My first go at section B - I would appreciate some constructive criticism!
As this was my first go, I mainly focused on getting my ideas on the document and not so much on redundancy/clarity of argument...Please let me know any feedback and how to improve!!
“Women now have the chance to do anything they want” How would you respond to this qs?
Intro
A woman sits in an air-conditioned office, and is the first in her bloodline to have the “chance” to work after her formal education has been completed. However, despite having access to such a chance, she is still discriminated against based on her gender and is salaried significantly less than her male colleagues. While women may have more formal opportunities in the social, economic and public sphere, such as voting and entering the workforce more freely, the phrase “anything they want” serves as a gross overstatement, as women still suffer from sexism, gender-based violence and pay-gaps. Moreover, the term “chance” in this prompt could suggest that women were either previously barred from exercising their full autonomy, or had to gain the permission of some authority to gain such freedom. Overall this prompt fails to consider the intersection of factors such as race, class and immigration status that may restrict a woman from doing “anything” she wants, assuming that women solely exist within a liberal Western monolith, wherein even so women continue to face barriers that undermine their rights and freedom, significantly.
BP1
While women may have legal or procedural equality with their male peers in front of the law, the extent to which this manifests as substantive chance, with addition to the intersection of factors such as gender, class and immigration status, raises crucial debate. For instance, both a man and a woman may be from a similar disadvantaged background as a woman, such as having a vulnerable immigration status, and originating from a working-class and minority ethnicity background. However, the woman in this case will face an extra layer of discrimination that the man will likely not, due to her gender. An intersectional wage disparity study published by Macalester College found that while immigrant status and race carry their own independent wage penalties, non-citizen women face an additional 7.9% wage penalty due strictly to the compounding effect of gender bias. Similarly, the prompt compartmentalises women in such that their experiences are all contained within a single monolith. However, substantially, the real “chance” for a woman to do “anything she wants” crucially lies in where a woman identifies herself across the scale of intersectionality. Even if this prompt may agree with one country’s legal system, the circumstances deteriorate once you leave a particularly Western context.
BP2
Building on the prompt's singularity, the prompt also assumes an entirely liberal, Western context, as if this prompt was to be applied in nations such as Afghanistan, where the radical, Islamist regime of the Taliban has barred secondary education for women, the scenario would fail to produce a response rooted in reality. Women in the Global South are often restricted by even hypothesising a “chance” for freedom, such as in countries like Pakistan, where 1,000 honour killings take place each year, primarily in response to a woman choosing to do “anything she wants”, such as marrying by choice or pursuing an education. However, some individuals may still argue that such regimes are an example of “cherry-picking”, and that progress is occurring in places around the world. It should be acknowledged that such perspective does represent a partial truth, as in countries like South Africa, gender-based violence has officially been recognised as a ‘national emergency.’ However, what this prompt fails to concede is that the absence of violence against women and their right to autonomy does not exist in any nation. A UN statistic shared that “no country is free of femicide” and that “every 12 minutes a woman is killed by an intimate partner of a family member”. The prompt’s inclusion of “now” treats uneven struggle as an accomplished fact, when women still continue to struggle in “doing anything they want” or exercising their autonomy, albeit from fundamentalist governments, patriarchal cultures or the prevalence of violence against women around the world itself.
BP3
Lastly, to fully determine the extent to which a woman may have the “chance” to do “anything she wants", internal, sociological barriers must be examined, beyond just the legal sphere. To illustrate, a hypothetical scenario can be abstracted, where if a girl is never encouraged towards a path to full freedom of choice and movement, and is socially redirected to traditional gender norms such as homemaking and childbearing, the want for such “chance” never fully concretises into being exercised in the future. The prompt phrasing of “anything they want” simply assumes that wanting is neutral and unconditioned, however, wanting is shaped by the same unequal environment as opportunity itself. Ideologies such as choice feminism or patriarchal bargaining encourage women to mould themselves inside systems which have been created to perpetuate a certain, traditional ideal, and therefore some women never even fully philosophise the idea of “doing anything they want”, as their future has already been societal determined for them. Therefore, the prospect of having “chance” alone does not fully summarise the contexts in which women exist today, because even if women do practically have access to a “chance”, they may not “choose” to exercise it in order to satisfy societal gender norms.
Conclusion
Ultimately, while it can be acknowledged that formal opportunity for women has significantly expanded, the prompt’s phrase of “anything they want” is a major overstatement (edited) . Factors such as intersectionality and the disadvantages that follow, ignorance of women in the Global South and the self-limitation of ‘want’ itself compound together to show how this “chance” faces a myriad of obstacles.
