Best 51 quotes in «gender inequality quotes» category

In Riyadh, I would be licensed to operate procedures on critically ill patients, yet never to drive a motor vehicle. Only men could enjoy that privilege.

I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist!

I’ve seen a dozen women have affairs. They are given high fives and congratulated for standing up for themselves and finally leaving their spouses. I’ve watched an equal number of men have affairs. They are vilified.

I sighed sometimes, watching Barack pull the same dark suit out of his closet and head off to work without even needing a comb. ... I quickly found out a truth that no one talks about: Today, virtually every woman in public life--politicians, celebrities, you name it--has some version of Meredith, Johnny, and Carl. It's all but a requirement, a built-in fee for our societal double standard.

It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior.

On s'empresse de les décharger de toute tâche pénible et de tout souci: c'est les délivrer du même coup de toute responsabilité. On espère qu'ainsi dupées, séduites par la facilité de leur condition, elles accepteront le rôle de mère et de ménagére dans lequel on veut les confiner.

Mais en fait les voix féminines se taisent là où commence l'action concrète; elles ont pu susciter des guerres, non suggérer la tactique d'une bataille; elles n'ont guère orienté la politique que dans la mesure où la politique se réduisait à l'intrigue: les vraies commandes du monde n'ont jamais été aux mains des femmes; elles n'ont pas agi sur les techniques ni sur l'économie, elles n'ont pas fait ni défait des États, elles n'ont pas découvert des mondes. C'est par elles que certains événements ont été déclenchés: mais elles ont été prétextes beaucoup plus qu'agents.

Mais même au XIX siècle elles étaient souvent obligées de se cacher; elles n'avaient pas même 'une chambre à elles', c'est-à-dire qu'elles ne jouissaient pas de cette indépendance matérielle qui est une des conditions nécessaires de la liberté intérieure.

No, I'm the human here. I'm the life at stake. I'm the one with fingernails, who feels pain. Me.

Même les manifestations et les initiatives féminines n'ont pris de valeur que lorsqu'une décision masculine les a efficacement prolongées.

Moving beyond past wounds and hurts and building a culture of respect, dignity, and flowering love

Our Arab mothers and sisters are suffering from injustices like domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriages and honour killings, some are still fighting for their right to drive or travel without male custody therefore our powerful Arab media was not only expected to broadcast this particular one of a kind Women’s march it should have held panels to dissect the issues being brought forth in order for the Arab world to better understand that gender equality is not an idea that one believes in, it is a planned movement that requires an enormous effort on the part of both men and women to reach.

Sadly, our society still perpetuates the false ideal that a real man should be all masculine, and a real woman all feminine. Neither is possible, nor desirable.

People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.

Some of the common occurrences of injustice are the presence of poverty, starvation, gender inequality, neglected widows and orphans and the injustice towards other vulnerable groups of people.

She was a spiky teenager rebelling against the soul-suck mirror reflected back at her in her mother’s blank stare, her question mark of a spine. Determined to beat the odds, she completed high school with distinction. But there was a caveat. Beydan was allowed to roam and educate herself – up to a point. On her eighteenth birthday her Father sat her down and held out his Rolexed wrist. Studded with crystals and flecks of diamond, the watch dazzled in the light. All Beydan could hear, however, was tick-tock-tick-tick-tick-tick - time to neatly fold all her hard work, to parcel up her progress, send it to the attic in her subconscious and let dust gather on her dreams. There was a lump in her throat and a stopwatch in her womb.

Some men are so indoctrinated that they sincerely believe that other than cooking and cleaning the only thing that a woman can do better than them is being a woman.

They are afraid to read out loud, fearful of being thought stupid or foolish or — what? I ask them. Girlish? Boring, says one Megan. (Which Megan? I can’t remember.) This is a terrible fear, I know — this fear of not being interesting — of being trivial, not special. It is almost as great, I think, as their fear of standing out and being special.

That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.

The passive and overt violence waged against the women and children of the world must end.

The Pluto boys were already The Planets so the Pluto girls were The Lady Planets. Their colors were purple and white, their mascot was a round planet with legs, arms, a perky face. The Reservation team was The Warriors but the girls weren't The Lady Warriors, they were just The Warriors also. Their colors were blue and gold. They didn't want to have themselves as a mascot so they had an old time shield with two eagle feathers.

Studies have shown a woman looking for a 'sense of humour' wants a man who makes jokes and who likes to laugh. A man looking for the same quality in a woman does not expect her to be funny; rather, he wants her to laugh at his jokes.

That's the trouble about the good guys and the bad guys! They're all guys!

The very act of accepting her position at Mademoiselle was an act of open defiance against Dick Norton, his entire family, and the gendered expectations of midcentury America.

The Women’s March did what it set out to do and that is to show the sheer magnitude of passion that the female voice can project and most importantly, for our future generations, it has shattered the falsity of the patriarch myth that women do not support other women.

Toward the end of the three weeks, I have lunch with a representative from the foundation. She wants to know what could be done to make the girls more “confident.” I rattle on, about girl-only classrooms, giving them room away from the boys, time to talk, permission to question and complain without being afraid of being seen as whiners, complainers, bad girls, tough girls. But I know that all of them, boys and girls both, are still only partly formed, soft as Playdoh. They are like golems — their bodies in full flower and everything else a work-in-progress. I don’t dare say there are essential gender differences here, though I wonder more and more. “But girls have so many more role models now,” the foundation representative says. She is a petite, elegant, beautiful woman in a black suit, perfectly coifed. More role models. Which ones, I wonder? An increasingly impossible physical ideal? A clear-cut choice between career and family? They’ve seen their mothers suffer from trying to do both. They know all about the “second shift” of endless work. When I was 15, my role models were burning bras, marching in the street, starting clinics, passing laws and getting arrested. Role models now are selling diet books and making music videos. The simple fact is, I don’t know. I don’t know how to help them. I know that I have to keep checking my watch during lunch and rush off to make the final bell for sixth period, and that all of these children who are almost grown have spent their entire lives ruled by a clock and the demands of strangers. They have grown up in a fragmented and chaotic place over which they have no control. I know they’ve rarely thought about the possibility of getting out; they don’t see any place to get out to, anywhere to go not ruled by bureaucratic entanglements and someone else’s schedule and somebody else’s plans. If girls are somehow wired toward pliancy, then the helpless role of student in the shadow of the institution is the worst place they can be. If we want to teach them independence, the first thing to do would be to give it to them.

Toute éducation des femmes doit être relative aux hommes (...) La femme est fait pour céder à l'homme et pour supporter ses injustices.

Understandably she had a lot of suitors, just like any other girls in China with two arms and legs.

We may add that it is not an act of justice but of foolish injustice to pretend the sexes are the same. Justice is exercised in respectfully providing for the due needs of each.

We need feminism because degrading phrases like "walk of shame" are commonplace in our social vocabulary, yet these are only applied to women; whereas men in the same situation are praised by their peers and seen as nothing more than " a guy who got lucky", by the rest of society.

Your indignant behavior over the slightest perceived gender inequality makes it almost certain that inequality is what you masturbate to at night.

What I still don’t get though,” ventured John. “Is why you did it?” “Did what?” “Put that dress on in the first place.” “I don’t know really,” said Dennis, a puzzled look crossing his face. “I suppose it’s because it was fun.” “Fun?” said John. “Well you know when we were younger and we used to run around the garden pretending to be Daleks or Spiderman or whatever?” “Yeah.” “It felt like that. Like playing,” said Dennis confidently.

Yet sometimes the world judges females by a different standard and seeks to punish them unjustly.

...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music—one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists— for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have.

Women empowerment begins at home!

blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books.

And a woman by herself is missing a man, while a man by himself is his own master. Trousers. That's the secret. Trousers and a pair of socks. I never dreamed it was like this. Put on trousers and the world changes. We walk different. We act different. I see these girls and I think: Idiot's Get yourself some trousers!

At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered false and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane. Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it about his status as my father that makes him more credible?

Evet, kadınların da erkekler gibi çirkin olabilme hakkına kavuşmaları için mücadele etmeleri gerekiyor. Otuz yaşın üstündeki bir hanıma yaş sorulmaz diye geçiştirilen ve sanki yüz kızartıcı bir hastalık söz konusuymuş gibi bu konuda en ufak anıştırmadan bile kaçınılan bu iğrenç uzlaşmayı bırakmak gerek artık.

Ce sont eux [les hommes] qui ont toujours tenu le sort de la femme entre leurs mains; et ils n'en ont pas décidé en fonction de son intérêt; c'est à leurs propres projets, à leurs craintes, à leurs besoins qu'il-ont eu régard.

Elles [Rosa Luxembourg, Marie Curie] démontrent avec éclat que ce n'est pas l'infériorité des femmes qui a déterminé leur insignifiance historique: c'est leur insignifiance historique qui les a vouées à l'infériorité.

Even though men have very little interest in wearing women’s clothes, this has not prevented a gigantic industry from arising, dedicated to satisfying women’s desires in fashion. Industries which provide makeup, hair styling, nail polish, hair removal, and weight loss services are similarly “biased” in the direction of females: they disproportionately serve women. These phenomena would be very difficult to understand on the feminist model that female wants are ignored or deprecated in the male’s favor.

For every woman you know who has been given substandard treatment by her parents, used by her friend or boyfriend, abused by her husband, discriminated by her employers and ridiculed by society, I know a man who has been burdened with family responsibility since childhood, humiliated by his girlfriend, bullied by his employers, pushed by society and harassed by his wife. Everybody is fighting their own battle.

Finally, the dirty little secret about sexual objectification is that it is an act that cannot be performed with any attention to its ethical meaning. Experientially —from the point of view of a man who is sexually objectifying—sexual objectification and ethical self awareness are mutually exclusive. A man cannot reflect on what he is doing and its real consequences for real people and at the same time fully accomplish the act of sexual objectifying. There's no way it can be done, because hos own subjective reality is too contingent upon the unreality of someone else. All that can be left "out there" in his field of awareness is the other person's sexedness—an abstract representation of a gender—in comparison with which his own sexedness may flourish and engorge. So it is that a man shuts off his capacity for ethical empathy—whatever capacity he may ever had—in order to commit an act of despersonalization that is "gratifying" essentially because it functions to fulfill his sense of an identity that is authentically male.

He was too smitten by his second wife and the sons she produced easily and regularly at eighteen-month intervals to bother too much about a daughter.

I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.

I cannot see that keeping the status quo intact would help in any way to solve the problems of inequality or suffering in this world. I would go for taking action towards change instead of accepting the inevitable.

I feel more than a mother’s fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of [my daughter’s] sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard—I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the worlds she is to inhabit—Hapless woman! What a fate is thine!

I have been looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal.

His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.