In Zehra Arat's chapter entitled Women Under Layers of Oppression: The (Un) Changing Political Economy of Gender, she writes that, "the common denominator of women in all societies, including the industrialized ones, is their subordinate status." Throughout history women have been mistreated as the second sex in an abundance of aspects. Arat's contention that "women have been denied equal access to education, job training, employment, health care, [property] ownership, and political power" provides only a few, however important testaments to such inferiority of females. According to the survey provided in class, the education of girls in Third World schools such as in the Dominican Republic in 1995 was 19%, while in the developing country of the United States, the percentage was 76. This just goes to show that withdrawing the chance for women to be educated leads to their perpetual struggle in health, job opportunity, and government input/interest. The collective world should understand by now that stripping the subordination of women begins with allowing all people to be educated about what they will and will not stand for. .
Addressing the issue that women have perpetually held a significantly lower status than men constitutes only part of the argument according to Arat. The question of what exactly caused this slant is an important one, since having the answer may, in the long run, lead to a deterioration of the problem. The answer, as Arat states, is the establishment of gender roles in society. In other words, once males were defined as powerful, money-making, more intelligible humans and women were defined for their significant ability to bear children, and hence inclination to domesticity, a somewhat concrete system was set up. The roles of males and females were split in two. This would supposedly leave no question for what one's tasks in life should or should not be. Since females became more notified for their reproductive vessels, males were valued for their ability to produce.