Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Yesenia Saldana on Faye Harrison "The Gendered Politics and Violence of Structural Adjustment: A View from Jamaica"

In Faye Harrison's article, "The Gendered Politics and Violence of Structural Adjustment: A View from Jamaica" the author makes a clear argument of how women receive unfair treatment in the global economy and in their daily lives. Women that work face harsh treatment at their workplace and then still have to go home and fulfill their roles as women and some of them as mothers as well. 

The way the author describes the unfair treatment that women receive in their workplace is by stating how jobs do not take into consideration the roles a women can play as a person but instead just consider the role a women usually plays as what society considers the role of a women to be. Jobs treat women unfairly beginning with the low wages that are paid to them just because of their gender. From the beginning of time, women have been paid less than men. This is because jobs assume that women depend on someone else and might only be working as part of their free time. With the low wages that women face, they also face loosing other important things such as healthcare, housing, education, social services, and employment. What I mean by this according to what the author mentions is that jobs don't provide healthcare for women and with the low wages women are not able to afford healthcare on their own. The way in which housing and education might be lost is in that if a women is the head of the household and her salary is the minimum then she is not able to have a stable place for her and her kids. This leads to poor education for their kids and poor or minimum social services that women and kids require in order to have goof lives. 

The way in which Harrison describes women is that women are "shock absorbers." To my understanding the reason why Harrison describes women in this way is because even after all the unfair treatment that women  face in the global economy women still face crisis in their immediate neighborhood and homes. From the bad wages they receive women are unstable along with their kids. Women have to go and receive bad treatment from their workplace to just go home and still face their women/mother duties. They have to get home take care of the kids, cook, wash and do all the regular women duties at home after having an exhausting day at work. This causes women to go through malnutrition because of their poor eating habits from all the duties throughout the day that don't allow them to have a regular schedule for their everyday meals. With the malnutrition and hunger women face and the poor healthcare of no healthcare they receive women go through more unnecessary problems in their lives. No healthcare means that women can have more unsafe abortions, more unpredictable pregnancies, which leads to more poverty or struggle. With this women also lack resources for STD treatment or preventions and resources for birth control. 

In today's society, all of the problems that Harrison mentions are the problems that women are still facing. As women, we don't have the same job opportunities as men. Men are wanted for jobs that require more physical strength because jobs believe that women are not capable of completing these jobs. There are certain jobs that are "for women" which require more labor for less pay. Since according to jobs women are not the head of the household the wages for women are less. Us as women we have to work, sometimes go to school and still go home and serve as wives/mothers. If jobs took all of this into consideration I believe that women should be getting paid more than men because of the exploitation and the heavier burdens we go through. To sum this up here is a picture of how wages are so unfair and have been for years. 

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/usatoday/editorial/graphics/facebook%20digest/2017/03/0315-earnings.png

What will it take in order for the voice of women to be heard one day and for women to be seen as humans rather than as our gender? 

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