Gender Inequalities vs. Biological Differences

Many people will attribute gender inequalities to biological differences, do you agree with this understanding? Why?
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Many people still attribute gender inequalities to what they see as fundamental biological differences between the sexes. Our history is full of people being pushed into fulfilling particular roles in society because people felt that was all they were suited for. In this essay I will argue why I don’t feel that there are biological differences between the sexes. I will use examples from various points in history and our modern day society to show why I feel this way. We have had many eras where women specifically have been hampered by gender inequalities. Our own modern history, however, gives several examples of how misguided that was. It isn’t biological differences which cause gender inequalities. It is in fact people who are in power, and who don’t want to lose that power. Even in a time of supposed gender equality, we still have people trying to segregate the sexes in the name of the same biological differences.
The Victorian era is not known as a bastion of gender equality by any standards. Women faced huge discrimination and inequality in all walks of life. What people don’t normally think about is that society did make huge strides towards gender equality in that time. By the end of the Victorian era, women were of course nowhere near the level of equality we enjoy today. They had made significant progress, however, progress that was built on in the ensuing decades.
As women gained autonomy and opportunities, male power was inevitably curtailed; significantly, however, men did not lose the legal obligation to provide financially, nor their right to domestic services within the family. Moreover, the key symbol of democratic equality, the parliamentary franchise, was expressly and repeatedly withheld from women. (Marsh, 2016)
Gender inequalities have always changed over time. They do so very slowly, but they do change. That change alone should show that biological differences are not the cause of gender inequalities. The Victorian era had no great shifts from men to women working like the twentieth century did. There were enough people who broke the mould of their society to show that gender inequalities were not set in stone the way many people still think they are. The Victorians had an ideal they called ‘female dependence’ (Marsh, 2016). This was when a woman was totally dependent on the men in her life. This obviously left women with little to no personal power. Women as a whole were subject to huge gender inequality, because they were entirely at the mercy of the men around them. This was not down to biological differences, but somehow it became an accepted explanation. This was possibly because it gave people a good excuse as to why they perpetuated the gender inequalities. Female dependence was couched in terms of women being physically unable to take care of themselves in terms of holding down a job and having a political voice. This then made it much easier for men to justify either continuing to benefit from gender inequality, or indeed to increase the inequalities between the sexes. This was used to try and curtail women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century. Initially the vote was given to women in 1918 to women over thirty (UK Parliament, 2021) with the expectation that these women would have husbands. It wasn’t until later that all women, regardless of the men in their lives, got the vote.
Both of the World Wars that took place in the twentieth century saw women take on the jobs that their husbands, fathers, and sons, had left behind when they went off to war. They went into all the existing professions, and also flocked to munitions and farming work as needed by the war effort (IWM, 2021).
When the men came marching home, most Americans assumed that women were going to return to being housewives. Indeed, a substantial number of people thought women with husbands who could afford to support them should not be allowed to work. (Rowbotham, 1999, p. 268)
The women stepped up in both instances because the jobs needed to be done. Both the normal every day jobs of postal service, shopkeeper, and more, as well as the war-specific jobs of munitions, had to keep going. Without women, the countries at war would have ground to a halt. During the first half of the twentieth century, women faced some sever gender inequalities. They were thought to be unequal to men, which was why they were kept out of the labour market. People who claim that gender inequality is the natural course of things would no doubt claim that it is the biological differences between men and women that caused this. The early twentieth century saw the continuation of the idea that women’s general inferiority was due to their biological inferiority, including that of their brain (Rippon, 2021). However, while these biological differences do exist, they don’t have any meaningful effect (Rippon, 2021). When the world wars came along, and women moved into the workforce, what happened to the biological differences? If they were such a problem for women, if they caused such issues that women were too delicate to work, then what changed? Surely a biological difference doesn...