Have you ever been playing a game like trivia crack and an unwanted commercial pops up? For example the Game of War commercial with Kate Upton. She rides on a horse and her cleavage is bouncing all over the place. What are they really selling on the app? Is it the game or Kate Upton’s breasts? The makers of the app get the attention of the viewers and the viewers will want to buy the game because of Kate. They objectify Kate for their profit. Women have become more of an object of play rather than the one with the control. Models and female celebrities in magazine photos need to exploit themselves in order to work and get paid. Discrimination of  women isn’t just in magazines or commercials. It happens to adolescent  girls in schools. In schools young girls are taught to change their clothes because it’s distracting to others. Women being oversexualized isn’t the only discrimatory way they’re being treated. Women aren’t always chosen to get promoted in their work if they are up against a man just because they’re female. Why has it taken America this long to realize that there is not gender equality in the workforce and schools?

Women for too many years have been treated unfairly in their jobs due to wage gaps based on gender, assignments given to them in the job, promotions, job titles, and qualifications.

In 2013 a study showed that female workers who worked full time only made 78 cents for every dollar earned by men, that means a wage gap of 22 percent. It will take 44 years for women to finally get rid of  the wage gap that has existed for decades. 44 years! That means in 2059 women will finally be equal in terms of pay.  In 2008 a study by the U.S. Department of Labor found that women with the same exact job title as a man earn only 80% of what the man makes. In terms of federal business the wage gap is illegal and does not follow federal law. Federal laws that are enforced by the U.S. Employment Equal Opportunity Commission are there to ensure that there is no gender based discrimination in the work place. Due to this wage gap employers can be sued because of the The Equal Pay Act of 1963 and can be issued a fine and required a pay-back to the female employee. The gender based wage gap is not the only unjust discrimination woman receive in the workforce.
Discrimination can be sexual harassment, withholding promotions based on gender, giving a different job title to a woman, and preventing women from participating in training opportunities. Some of these things happen quite a lot, for example a woman’s clothing and physical appearance may be the reason a woman is being hired not her qualifications. The company hires her only because her looks might bring in more sales. Discrimination also happens in terms of physical ability. A woman police officer or female firefighter may not get promoted because she may appear weaker than her male colleagues. As a police officer you must take a grueling physical test that eliminates most women because men are built to have more muscles or strength. Yes the test is necessary but is physical ability the only ability our police officers should have? What about the ability to notice details, the knowledge of the law, and the ability to cooperate with their fellow officers? The physical test seems to be the main reason officers are hired.  Discrimination happens and there is no explanation for why it should.
Women in the workforce isn’t the only place where the female gender is harassed. It happens in schools. Girls everywhere are standing up against the unfair dress codes of their schools. Girls are being harassed over their choices of clothing. The question is why? Well here is the answer the schools are giving, it’s a distraction. A distraction to who? Boys. These poor girls are told to change their choice of clothing to benefit the learning of male students. If a boy can’t keep himself focused, then that’s his fault not the girl’s. Girls all around are standing up and protesting by saying “I am more than a distraction.” Everywhere girls are saying that there is more to them then their clothes. It isn’t just short-shorts and miniskirts the schools are banning.  Schools in North Carolina are banning skinny jeans, yoga pants, and leggings. These are all pants that cover the leg, not the short-shorts that reveal skin. Some schools aren’t as strict with their dress codes. They relax about shorts and the width of straps as long as they’re not too revealing. But other schools seem to think the right way to get the message across is to embarrass the girls in front of the class. At a nearby high school a local girl was sitting in a class with her shorts that were just an inch above her fingertips and her shirt, that covered herself fully, that had her bra straps just barely peeking out. The teacher promptly pulled her in front of the class and stood her on a chair and began to point out all the things wrong with her outfit. She began with her shorts, even though they weren’t relatively short. The teacher said that showing too much leg was inappropriate and that she was asking for a reason to change her outfit. She then continued on to her shirt and how the bra straps were peaking out. An engrossment and boys would not be able to focus on their work with them showing. The teacher went on to criticize more outfits of the young ladies in the class. She finished her “presentation” by saying, “young girls who dress like this will get no where. They will not be taken seriously because they seem to be asking for it.” The next day those girls asked for a transfer from the class because they feel they were treated unfairly and they thought their outfits were fine. They said that they would not be able to focus in class with the teacher criticizing their outfit, outfits that were “sold” to them through a deluge of contemporary media. But media and contemporary culture sometimes clashes with school culture.

Sexualized images, which are very common in today’s media, promote a limited message of what it means to be female. They may not seem as influential because they are so recurring  but there is a deep detrimental effect on women and girls. Teens on average spend 6-7 hours a day on some type of media. They see on average 2000 ads. These images affect how we see purity today. 10-17 year old girls on social media are exposed to images that change the way they think women should act or present themselves. A survey was taken in a high school about the way teens learn about birth control, contraception, and preventing pregnancy. 63% percent of the girls (two thirds) and 40% of the boys already learned about these topics from magazines. The ads imprint the wrong message when trusted adults could be imprinting the right message about preventing pregnancy. These images are branded into women and girl’s point of view and change how they see things. Changing their ideas and point of views can affect them for the rest of their lives. Beth Malcolm, director of the Canadian Women’s Foundation Girl’s Fund says “young girls today are being exposed to the same level of sexualized imagery at the age of 9  as 14 year old girls were 20 years ago. They are facing changes in the media and communication without the developmental maturity to handle it all. If there’s more opportunity to access media and you see it at younger and younger ages, you don’t necessarily have the emotional and intellectual ability to process it.”  The Girl’s Fund works with girls between ages 9 and 13 to build protective factors that works against provocative media images. These protective factors can be confidence, connectedness, competency and critical thinking skills. The ideal problem Americans should be working on is to build strong, resilient girls who are confident enough to overcome any problem or challenge they may face in their teenage years. The petrifying teenage years in a girl’s life are the hardest to overcome. So many issues are coming up about school, life, friends, boys, and their futures. These dilemmas appear so rapidly they can be hard to handle. It’s so important to build character in girls in their teenage years. Because in their futures they have to learn to speak up in the workplace and learn to navigate their way through work related issues. But by having these images that evoke self harm, insecure, and emotionally distraught girls we can’t have the strong empowered society of women to run our world. We need women to run our society like business women, chefs, company owners, presidents, teachers, and so many other titles. We won’t have those women in those jobs because they will have these pictures in their head, thinking that they can’t do it because they’re not as vivacious  as those lucrative models.

Women can take the oversexualization of media and spin it to make them and others  feel empowered. Why let all of this unfair treatment get you down? Why not take it and use it to your advantage? Some women can spin anything and put it on their turn table not some guy’s. They can turn anything into a reason for confidence. But other women aren’t so lucky to be born with that superpower. They can’t turn that insulting toad and turn it into a confidence prince! Even if it doesn’t affect you right now it will someday. Be prepared to fight the media when it comes!

The next time you see the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue on your counter. Don’t pick it up just to look at the girl’s body. Look at it to realize that the girl is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, or best friend not just a body. That woman is not an object for male delectation she’s a woman with a brain.  We are all said to be equal and free but does that freedom really ring true? Women are treated as an object or as a dissipation. I can say for myself I am more than a distraction.