How Does Gender Affect a Chosen Profession?

How Does Gender Affect a Chosen Profession

Kim Anderson and Jayne Van Bakel

Mr.Stehlik

MDM4U

Thursday, June 15, 2005

How Does Gender Affect a Chosen Profession?

Hypothesis:

When it comes to the problem of whether or not gender affects a chosen profession we believe that it will. However we feel that gender does not directly affect a chosen profession rather it indirectly affects a chosen profession. What we mean by this is that it is not written in stone that a male can not choose to be a nurse or a secretary and that a woman can not choose to be a mechanic or firefighter. It is possible for males and females to choose whatever profession suits them. However in today’s society it seems as though males and females are stereotyped into having certain jobs. When we say that job profession is indirectly affected by gender we mean that it is not actually being male or female which affects the chosen profession, it is the bias that society demonstrates in the workplace that changes where men and woman are going to work, or what they apply to at university. Therefore the following statistics demonstrates that gender affects chosen profession indirectly.

Background:

We chose to look at this particular problem knowing that in earlier times the roles of men and woman were very much divided. Women were expected to stay in the home and keep house, watch the children, and make meals for the men. The men on the other hand worked outside of the home. It is quite obvious that this is not the case in today’s world as woman’s rights have come a long way and woman are doing all the things that men can do. However it is still unlikely that a male will be a preschool teacher or female will be a mechanic. This may be because of the influence of media and the way that our society still works. However after examining our data we feel that our hypothesis is correct and that gender does affect chosen profession. We will examine this more in-depth in the following report