Gender Equality

Did you know that about 75% of microcredit borrowers in Afghanistan are women(Microfinance Times}? Gender equality is something that is fought for in America, and we’ve come a long way from where we used to be. I’m going to be comparing the United States and Afghanistan. There is is so much inequality between men and women in the world, and our community should be treated the same.

(AFP)

The United States is famous and infamous for many things, and gender equality is definitely one of those things. In 2010, there were approximately 65 million women in the labor force and 53 percent of these women were concentrated in three industries education, trade, and local government (BLS 2011a). So not too many years ago there was still gender equality. Women still get payed less than men, and don’t get many jobs because men get them over women. In fact women make 79% of what men make (Hill, Catherine).

Afghanistan is also infamous for a couple things, like the Taliban. The Taliban is actually a perfect example of gender inequality. The Taliban is a male dominated group, that controls most of the Middle East. They don’t allow girls that are aged ten and over from going to school, and women had to wear the all-covering burka. Even though it’s hard for men the rules that the Taliban gave men were still biased towards men. For example Men were required to grow beards.The punishment for going to school is death or serious injury. A famous story of a girl being attacked was Pakistani Taliban attacks took place in “October 2012, when schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai was attacked on her way home in the town of Mingora” . There is only a few incidents where men in the middle east are attacked severely that were reported. There are protests to stop these attacks, but their effort isn’t strong enough which is why the Taliban rules most of the middle east and some citizens fight back.

There are some similarities between these two countries. For example there are protests all the time to promote gender equality. In the U.S. the situation isn’t nearly the same as afghanistan since we don’t have terrorists attacking us every day, but in America we still fight hard for gender equality for men and women. In Afghanistan they fight to promote by doing protests like we do in America. The main difference is that in the U.S. women are fighting for better pay and better jobs, while in Afghanistan they’re fighting to get in school, and better jobs and pay, which is a lot more.

It’s easy to tell that in Afghanistan there is a lot more to fight for, but most countries are still fighting for gender equality. In the U.S. it’s to promote gender equality just the same as Afghanistan.

Works Cited

"Gender Equality in Afghanistan." - Wikigender.org. Web. 15 Oct. 2015.