Gender Limitations

Many expectations have been settled based on a person's gender as well as many limitations. Those boundaries have been affecting many groups of people from generation to generation. Therefore, stereotypes become common in people’s lives, and women have been suffering from them for a long time. Besides, gender stereotypes affect self-image and self-concept and impact opportunities taken and overall health. In the article, “The Impact of Gender Stereotypes on the Self-Concept of Female Students in STEM Subjects with an Under-Representation of Females,” it describes how stereotypes affect people’s self-concept of their femininity, and the avoidance of females to study in the STEM field is because of negative stereotypes perceptions. Stereotypes also prevent females from achieving their full potential. They create limitations on career choice of females which impact their self-confidence by lowering them (Ertl, Bernhard et al. 9, 27). Moreover, it is common for women to work harder for assets that men naturally inherit, for example, women had to fight to have the right to vote. Women also spend more time taking care of their images and even spend their money to look good and to feel acceptable. These realities that women went through, and still going through, in many nations, cause women to have self-doubt and limitations. Due to poor self-concept, caused by society, women spend copious amounts of time and money to try to be more acceptable to others; however, men do not have to do that much, which is a form of inequality. It is undeniable that there are many factors that cause women to have limited self-image, but those societal factors need to be eliminated. Self-limitation is a mindset that passes down generation; therefore, challenging these false mindsets and working to rewire the minds to believe differently will save the world from one social injustice.

The issue of gender stereotyping and its effects is a social problem. Even if all people do not feel or realize that it is happening and do not think that they are harmed by it, every person is touched by the reality of gender stereotyping. The subjectivist definition of social problems are “efforts to arouse concern about conditions within society [... or] claims about conditions” (Best 10). The impacts of gender stereotyping fits this definition of being a social problem because there are many activists and other educators working to either mitigate the prevalence of stereotyping or to mitigate the ways that it affects opportunity. This process involves helping others understand why it is an issue through arousing concerns on public platforms and taking action steps in order to try to remedy it. Another definition of social problems is given from an objectivist approach and it stipulates social problems “as conditions that somehow harm society” (Best 3). The exact ways in which gender stereotyping is harmful to society will be discussed later on but anything that causes perfectly capable people to not live up to, for example, their full career potential could be harmful to society economically, therefore, gender stereotyping also meets this definition.