Women's Oppression

Introduction

The purpose of our group research was to identify and elaborate on the issue of oppression towards women in America. Traditionally speaking, the term oppression refers to the exercise of tyranny by a ruling group [6]. Females have often been the face of oppression since the beginning of time, so we took this opportunity to investigate the views of our peers on this topic. The focus of our project was on specific areas of today’s society where women are tyrannized. We took an in-depth look into our own college campus and stepped into the daily lives of female students to see some of the hardships they have to deal with. By researching costs of women’s products, social media stigmas, sexism in the workplace, and sexual harassment on college campuses, we have proven a clear pattern of oppression upon females. Consequent to gathering statistics, we will analyze and discuss our results with the hope of shining light on some of these issues and bring awareness to the different varieties of female subjection. For example, when researching topics we found a past study of two university campuses which concluded that “participants at both schools associated fear and vulnerability with being women” [1]. With our own study we can learn from the students at our college to make informed decisions and productive solutions in order to create a safe environment for everyone.

Methods

We created a survey as our primary source for this research project to gain first hand statistics directly from students at College of Coastal Georgia. This survey consisted of sixty-five questions relating to specific issues females have to face, and whether or not they are present on our campus. To propose our survey questions, we reviewed research-backed scholarly articles. By using journal articles and past studies as secondary sources for our study, we were able to establish a pattern of oppression towards females and see how our campus compares to others that have been investigated in the past. The questions we came up with reflected the general ideas of the research we reviewed. Our questions asked about the personal experiences of the participants regarding life on college campuses, pay disparities and discrimination, additional daily expenses exclusively due to gender, and social media. The goal of our survey was to determine whether the women on the CCGA campus experience these forms of oppression to a greater extent than men, and if so how much more.

We were able to gain eighty-six qualifiable participants for our study. The students had to be United States citizens, enrolled at CCGA, and at least eighteen years of age. Our survey was posted on the CCGA app along with the D2L page, and each member of the group posted it to a variety of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. The survey was advertised in the form of a colorful, enticing flyer which clearly stated our purpose and criteria to draw in potential candidates.

Above is the flyer we used to advertise our survey.

Demographics

Of our sixty-five survey questions, ten pertained to our participants' demographics. For the purpose of our study, we limited our included statistics to only those who attend College of Coastal Georgia. 81.40% of our participants are ages 18-24, 6.98% are ages 25-34, 6.98% are 45-54, and only 4.65% are 35-44 years old. What may be the most critical aspect of demographics to our study is that 82.56% of participants are female and 16.28% are male. We had one student (1.16%) identify as gender fluid. 12.79% are black or African-American while 82.56% are white or Caucasian. 2.33% are Hispanic or Latino and 2.33% have a different racial identity. 75.29% of our participants are single/never married, 10.59% are married, 3.53% are divorced and 10.59% are in domestic partnerships. 66.28% of our participants identify as heterosexual/straight, 22.09% identify as bisexual, 5.81% identify as gay/lesbian, 3.49% identify as pansexual and 2.33% identify as asexual.

In terms of socioeconomic status, the majority of our participants, 39.53%, are not working but they are full-time students (taking at least 12 credit hours). 3.49% of students work full-time (40 hours per week or more), 1.16% work part-time (less than 40 hours per week), and 1.16% are self-employed. 23.26% of participants work part-time and are also full-time students. 10.47% work part-time and are part-time students (taking less than 12 credit hours). 6.98% work full-time and are full-time students. 5.81% work full-time and are part-time students. 4.65% are not working (looking for work), and 3.49% are not working (part-time student). When asked what their household income was for last year before taxes, 24.71% of our sample selected less than $10,000. 8.24% selected $10,000-$19,999, 8.24% said $20,000-$29,999, and 8.24% said $30,000-$39,999. 9.41% selected $40,000-$49,999. 4.71% selected $50,000- $59,999. 9.41% selected $60,000-$69,999. 10.59% of participants selected $70,000-$79,999. 3.53% said $80,000-$89,999. 1.18% selected $90,000-$99,999, and finally 9.41% selected $100,000-$149,999. Lastly, we asked our participants what their highest level of completed education was / the highest degree they have received. One participant selected that they had less than a high school degree. 15.12% of students are high school graduates (high school diploma or equivalent including GED). The majority, 58.14%, have some college but no degree. 19.77% have an associates degree in college (two year) and 5.81% have a bachelor's degree in college (four year).

Results

College Campuses:

Only 16.3% of our participants report feeling fear for their safety while alone on campus. As we presumed, the majority of students who do tend to be afraid identify as female. 66.28% of participants reported that they feel a school required self-defense course would benefit the safety of students and 70.93% reported that a school required sexual assault prevention/awareness course would also be beneficial.

Social Media:

Pink Tax:

72% of participants are familiar with the Pink Tax. 84.9% report noticing the price differences between items made for boys and items made for girls. 67% of participants report that the Pink Tax affects them or someone they know financially.

Gender Pay Gap:

The results for this statistic were filtered to only include women. Of the women that participated in our survey, 57.5% report either getting paid or knowing someone who gets paid less for the same job than someone of the opposite sex (male). On the other hand, only 42.9% of males report getting paid less for the same job for someone of the opposite sex (female).

Discussion

Our study was able to analyze several different ways females are currently oppressed and whether or not these issues are present on our college campus. While the majority of our participants do not tend to fear for their safety while alone on campus, most students agreed that it would likely benefit the safety of our peers to have school required self defence and/or sexual assault prevention courses. Furthermore, the majority of our students who work concluded that they personally do not feel discriminated against at their jobs due to sex/gender, however, many do believe the gender pay gap is an issue and report that either they or someone they know get paid less for the same job than someone of the opposite sex. To our surprise, most of our participants already had previous knowledge on the Pink Tax. Not only did most students confirm they notice a difference in pricing for products targeted at females as opposed to males, but they or someone they know are financially impacted by this tax. Ultimately, although female students did not report receiving more negative comments online than their male peers, the majority of participants stated that cyberbullying towards females seems to have gotten worse over the years.

Female Harassment on College Campuses

An article written by Robert D. Reason and Susan R. Rankin called “College Students' Experiences and Perceptions of Harassment on Campus: An Exploration of Gender Differences” contained a study similar to ours. While we researched areas in society where women are oppressed—college campuses being one of them—and surveyed our peers, these authors surveyed students from ten different campuses to analyze the variable experiences with harassment reported by men and women [4]. Our study contained a variety of questions based on different social settings students face, whereas this particular study specifically focused only on sexual harassment within their observed campuses. In the Rankin and Reason study their results showed that the female student participants experienced harassment based mainly on their gender or race, whereas the male students indicated their harassment was due primarily to their race or their religious beliefs [4]. This article proves our idea that there is a pattern of oppression towards females, this example being that women pursuing higher levels of education tend to be targets of victimization.

The main difference between their study and ours was the amount of available candidates to question. Instead of having multiple campuses to analyze, ours is relatively small and overall our study concluded that the majority of student participants do not tend to generally fear for their safety while alone on our campus. However, of the students that did report tendencies to be afraid on campus the majority were in fact females. Another study we analyzed, “Strangers In The Night: Women’s Fear Of Sexual Assault On Urban College Campuses” by Kristen Day states that sexual assault has been named “one of the most insidious problems” on U.S. college campuses [1]. In fact, since the 1960’s, studies have consistently proven that between 15 and 20 percent of female college students experience some sort of sexual victimization per year [3]. While our study did not contain questions directly asking our peers about their personal experiences with sexual assault, our results did show that the majority of students agreed our campus could benefit from a required self defence and sexual assault prevention course. During our research, we found many journal articles and studies, most of which are similar to ours and indeed back our claim. Although our own survey results that focused on harassment towards female college students did not completely align with past studies we found—whether it be because our study was much more recent and campuses have progressed, our lack of available participants, or time limit—all of this gained information helped us to analyze one pattern of female oppression on college campuses.

Pink Tax

Women are oppressed by the pink tax. It is a tax targeted at women's products, goods, and services. Women pay extra for items like shampoo, conditioner, lotions, buying a car, getting an oil change, buying a pair of jeans! This “pink tax/tampon tax” was brought up back in the day because men didn't want to make menstrual products. So they taxed them as a luxury item and made more money off of it. Women’s menstrual cycles should not and cannot be looked at as a luxury because it's not a choice of having it or not, it's when you get it [2].

Gender Pay Gap

On average, across all occupations in the United States, women make seventy-six cents for every dollar a man makes [5]. This is a topic of controversy, because this inequality is typically considered a result of gender discrimination. While gender discrimination is partially to blame, research has shown that there are many other factors that determine why the average woman makes 24% less than the average man. In an article written by Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel, the schedules and lifestyle preferences of women were researched with data sourced from the Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority. They discovered that men take off 48% fewer unpaid hours and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. In addition, women have a greater demand for workplace flexibility. They state that this is due to women typically taking up more child-care and home-responsibility duties than men [9]. This is a major contributor to the pay gap, because fewer work hours in the same occupation as someone who works more means less pay.

In another article, Hadas Mendel discusses several different contributors to the pay gap. Similar to the first article, Mendel states that work hours make up 33% of the gap, and in addition, another 13% is due to occupational choice. He states that only 2% of the pay gap is due to discrimination [7]. For many people, this is still a significant amount of money. In the previous article, it was stated that women have a lower chance of promotions, and wage negotiators tend to mislead them more than men [9]. While studies have shown that discrimination is not the most significant factor in the gender pay gap, we conducted research of our own to determine the level of gender discrimination that students at our college face in the workplace. What we found was that most women on our campus hardly face workplace/pay discrimination. The majority of female participants in our survey had never been denied a pay raise because of their gender or report feeling discriminated at work. While this may not apply to all settings, our research has shown that workplace and pay discrimination are not as apparent on our campus as we previously thought. While 57.5% of female participants report being paid less for the same job than a man,

Women on Social Media

Women struggle with extreme oppression on social media and have for years. Men have gotten more recognition with their sites and businesses online more than women have. Women have to look a certain way online to get any views or likes and most women get cyberbullied really badly online and on social media such as Facebook, Instagram and twitter. Women get bullied online for the way they look or the way they dress, whether it being half dressed or fully clothed.

Limitations and Conclusion

Limitations:

The lack of participants in our study was certainly our biggest limitation. We ideally would have liked at least one hundred students to participate. Although our sources did establish a pattern of oppression towards females, our own survey did not always mirror the results of past studies on other campuses. The data from our sample could also have been skewed considering the small size of CCGA. Schools with higher enrollment rates, such as universities, tend to have more instances of crime, and as a result, more fearful students [1]. Another limitation was the age of the participants. The vast majority of them were between the ages of 18 and 24. It is likely that many of the participants had not yet immersed themselves in a career where discrimination is more apparent. Our other biggest limitation was the time limit. We had issues getting our survey approved which significantly cut down our research time.

Conclusion:

In the future, we would need to give ourselves more time to conduct better formulated questions, get a larger group of participants, and overall more closely analyze our statistics and better organize our data. There was room for improvement, but even with the study’s faults we gained valuable opinions from our peers to analyze the extent to which female college students feel oppressed in today’s society. Ultimately, our study showed that the majority of students at CCGA did not report sensing general fear for their safety while alone on college campuses, nor did they report unfair treatment in the workplace due to gender. However, we found that participants did notice a difference in costs for male and female products, and students agree that social media sets unrealistic standards for females.

We believe we have brought attention to some of these issues and that our study may be used to make informed choices for the benefit of students at CCGA.

Works Cited

[1] Day, Kristen. “Strangers In The Night: Women’s Fear Of Sexual Assault On Urban College Campuses.” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, vol. 16, no. 4, 1999, pp. 3-7. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43030512. Accessed 2 Sep. 2021.

[2] Habbal, Hajar. An Economic Analysis of the Pink Tax and Economic Analysis of the Pink Tax. 27 Apr. 2020.

[3] Mustaine, Elizabeth E, and Richard Tewksbury. “Sexual Assault of College Women: A Feminist Interpretation of a Routine Activities Analysis” SAGE Journals, vol. 27 no. 1, May 2002, p. 5. https://doi.org/10.1177/073401680202700106

[4] Rankin, Susan R, and Robert D Reason. “College Students' Experiences and Perceptions of Harassment on Campus: An Exploration of Gender Differences.” College Student Affairs Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1–7. doi:10.1353/csd.2005.0008.

[5] “Earnings Disparities by Sex.” United States Department of Labor, www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/about/data/earnings/gender.

[6] Young, Iris Marion. "Five Faces of Oppression." Readings For Diversity and Social Justice, edited by Maurianne Adams, et. al., Routledge P, 2018

[7] Mandel, Hadas, and Moshe Semyonov. “Gender Pay Gap and Employment Sector: Sources of Earnings Disparities in the United States, 1970-2010.” Demography (Springer Nature), vol. 51, no. 5, Oct. 2014, pp. 1597–1618. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s13524-014-0320-y.

[8] Meara, Katie, et al. “The Gender Pay Gap in the USA: A Matching Study.” Journal of Population Economics, vol. 33, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 271–305. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s00148-019-00743-8.

[9] Bolotnyy, Valentin, and Natalia Emanuel. “Why Do Women Earn Less than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators.” 28 Nov. 2018, pp. 2–5.

[10] Smith, White, et al. “A Longitudinal Perspective on Dating Violence Among Adolescent and College-Age Women.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 93, no. 7, 2003, p. 4.

[11] Triplett, Matthew. “Sexual Assault On College Campuses: Seeking The Appropriate Balance Between Due Process And Victim Protection.” Duke Law Journal, vol. 62, no. 2, 2012, pp. 2–4. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23364856. Accessed 2 Sept. 2021.

[12] Lafferty, Mackenzi. “The Pink Tax: The Persistence of Gender Price Disparity.” Midwest Journal of Undergraduate Research (MJUR), no. 11, Jan. 2019, pp. 56–72. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=edb&AN=141799388&site=eds-live&scope=site.

[13] Yazıcıoğlu, Alara Efsun. Pink Tax and the Law : Discriminating against Women Consumers. 2018. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=edszbw&AN=EDSZBW1018091580&site=eds-live&scope=site.

[14] Grundy, Saida. “Lifting the Veil on Campus Sexual Assault: Morehouse College, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Revealing Racialized Rape Culture through the Du Boisian Lens.” Social Problems, vol. 68, no. 2, May 2021, pp. 226–249. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/socpro/spab001.

[15] Firat, Meryem, et al. “Evaluation of the Media Usage Status and Mental Status of Women.” International Journal of Caring Sciences, vol. 13, no. 2, May 2020, pp. 1023–1030. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=ccm&AN=146255965&site=eds-live&scope=site.

[16] Fioravanti, Giulia, et al. “#Fitspiration on Instagram: The Effects of Fitness‐related Images on Women’s Self‐perceived Sexual Attractiveness.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 62, no. 5, Oct. 2021, pp. 746–751. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/sjop.12752.

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