VIVE LA DIFFERENCE: Gender Differences and Public Policy

Since early civilisation, women have been suffering men’s discrimination, and although there are people who are too positive and think men and women have the same rights and opportunities, it is true to say that nowadays there is still an important gender difference between us.
Obviously, men and women are different, but the historical idea of men’s superiority has to end. There are a lot of biological differences between both genders. The main differences are not biological but cultural and social; in other words, these differences has been created by mankind. Therefore a public policy that deals with women’s discrimination is essential in solving this unfair situation and that also balances the scales.
Concretely, a clear example of a big disadvantage is being a superwoman, which means being a mother, a wife, a housewife, and having a full time job too. Why do women have this huge burden on us? Because traditionally men go to work and women take care of children and do the housework, but now women have been incorporated into the work-related world and nothing has changed in men’s roles. The same opportunities and remunerations have not been equalled, either.
Unfortunately, discrimination affects all aspects of life; sports, family, and an important one: publicity. It is frequent that advertisements on television are narrated by a woman, who explains the product’s qualities to spectators, but at the end of the commercial, a man’s voice concludes it with the most relevant arguments to give credibility and seriousness. This kind of strategy is used in most of the 85% of commercials, which studies have proved it makes us associate men with a self-confident figure and women as his subordinate.
Another focus of male chauvinism is the role of the couple when maternity arrives. In general womankind do not want to leave their jobs yet they also want to be with their babies, so a good solution would be more options to work part-time, have flexible timetables and for nursery schools to have part time care. It would be an interesting idea too, if fathers got involved from the first day of the baby’s care, giving them financial incentives for a period of time to share all the attentions for the baby.
It would be possible to continue with another examples of women’s discrimination, but the key problem is that society has assumed almost without question some roles that really determined womankind. It is such a strong influence, that women even adopt it, even nowadays. Some women still have in their minds ideas that are really difficult to exterminate. Society has to stop these prejudices because it doesn’t matter if this kind of behaviour has been developing itself for centuries, time is not a guarantee of doing things right.
Taking everything into account, it can be said that a better future is possible for women with the implication of every sector of society Although some men feel threatened to lose their privileges, in fact, nobody will lose anything, but it will be a guarantee for a better future. The debate is established and it will be possible other discriminations can be eliminated, like racial discrimination. The truth is that our society has evolution in modernity, fashion, and above all, in trivialities; but society still be prejudiced against other races, poor people, physically limited people, etc. Nobody is perfect and for this reason discrimination is always unfair.

Mark Osborne.

I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was grey.

I was leaving in a grey world. Sad. Empty. Without colours. Without bliss. In a grey world. I was working in a factory, in a grey, sad, empty factory. Every day, I did the same I had been done yesterday. Nothing special, any smile from a stranger, any smile from a friend, any friend, any smile. One day, a dream changed my world. I could hear my laughter, I could hear something different from the sounds I am used to; I saw myself when I was a child, when I was still happy. Suddenly my alarm clock woke me up, and I realised I was dreaming, and for a long time I had been happy, happy for the first time in too much time. Going to the factory, I saw the advertising slogan of our product Get Happy everywhere: “Get happy, get happy”, I was repeating to myself but I was not happy, I couldn’t. I arrived at the factory, but I could not think about something different, I was obsessed: I would like to live there, in the past, in my past. I was so obsessed that I tried to invent something, some object which allowed me to escape, to isolate my reality, and after losing my job, I finally got it. I was famous and very rich thanks to my extraordinary finding and I became the boss of the big empire of Get Happy, now the name changed to Bliss. I was the most powerful man in the city, I had billions of pounds, but this was not my objective. I turn myself as my boss, the capitalist system absorbed me and I lost again my opportunity to save myself.


This is not an invented story, in my view, is our world.

Literature in a globalized world

Nowadays nobody can deny that we already live in a globalized world and this fact has important consequences in all of life’s matters. Music, art, language, briefly the culture of a group of people is also influenced by this movement; needless to say literature is not an exception. “The Arts world” has an enormous power in order to connect different people, cultures, ideologies, political and social movements. However, living in a globalized world has a lot of disadvantages, too. The most common one is the imposition of one idea over the others, threatening them of disappearance. We neither can forget the interests of capitalism and the importance to spread a certain set of ideals.
Thanks to a global world, an explosion of different tendencies and points of view emerge, although it is said that there is an underlying aim to move people to the “correct” side, with press’ help, or manipulation, of course. Literature could be a wonderful skill of knowledge but also a skill of manipulation of ideologies. Fortunately, there are people who are critical in front of what they are reading, and that they are difficult to manipulate because they have their own ideas of life.
Fortunately, literature also allows us to imagine millions of different possible worlds, it allows to make us speculate and imagine. It makes us think of other philosophies, fantastic stories, of other cultures, everything that we want. And the most important, it could have an important repercussion in people’s behaviour around the world; although changing things for good or bad depend on us, not on literature.