Copyright by Tatiana Borisovna Segura 2008 - The University of ...

feminism. The first wave of the movement took place in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The goal of first wave feminism was to get equal legal rights for
women including the right to vote, the right to have equal earnings for both genders and
the right to have equal access to higher education (Lorber 2). The contemporary feminist
movement took shape as an organized political movement in the 1960s and it is usually
referred to as “second wave” feminism. The goal of second wave feminism is to achieve
social changes by focusing attention on how women are still more socially disadvantaged
than men and by analyzing the sexual oppression women still suffer (Lorber 4).
When talking about gender inequality, feminists usually refer to women who are
disadvantaged in comparison to similarly situated men. Contemporary feminists’ view of
gender inequality is not unified in any way. Depending on the type of feminism they
belong to or work in (Marxist, socialist, psychoanalytic, etc.), feminists offer different
solutions to the problem of gender inequality. However, the majority of contemporary
feminists believe that gender inequality is not an individual matter, but is deeply
ingrained in the structure of societies (Lorber 6-7; Bem 133-34; Connell 9-10; Chafetz
11-12).
From the social structure to cultural traditions
Gender inequality has various forms and is expressed at multiple levels (Lorber 5;
Bem 1-2; Connell 55-59; Chafetz 14). For example, we can talk about gender inequality
when work most frequently performed by women (such as teaching, child care and
nursing) is traditionally less paid than work done by men (such as construction work or
mining). We can also see gender inequality in the fact that women get less education than
men of the same social position. As Lorber sums it up, “The modern forms of gender
inequality are… an elaborated system within which, it was estimated by a United Nations
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