Success From Going Against Gender Roles

Cherish Kalilikane

06SEP11

RD1

The ideology of an American family where the wife stays home, cooks and cleans, while the husband is out working is slowly transitioning out of our society. Roles are what people title the identities of society, it’s where people are supposed to fit in and if they don’t fit into these roles they are characterized as unusual or strange. When one thinks about trauma a more likely response would be ideas of someone in a life or death situation, or someone dealing with something that is so emotionally or physically breaking that they cannot do everyday things.  [THESIS] Gender roles are not traumatic, instead they allow women to fight through the stereotypes and roles and become successful. [THESIS]

Trauma, according to Oxford dictionary is, a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. It can also mean an emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical injury, which may be associated with physical shock and sometimes leads to long-term neurosis. I wouldn’t classify gender roles as traumatic because that would be a melodramatic, overdrawn statement. When thinking about gender roles one would assume that the discussion would be primarily about the women in these roles as opposed to the men because they have the stress of higher standards to uphold.

Michelle Wie is a woman and therefore has a gender role needed to appeal to the today’s society. Overcoming her “role” didn’t lead Wie into a traumatic experience, instead it lead her to fame and success. In the example of Michele Wie, she is a young woman golfer who enters various championships going head to head with men. Wie is marked as ludicrous for not sticking with her own gender and constantly critiqued for trying to keep up with the standards of the male professional golfers that compete with her. Gender roles made her seem unusual because she goes against the normal stereotype for a young woman. It also allowed her to gather more attention from golf fans whether it was bad or good. Dr. Richard Lapchick, the director of the institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the UCF says, "it gives added opportunity to belittle the accomplishments of women like Michelle Wie. The fact that they haven't won it all shouldn't get in the way of it. We have a society where sexism is at play."Since Wie did not fulfill her stereotype of sticking with woman golfers she gained a lot of critics, which also led to being a great advertisement opportunity. As Hill said, “If her name were Bob Wie, nobody would be calling her a failure or questioning why she was trying to play with men.” Since she is a woman and has expected gender roles, people can’t stop talking about her.  Wie has been very close to placing in championships as well as the fact that she isn’t even in her 20s and she’s already grossed over 10 million dollars from her success. 

The educators of society also realize the importance of gender roles. Teaching the girls at Sacred Hearts Academy the importance of ignoring society’s roles and becoming what you want in the world. At Sacred Hearts, headmaster Betty White states, “We want to break down the stereotypes that girls are better at English and history and boys are better in math, science and technology. We want to show them that girls can do anything that they set their minds to."  Although the statement may come off as biased because the headmaster happens to be a female, she is older in society and therefore she understands the importance of being a female and setting yourself apart from society’s roles and stereotypes. I know first hand how hard it is to become technologically savvy and work your way through science fighting the stereotypes that a female will most likely fail at learning technological advances. In the article regarding Sacred Hearts there is a female success story, Audra Bullock, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Hawai'i Manoa who specializes in lasers and optics. As Andrea Hamilton states in this article,  "She's a female in a male-dominated field and industry, so we want her to convey that message to the audience that in these times, the sky's the limit.” Bullock was a great example of a female who ignored society’s gender roles and excelled at what made her happy which happened to be different from the usual woman’s occupation.

Society’s gender roles don’t need to be the deciding factor of a person’s life, male or female. People categorize normal when they have no right to. Women are slowly grasping the idea that they are very capable of fighting through normal gender roles and accomplishing whatever their hearts desires. Wie fought through the opposition of many critics that didn’t believe she should be competing in a men’s sport let alone with men. Bullock fought through gender roles as she went to school for engineering and was successful when she got her degree in lasers and optics. These ideologies are slowly being recognized for women and they’re starting to realize that there isn’t only one way about doing things, one can create their own path, a path less traveled by.  

Works Cited

“Wie Deserves Our Applause, Not Those Jeers.” 6 June 2006. MercuryNews.com. 8 June 2006 [http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/14756706.htm].

Pipher, Mary. “Saplings in the Storm.” Dialogues: An Argument Rhetoric and Reader. 7th edition. Eds. Gary Goshgarian and Kathleen Krueger. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2011. 347-354

Shapiro, Treena. “Girls Gather to Break Stereotype.” HonoluluAdvertiser.com 13 Jan. 2005. 13 Jan. 2005 [http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/Jan/13/ln/ln20p.html].