Media Influence on Equality

606 Words3 Pages
Media influence on Equality Even though many activities influence the way we view women and men, media is the most prominent and the most powerful factor influencing ideas/feelings about race and gender. People can spend more than half of their life occupied with radio, TH, newspapers, the Internet, and listening to personal music devices. Mass media and popular culture feeds people with a picture on how women and men are supposed to behave and be. This essay examines how the media and popular culture influence people’s perception on race and gender. Women have been progressing by receiving more rights to be equal. After realizing the importance of education, and beginning to hold various positions in the workplace, women started noticing that they held an important position alongside men. “By the 1990’s nearly half of all workers were women and the majority of the working age women held jobs outside the home.”1 Despite all these people continue to view women as mere objects to men and inferior, and not people. The media communicates images of sexes, majority of which perpetuate stereotypical, unrealistic, and limiting perceptions. Media represent gender in three different themes. To start with, women are underrepresented which implies that men are more superior and women less important or invincible according cultural standard. Secondly, women and men are stereotypically portrayed in a manner that mirror and uphold socially endorsed views of race and gender. The third theme is the depictions of the relationship between women and men accentuate traditional roles and normalize violence against women. The major way in which media disfigures reality is through underrepresentation of women in the media. Regardless of the time, the number of white men outnumbers the number of women three times. During the 1970s, women’s sports did not receive equal coverage as
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