“I am feminist because I believe in civic equality between men and women.”
Saeed Marandi is currently a third year student studying History at UCLA.
He has always had a passion for learning about the many injustices people experience in society. But after enrolling in a Gender Studies class, he was introduced to a different kind of societal prejudice. Specifically, the countless discriminations women face simply because of their gender.
“[In class] I read about a woman who was an attorney out of college. She was not getting paid as much as the other attorneys at the firm who worked the same amount of hours. That reading led me to understand about the social stigmatizations of being a woman while working in that kind of position. I think that was when I thought, yeah I really do identify with feminist values”.
This realization of gender inequality became instrumental to Saeed’s identification as a feminist. It is important to understand that this particular story Saeed shared is not an uncommon situation for women in the workplace.
According to the Huffington Post, pay inequality for women is still a problem in 2013:
“Women in the United States today are paid on average 77 cents for every dollar paid to men — the gap is even worse for African-American and Latina women — and according to a new study done by the National Partnership For Women And Families, the gender-based wage gap exists in every state and in the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas.”
2013 is also the 50th year anniversary of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. It is troubling that after so many years of progress, women are still being devalued in the work sphere. Someone’s gender should not be a deciding factor that determines how much or how little money a person makes at his or her jobs.
These issues are what drove Saeed Marandi to consider himself a feminist; do you feel the same way?