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 ...