My small example of gender inequality in my high school’s student council is actually very common in the world; women in politics have a disadvantage. I could see myself being the president of the United States one day, but when hearing statistics about how “women are highly underrepresented in national politics, with the average percentage of women in parliaments only 15.2% as of January 2004 (IPU 2004)” (Kunovich 2005), it’s discouraging and disappointing. Even though, since the 1960’s, there has been a steady incline in the number of women who are serving in high ranking positions in their countries (Klenke 1999) and as of the 1990’s thirteen women had become “presidents or prime ministers of their countries” (Klenke 1999), the United States has not taken this step toward equality. If companies and employers “prefer men over women” (Stier 2017) when hiring for jobs beneath their own positions, it is logical to conclude that sexism occurred in this past election when a woman was running for the highest ranked position in the country. America cannot expect fair elections, in the gender sense, if there is still a discrimination of women in leadership positions in lower levels. Even though the United States could have had their first woman president, because of biases and unequally views of both genders, the election resulted because of sex, not qualification.
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