The Impact of Gender and the American Dream
For my final paper, I decided to focus on the impact of gender in the American Dream. Before deciding on this topic, I skimmed through a few chapters in The American Dream in the 21st Century by Sandra L. Hanson and John Kenneth White. This topic stood out to me because Hanson wrote an interesting chapter on it within the book. While reading the chapter “Whose Dream? Gender and the American Dream,” I learned that the American dream is kept out of reach primarily for women based off of three factors. The first is that there are different standards for women and men within education. Women are discouraged from entering science-related majors, and even those who demonstrate significant potential in the field do not stick with it. According to Hanson, “[a]lmost half of women who enter college with science-related interests switch to other majors” (79). Women are setup to fall behind men in the real world before they get out of the school-system; therefore, women have a harder time...