When you think of America what comes to mind? Fast food, Baseball, and Apple pie are very common answers. When asked what do American’s value? Does something come to mind right away or do you have to think about it for a second. People can say they’ll do something a million times but that doesn’t mean they will actually do it. When I think of American Equality that analogy comes to mind. Americans put out a lot of talk about equality but do they really work to make things equal. A huge inequality in America  is the gap between men and women. Over time many people have worked to close that gap but it’s nowhere near as close as it should be.


Lately Americans have been working towards giving more support towards victims of abuses, usually you can tell they are only referring to women. Why does no one offer support to male victims? In the book Namaste:New York, One of the main characters Raj is a cook in an indian restaurant. This is a job that he desperately needed to keep in order to survive. Throughout his time spent working there Raj’s boss Manpreet continuously makes sexual advances on Raj who is to scared to do anything about it in fear of being fired. Raj finally gains the courage to fight off his boss but receives this as a response “You owe it to me. I always fought for you,” said ( Manpreet 146). In this situation Raj is offered no support for the defending of his good reputation after Manpreet lies and said Raj came on to her. More often than not men have been told not to be “babies” about things like this. If were so keen on reaching equality between males and females, the same support given to women victims should be given to male victims as well.

A huge topic that’s always being talked about in America is the wage gap between males and females. How can it be that 54 years after the the United States passed the Equal Pay Act, women in the US still are paid less than men.In the article Pay Equity & Discrimination, they say “if change continues at the same slow pace as it has done for the past fifty years, it will take until 2059—for women to finally reach pay equality.”(Institute for women’s policy research 3). How can change be moving so slowly that it will take over 42 to years to reach equality of payment. Something that can be changed so simply but hasn’t. In order for men and women to reach equality between each other it has to start with something as simple as equal pay.


Another example of inequality between men and women is the double standard of domestic abuse. Women hit men all the time and never receive consequences but men hit women and they receive full punishment. I don’t condone violence from males or females,violence is never okay. Yet for violence to be okay for one gender and wrong for another gender is not equal or acceptable. In a new US survey conducted by the telegraph  it indicates that young women are three times as likely to admit hitting their partner than men. In the article,Women: hitting your man is not cute; it’s abuse. Young women are internalising messages that dominance is the only way to conduct a relationship successfully, in keeping with the individualistic streak that feminism has acquired in recent years, where to be empowered means getting what you want, not working together for what you can both accept from each other.” (O’Mahony,Jennifer 14).Men and women need to work together to avoid violence and begin to value each other on the same level.


America values the freedoms and equalities of its citizens but as you see there’s still many inequalities men and women are facing to this day. If we take time to focus on trying to solve the negatives in life America will begin to change for the better. Hopefully in the future when people think what do Americans value they will respond with Fast food, baseball, apple pie, and equality between genders.


Kumar,Vijay .Namaste New York: A Novel .CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,October 12, 2015. Print.


O’Mahony, Jennifer. “Women: Hitting Your Man Is Not Cute; It’s Abuse.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 15 Mar. 2013, www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/9930142/Women-hitting-your-man-is-not-cute-its-abuse.html.


“Pay Equity & Discrimination.” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2015, iwpr.org/issue/employment-education-economic-change/pay-equity-discrimination/.


CC BY-SA 4.0 Are we really that equal? by Allison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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