by Royce Radcliffe

Created on: June 08, 2008   Last Updated: June 26, 2008

For the purposes of this debate I am going to focus primarily on First World countries. There are many countries in the world where there is in fact no need to debate this point at all, for they are blatant in their prejudice against women. The perception by many is that there is a similar level of prejudice in advanced countries, only more hidden, subtle. I strongly disagree.

I was shocked to see that twice as many people on this site thought men were favored in society. I think in many ways you could argue the opposite. But the truth probably lies between the two vantage points. In my opinion the overall result is a skewed sort of equality.

It just depends on what you are looking at. Remember that this was posed as a general question and not specific to finance. Despite that I have noticed that almost all of the articles on the other side of this debate focus on one thing: money. They cite the fact that many of the heads of the largest corporations are men, that there are many more male billionaires than female, among other observations along these lines. This is true. In the high business sector men do appear to do better at a proportion which would indicate some level of bias.

I have two responses to this point, however. The first is that very few individuals acheive on anywhere near this level of corporate success. The lower you look down the corporate food chain the higher percentage of women you will find. Most people do not even work in a corporate environment, though many do. I do not think sexism by the richest of the rich has much bearing on the day to day life of most women or men.

Another point is that there are now many realms of business where one can operate under a cloak of anonymity, such as all forms of electronic commerce (ebay reselling, online selling and the like), selling art or written ideas, and entering the many lucrative contests in a number of fields. The stock market is indifferent to the sex of shareholders, for instance. If a woman fears being discriminated against she can enter the world of entreprenuership in one form or another and circumvent prejudice entirely.

Now that I have hopefully mitigated, though certainly not eliminated, their main argument, let me offer a counterpoint to show the areas where society favors them. Since the focus in these debates is mainly financial the first thing I will point out is that women have many occupations that pay them much more than men.

If you compare the amount of money a female model makes

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