#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as relevant today, the majority of the men will find the issues to be irrelevant and find the feminist cause to be outdated.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.