the respondents. 

·          Many more women than men feel women are discriminated against in daily life - 96% vs 83% - and women answered that with “frequently” 20% more.  Six men answered that women were never discriminated against, but only 1 woman answered that way.

·         A majority of women (58%) feel that women perform the majority of the household management. A significant minority (6%) of the respondents felt that men perform the majority of the household management; A majority of men (62%) feel that women and men perform equal amounts of the household management but 30% admit that women perform the majority of the household management.

·         The Construction industry was ‘hands down’ voted as the worst when it comes to treating women equally - 50% voted it the worst followed by the Military at 20%. Healthcare and education (traditionally more females have worked in these sectors) were not chosen by any of the respondents. This supports the notion that in traditionally male jobs, women are having a hard time reaching an equitable working environment.

·          Another interesting statistic of the survey shows more men believe it is possible for women to aspire to corporate level jobs. This may support the notion that women don’t believe in this enough and don’t try as hard to get to that level.

·           90% of all surveyed responded that women are just as intelligent as men in all subjects and areas. Only 1 person (a man no less) responded that women are better at mathematical and scientific subjects in general than creative subjects. Only 1 woman chose the phrase women are better at creative subjects in general rather than mathematical and scientific subjects whereas 4 men thought that was the case.

So does the analysis of the surveys support some of the conclusions I reached from my prior research? 

·          Most people believe that feminism and the charge for equal rights is relevant today. Since we still have a long way to go before we can declare victory, I believe these people may believe the issues are relevant but they may not be supporting the movement by personally getting involved. Perhaps movements like these can never die as the nature of human beings is to set people apart from each other based on physical attributes.

·          The results may support the notion that women are still not paid as much as men are for the same job. National statistics prove this however. This topic has been in the news quite a bit lately.

·          Again national statistics prove that women do not reach the higher level corporate jobs business nearly as much as men. Since less women believed they should aim for that level job, this might support the statement that women don’t try as hard to get those jobs or dedicate themselves to their career as much as men.

·         The data supports that more often than not, women bear more of the burden than men for taking care of things at home – running the household and taking care of the children.

·         The people who responded to this survey do not follow the thinking that women have a different inherent intelligence than men.

·       The survey responses support the thinking that in professions such as construction and the military, women are not treated equally.

The survey data supports that there is a need for the Feminist movement today. The data shows that equality is far from present and that there is indeed a fairly long way to go to reach it. There needs to be more people involved to catalyze more movement towards equality and women must continue the effort to bring about social change. We must all work together on accelerating efforts to alter these mindsets that have been in effect for so long. I believe that progress has been slow but we are starting to see improvement in the equality of the treatment of women. I am encouraged by the survey results – in fact it shows that in general men are not as far away from the effort as I thought. My hope is that men and women can work together to make changes in society. Everyone can benefit from a productive, encouraged workforce that can achieve balance and happiness in life by sharing in all activities. Welcoming and encouraging diversity in all walks of life maximizes human energy, opens up creativity, and generally produces better results than a homogeneous, 1 dimensional effort.

#3 Post: Revised Summary/Plan/Update

I used survey monkey to design and administer my survey. My survey link is https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/J3DGKK8. The design of my survey is as follows:

1) Which category below includes your age? - various choices

2) What is your gender? - male; female

3) What is your approximate average household income? - various choices

4) How relevant is the Feminist movement today? - Extremely relevant; Very relevant; Moderately relevant; Slightly relevant; Not relevant at all

5) In your experience, are women given equal opportunities and salaries in the workplace? - Frequently; Sometimes; Never

6) In your experience, are women discriminated against in daily life? - Frequently; Sometimes; Never

7) In your home, what is the balance of responsibility for household management (includes cleaning, cooking, childcare) - Women perform the majority of the household management; Men perform the majority of the household management; Women and men perform equal amounts of the household management

8) What industry would you pick as the least equitable in their treatment of females workers? - Military; Government; Construction; Healthcare; Financial; Services; Education

9) What is the highest level of job do you think it most possible for women to aspire to and achieve today? - Administrative; Line worker; Supervisor; Mid-level management; Corporate level management

10) Choose the phrase you would use to describe women’s intelligence. - Women are better at creative subjects in general rather than mathematical and scientific subjects; Women are just as intelligent as men in all subjects and areas- depends on the person; Women are better at mathematical and scientific subjects in general than creative subjects

My prediction was that the majority of women would think that feminism is still relevant today and that the issues that feminism tries to deal with and solve are crucial issues for the modern world. I thought that although a portion of the men taking the survey may find some feminist issues as relevant today, the majority of the men will find the issues to be irrelevant and find the feminist cause to be outdated.

So far the data from the survey is supporting my theories. On average, the women who took the survey responded in a way that supports my hypothesis. Women more often responded that women are not treated equally today and that there is still discrimination against women taking place. They all felt that women do all the household management and that women are equally intelligent. Men did not all answer that feminism is not relevant, but they did not find it as relevant as women so far. The older they were, the more they thought that feminism was not relevant, that women were paid equitably, and that they should not aspire to jobs higher than supervisor or middle management. Younger men tended to think that women are the same intelligence wise. So far the data shows the construction industry is the one most likely where women are not treated as equals. The reason would seem to be that this is a traditionally male industry and requires strength and endurance. Most people believe men are better at those things.

I continue to believe that there is a need for the Feminist movement today. A large portion of men and even some women believe that women should not aspire to Corporate level jobs. A majority of the respondents think that women are frequently treated equally on the job. Most people responded that women are discriminated against only sometimes. The reality is that women are still paid less than men and are given a much smaller portion of the Corporate level jobs than men. People still believe they have different brain capacity than men. A resounding majority believe that women handle most of the cooking, cleaning and child care. The data shows that equality is far from present and that there is indeed a fairly long way to go to reach it. Some men and even some women do not even want true equality of men and women. There needs to continue to be effort to bring about social change to alter these mindsets that have been in effect for so long.

#2: Strategy/Plan for Research

I have decided that I will use the survey method for my topic of feminism. I plan to have an online survey through google forms. I am going to ask many of my friends and family to send it to all of their Facebook friends so that I can get a variety of different people influenced by their different societies and backgrounds. This means that I will allow answers from all ages, but I am really going to focus on ages from 18-60 from both men and women. I will begin by stating that the survey is completely anonymous. It will begin with the following questions: 1. What is your age? 2. What is your gender? 3. What state do you live in? 4. What is your household income? (the choices will be: 1) $0-$20,000, 2) $20,000-$50,000, 3) $50,000-$100,000, 4) $100,000-$200,000 5) over $200,000). After these questions, I will have 6 questions about what feminism means to them and whether or not they think that the issues that feminism tries to address are still relevant today. My prediction is that the majority of women will think that feminism is still relevant today and that the issues that feminism tries to deal with and solve are crucial issues for the modern world. I think that although a portion of the men taking the survey may find some feminist issues as relevant today, the majority of the men will find the issues to be irrelevant and find the feminist cause to be outdated. This survey will be a great way to find out what people really think of women and their role in society today.

#1: Suggested Research Method/Why

My topic is feminism. I plan to combine the methods of surveying and observation. I want to take a survey of what feminism means to people. I plan to survey mostly older people between the ages of 18-60. They can be any ethnicity and I want to ask both men and women. I may ask them where they grew up to get an idea of the influence that their childhood had on their view of this topic. I want to see the reactions of both the people who are indifferent to the topic and people who have strong viewpoints on the subject. I am going to ask them certain questions relating to the topic of feminism, and I am going to observe who responds first and who remains more passive. I plan to either do it in a mall or another large public places that gathers many different people in different positions of society. I feel that this will reveal information about their views on the place of women in modern society.