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Gender Identity Argumentative Essays Samples For Students

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113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for gender roles essay topics? This field is hot, controversial, and really worth exploring!

  • 🔝 Top 10 Gender Topics
  • 📝 Gender Essay: Writing Tips
  • 🏆 Gender Essay Examples & Topic Ideas

✍️ Gender Argumentative Essay Topics

❓ research questions about gender roles.

In your gender role essay, you might want to focus on the issues of gender equality in the workplace. Another exciting option is to write about gender stereotypes in education. Finally, you can elaborate on how traditional gender roles are changing.

In this article, you’ll find a list of gender argumentative essay topics, ideas for papers on gender and society, as well as top gender roles essay examples.

🔝 Top 10 Gender Roles Topics

  • Gender stereotypes and the way they affect people
  • Fighting gender stereotypes and sexism
  • Gender equality in the workplace
  • Gender stereotypes in education
  • Gender schema theory
  • Is gender socially constructed?
  • Social learning theory and gender
  • Gender roles and sexual orientation
  • Body image and gender
  • Social gender construction in the media

📝 Gender Roles Essay: Writing Tips

Essays on gender roles present students’ understanding of the similarities, differences, and aspects of gender roles in society.

Writing gender roles essays helps learners to understand the significance of topics related to gender roles and the changes in societal norms. Students should be highly aware of the problems associated with traditional gender roles. For example, there are many periods in world history, in which people did not have equal rights.

Moreover, some aspects of gender roles may be associated with discrimination. To make an essay on this problem outstanding, you should discuss the problem in detail and present your points clearly. A useful tip is to develop a good structure for your paper.

Before starting to work on the paper, you should select the problem that is most interesting or relevant to you.

Gender roles essay topics and titles may include:

  • The history of gender roles and their shifts throughout the time
  • Male and female roles in society
  • Gender roles in literature and media
  • How a man and a woman is perceived in current society
  • The causes and outcomes of gender discrimination
  • The problem of ‘glass ceiling’
  • The problem of social stratification and its outcomes
  • The revolution in the concept of gender

After selecting the issue for discussion, you can start working on the essay’s structure. Here are some useful tips on how to structure your paper:

  • Select the topic you want to discuss (you can choose one from the list above). Remember to pay attention to the type of essay you should write. If it is an argumentative essay, reflect on what problem you would want to analyze from opposing perspectives.
  • Gender roles essay titles are important because they can help you to get the reader’s attention. Think of something simple but self-explanatory.
  • An introductory paragraph is necessary, as it will present the questions you want to discuss in the paper. Remember to state the thesis of your essay in this section.
  • Think of your gender roles essay prompts. Which aspects of the selected problem do you want to focus on? Dedicate a separate section for each of the problems.
  • Remember to include a refutation section if you are writing an argumentative essay. In this section, you should discuss an alternative perspective on the topic in 1-2 paragraphs. Do not forget to outline why your opinion is more credible than the alternative one.
  • Avoid making the paragraphs and sentences too long. You can stick to a 190 words maximum limit for one paragraph. At the same time, make sure that the paragraphs are longer than 65 words. Try to make all sections of the body paragraphs of similar length.
  • Check out examples online to see how you can structure your paper and organize the information. Pay attention to the number of paragraphs other students include.
  • Remember to include a gender roles essay conclusion. In this paragraph, you will discuss the most important claims of your paper.
  • Do not forget to add a reference page in which you will include the sources used in the paper. Ask your professor in advance about the types of literature you can utilize for the essay.

Do not forget that there are free samples on our website that can help you to get the best ideas for your essay!

🏆 Gender Roles Essay Examples & Topic Ideas

  • Gender Roles in Antigone Essay This will be seen through an analysis of the other characters in the play and the values of ancient Greeks. Indeed this central character appears to be at odds with the inclinations of the other […]
  • Conflict of Gender Roles in Munro’s “Boys and Girls” Munro’s “Boys and Girls” is a story about a puzzled girl who struggles to find the balance between the battles of her inner female-housewife side, like her mother, and a boyish character who likes to […]
  • Gender Roles in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams In the play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams has written the story of the Wingfield family that lived in St Louis during the 1940s.
  • Gender Roles in “Bridge to Terabithia” by Paterson The theme of gender roles is consistently present in the novel, starting with character origins and becoming the central concept as they mature to defy archetypal perceptions of feminine and masculine expectations in order to […]
  • Gender Roles in Society One might think that a child is born with the idea of how to behave in relation to gender while in the real sense; it is the cultivation of the society that moulds people to […]
  • Gender Roles in The Yellow Wallpaper & Trifles The two texts; the short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins and the play ‘Trifles’ by Susan Glaspell strategically illustrate this claim since they both aim at attracting the reader’s attention to the poor […]
  • Gender Roles: Changes From the Late 1800’s to Today The definition of who is a male or a female depends on the types of gender roles one was exposed to during the early ages. In today’s society, we have a greater number of women […]
  • Gender Roles Set in Stone: Prehistoric and Ancient Work of Arts In the prehistoric and ancient works of art, the representation of women and men reveals a massive imbalance in gender equity that favors men over women.
  • Changing Gender Roles in Families Over Time The division of labor and traditional gender roles in the family usually consists of men doing the work while women take care of the children, other relatives, and housekeeping.
  • Gender Roles and Stereotyping in Education Teachers should be trained to give clear and useful instruction to students on the issue of gender roles in modern society.
  • Cohabitation and Division of Gender Roles in a Couple Cohabitation is perceived in the society as the form of relationships which is an effective alternative to the traditional marriage because of focusing on the principles of flexibility, freedom, and equality, but few couples can […]
  • Gender Roles Inversion: The Madonna Phenomenon At the same time partial narrowing of the gender gap in the context of economic participation did not lead to the equality of men and women in the field of their occupations.
  • Athena and Gender Roles in Greek Mythology According to Eicher and Roach-Higgins, the elements of her dress were important because they immediately communicated specific ideas about her character that was as contradictory as the physical gender of the birthing parent.”In appropriating the […]
  • Gender Roles in South Korean Laws and Society At the same time, all custody is traditionally granted to husbands and fathers in a case of a divorce” though the anxiety about the high divorce rate and the nasty endings of relationships is more […]
  • Gender Roles by Margaret Mead Once the a rift defining men and women develops this way, it goes further and defines the positions, which men and women occupy in the society, basing on these physical and biological differences, which form […]
  • Gender Roles in the 19th Century Society: Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper However, the narrator’s developing madness can also act as the symbolical depiction of the effects of the men’s dominance on women and the female suppression in the 19th-century society.”The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in […]
  • Gender Roles in Brady’s “Why I Want a Wife” and Sacks’ “Stay-at-Home Dads” Yet, there are some distinctions Judy Brady believes that women are often viewed as unpaid house servants who have to take care of husbands’ needs, whereas Glenn Sacks argues that gender roles begin to transform […]
  • Gender roles in the Wind in the Willows For instance, in the case where both the mole and the rat make comments to the toad that are full of women critics.
  • The Concepts of Gender Roles and Sexuality by John Money and Judith Butler These categories of feminists are united in the belief of existence of many children and little sex. This paper explains the concepts and ideologies relating to gender roles and sexuality.as advocated by John Money and […]
  • Gender Roles in ‘Mr. Green’ by Robert Olen Butler Green Butler uses the character of the grandfather to develop the theme of gender roles within the culture. The character of the grandfather is extremely sound for the cultural beliefs the author conveyed through all […]
  • Analysis of the Peculiarities of Gender Roles Within Education, Families and Student Communities Peculiarities of gender aspect within the education system and labour market Attitude for marriage of men and women as one of the major aspects within the analysis of gender roles Family relations as a significant […]
  • Gender Roles in Brady’s and Theroux’s Works In the satire “Being a Man” by Paul Theroux, the author demonstrates to readers the essence of how a particular manifestation of masculinity is extolled in American society.
  • Evaluating Gender Roles in Nursing The purpose of this study was to explore perspectives on the experience and gender roles of male and female students, as well as how they think about their future professional roles.
  • Women’s Gender Roles in American Literature The stories written by Constance Woolson Fenimore, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Jaqueline Bishop highlight the harmful gender roles and discrimination that still remains a major topic for disputes and illustrate the fate of oppressed women.
  • Aspects of Gender Roles and Identity The breadth of her practice in transgender issues suggests that every choice Bowers makes is ethical, requiring her to be respectful and highly responsible.
  • Gender Roles, Expectations, and Discrimination Despite Isaac being the calmest boy in the school, he had a crush on Grace, a beautiful girl in the school who was from a wealthy family.
  • Gender Roles in Social Constructionism The reality, in the view of sociologists, is a social attitude in connection with which a personality is formed that adapts to the requirements of the world.
  • Gender Roles and Stereotypes in Straightlaced Film One might conclude that gender neutrality and abstraction in offices are only a cover to maintain the basis of gender injustice.
  • Gender Roles and Body Images The media has one of the most widespread and significant effects on how we perceive men and women. It is incorrectly assumed that men are the cultural norm, while women stay invisible and underrepresented by […]
  • Biology and Gender Roles in Society Thus, it may be more convenient for society to justify the imposition of certain gender roles on men and women using biology-related arguments, which, in reality, are more related to culture and social development.
  • Children’s Views of Gender Roles Today, both parents and teachers see the positive impact of the attempts to integrate anti-biased gender-related education on young children as they get more freedom to express themselves and grow up less aggressive.
  • The Construction of Gender Roles However, it is wrong to consider women exposed to the domestic work powerless, as they have the opportunity to informally or implicitly influence men and the decisions they make.
  • Sociology of the Family: Gender Roles Thus, the societal predisposition and notion that women are lesser in the community should be abandoned, and greater emphasis should be placed on the critical functions they perform in the household. These assertions, equivocations, and […]
  • Femininity and Masculinity: Understanding Gender Roles The understanding of how gender roles are portrayed in the media and the general perception of the expected behavior for men and women communicated non-verbally in the society is the basis on which children build […]
  • Injustice Within Strict Gender Roles There is still no clear answer to how a person can find his or her destiny and place in the world, and understand the opportunities and prospects, considering the opinion of the dominant number of […]
  • Gender Roles and Body Image in Disney Movies In this research, attention will be paid to gender roles and body images of Disney princesses to understand the popularity of the franchise and its impact on child development.
  • Gender Roles and How People Perceive Them However, all of the survey participants indicated that their families would be inclined to differentiate between the toys for a child based on the latter’s sex and the corresponding perceived gender role.
  • Early Gender Roles, Modern Interpretations, and the Origin of Stereotypes Since each gender was assigned a particular role in the past due to the differences in the biological makeup between a man and a woman in the prehistoric era, the modern process of communication between […]
  • Gender Roles in TV Commercials and Values in the Society Each of them will watch, code, and analyze the TV commercials separately; at the end of the procedure, their results will be compared in order to ensure the inter-observer reliability of the chosen research method.
  • Toxic Masculinity and Gender Roles: New Aspects in Discussions Between Men and Women It is believed that men have to be silent and invincible warriors who exercise power due to their status of a man.
  • Gender Roles in Contemporary Society The conditions of life are tough and it is presumed that only men are able to carry out such hardships and limitations of a soldier life.
  • Culture and History: Gender Roles Over the Past 50 or So Years It is not that there were no women in the workforce; it was just that she had to choose one over the other, juggling the two was quite rare and unheard of.
  • Gender Roles and Sexuality in Media: Cosmopolitan & Maxim The woman portrayed in these sites is supposed to look ‘hot’ and sexy in order to be attractive to a man.
  • The Problem of Gender Roles in Society Based on Plays by Glaspell and Ibsen The men in the play are constantly showing their self-importance, they are trying to act like real detectives, and they do not even realize that Mrs. But, all of a sudden, the moment of repaying […]
  • Social Element in Gender Roles I learned of the origins of gay and lesbian studies, as well that of the confining of such studies in earlier times to specific institutions.
  • Equality: The Use of TV to Develop Our Gender Roles In this sense, when it is the men who predominantly work outside of the home, they will usually see the home as a place of leisure and so use the TV as a source of […]
  • Gender Roles and Family Systems in Hispanic Culture In the Hispanic culture, amarianismo’ and amachismo’ are the terms used to determine the various behavioral expectations among the family members.
  • Family Unit and Gender Roles in Society and Market The role of molding the infant into an adult belonged to the family in the ancient society. In the past, the father was expected to be the breadwinner of the family.
  • Gender Roles and Social Classes in Wartime The message is as simple as “The women of Britain say ‘Go.’” It points to the role of both men and women in wartime.
  • The Necessity for Gender Roles The potential change from the elimination of the differences in gender may affect every perceived part of one’s life. Such factors as one’s occupation, status, and appearance may also contribute to the creation of stereotypes.
  • China’s Gender Roles in Mo Yan’s and Shen Fu’s Works Six Records of a Floating Life is a multi-faceted chronicle which helps to comprehend the difficulties and the features of Shen Fu’s life and the romance between him and his beloved Chen Yun.
  • Changing Gender Roles Between Boys and Girls In the twenty-first Century, girls have greatly stepped up and assumed some of the roles that were considered to be boy’s while boys have done the same leading to an interchange of roles.
  • Nomadic Society’s Gender Roles and Warrior Culture On the one hand, it was clear that the 1100s and the 1200s included the period of male power. It was wrong to assume that all women were similar and treat them in the same […]
  • “Beside Oneself” by Judith Butler: Gender Roles Following the views of the author, who states that choice in the formation of gender and sexuality is not transparent, and a key role is still played by others in the form of expectations and […]
  • Gender Roles in Couples and Sex Stereotypes Altogether, the last reconsiderations of the nature of relations promoted the appearance of numerous debates related to the role of partners and their right to be the leader.
  • Understanding the Social Element in Gender Roles When saying that gender is a binary construction, one implies that there are two genders, namely, the masculine and the feminine one, and two corresponding types of social behaviour, which are predetermined by the existing […]
  • Gender Roles in Tango: Cultural Aspects However, one should not assume that the role of women in tango is inferior because they create the most aesthetic aspects of this dance.
  • Gender Roles in Toy Stores According to Fisher-Thompson et al, two of the major differentiating factors in toys for girls and boys are color and nature.
  • Discussing Gender Roles in the Interaction Perspective It is the purpose of this issue to discuss the concept of gender roles using the sociological perspective of symbolic interaction.
  • Women in Hip-Hop Music: A Provocative and Objectified Gender Roles It is one thing that men want women to be in music videos and play a particular role, but women are willing to participate in the videos.
  • Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media In the critical analysis of the article, the point of disagreement is that of under-representation of women in the media. How do the media subordinate and relegate roles of women in society?
  • Effects of Media Messages about Gender Roles Media articles, such as the Maxim Magazine and the Cosmopolitan Magazine, socialize individuals to believe that women are very different from men as regards to dressing, behaving, and eating.
  • The Change of Gender Roles This similarity is one of the most important to focus on the structure of the narrative. In both plays, the main actions of the characters are not directly described by the authors.
  • Gender Equality: Male Dominance The simple reason is that gender inequality exists in affluent societies wherein women are free to do what they want, have access to education, and have the capacity to create wealth.
  • “The Odd Women” and “Women in Love”: Evolving Views of Gender Roles An effort is also made to track the changes of the roles of women in the social fabric in the Victorian era by considering The Odd Women by George Gissing written in 1893.
  • Gender Roles: Constructing Gender Identity In the course of the twentieth century and at the threshold of the twenty-first century, the images and roles of gender have constantly been changing.
  • Ideology of Gender Roles In the world of literature, ideology has played a vital role in depicting the condition of the society. In this scenario, Kingston reveals that the men out-live their roles in the society, and they are […]
  • Concepts of Gender Roles As a result of these, the war on gender inequality and sexism has failed, because of the failure of these agents of change to promote gender equality and eliminate discriminative notions held by the society.
  • Gender Roles in the United States Over the Last Century The men’s perception towards this idea was negative, and this consequently resulted to a conflict with the men claiming that the roles of the women were in the kitchen.
  • Fashions, gender roles and social views of the 1950s and 1960s Fashion was highly valued and this can be seen in the way the clothes worn by the wives of the presidential candidates in America hit the headlines. In the 1950s, the role of housekeeping and […]
  • Cheating, Gender Roles, and the Nineteenth-Century Croquet Craze The author’s main thesis is, “Yet was this, in fact, how the game was played on the croquet lawns of the nineteenth century?” Whereas authors of croquet manuals and magazines emphasize so much on the […]
  • Gender Roles in Cartoons Though the males are portrayed to be logical, but it is shown that the females are more successful because of simple blunders or miscalculations which males fail to understand, females are able to beat males […]
  • The Industrial Revolution Impact on the Gender Roles The population growth combined with the increased productivity of small parts of the country and the migration of the now landless people in search of work opportunities led to the phenomena of urbanization.
  • How Does Aristophanes Represent Gender Roles in Lysistrata?
  • Are Gender Roles and Relationships More Equal in Modern Family Life?
  • How Do Children Develop Gender Roles?
  • Does Men’s Fashion Reflect Changes in Male Gender Roles?
  • How Did Colonialism Resonate With Gender Roles and Oppression?
  • Are Gender Roles Damaging Society?
  • How Did Revolutions Affect Gender Roles?
  • Are Gender Roles Defined by Society or by Genetics?
  • How Have Family Structure and Gender Roles Changed?
  • Are Gender Roles Fluid When Dealing With Death and Tragedy?
  • How Do Gender Roles Affect Communication?
  • Are Gender Roles Natural?
  • How Do Gender Roles Affect Immigrants?
  • Are Gender Stereotyped Roles Correct?
  • How Do Gender Roles Affect the Physical and Emotional Health?
  • Have Gender Roles Played a Big Part in the History?
  • How Do Gender Roles and Extroversion Effects How Much People Talk?
  • What Are Gender Roles? How Are They Defined?
  • How Are Gender Roles Predetermined by the Environment?
  • What Drives the Gender Wage Gap?
  • How Has Gender Roles Changed Over the Last Centuries?
  • What Factors Influence Gender Roles?
  • How Have Gender Roles in Japanese Theatre Influenced and Affected Societal View on Homosexuality and Masculinity?
  • What Society Norms for Gender Roles Should Be Conceived?
  • How Have Traditional Gender Roles Been Stressful?
  • What Was Distinctive About Gender Roles in the Nineteenth Century?
  • How Has Hegemonic Masculinity Set Ideas of Gender Roles?
  • How Do Media and Politics Influence Gender Roles?
  • Where Does the Truth on Gender Roles Lie in Nahua and Mayan Civilizations?
  • How Radical Are the Changes to the Gender Roles in Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”?
  • Chicago (A-D)
  • Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 26). 113 Gender Roles Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/gender-roles-essay-examples/

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gender identity argumentative essay

Opinion Lydia Polgreen

Born This Way? Born Which Way?

Credit... Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. Photographs, via Getty Images/Room Rf

Supported by

Lydia Polgreen

By Lydia Polgreen

Opinion Columnist

  • Dec. 1, 2023

When I was in sixth grade, I made a decision that changed the course of my life. I decided not to try out for the middle school swim team. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but it was. As a grade schooler I was a standout swimmer — strong shoulders and back, and well-muscled legs that powered me through the water with ease and speed. I was disciplined, obsessive. My form was excellent. My coach saw potential.

Had I stuck with it, my life might have turned out pretty different. I might have been a popular jock rather than a lonely weirdo. I might have become a varsity athlete who won admission to a top college rather than a barely graduated teenager who had to take remedial math at a community college to scrape my way into a not-very-competitive school.

I have been thinking about this decision a lot lately, because many of us have been forced, regardless of whether we want to, to think about children and the decisions we allow them to make, and what it might mean for them to regret those decisions. I am speaking, of course, about the ongoing war over transgender and gender-nonconforming children.

For people on the right who oppose gender transition at any age, the argument is simple: There are two genders, and people who think they are a different sex or gender than the one they were assigned at birth are delusional; indulging that delusion is wrong. Biological reality requires all people to simply live with the gender associated with their birth sex. (Unless they are intersex, in which case it is evidently OK for parents and doctors to decide and surgically alter a child’s body to conform with that decision without the child’s consent or even knowledge.)

For those liberals and progressives who fret about the rapidly changing gender landscape, the agonized argument over gender-affirming care for children is different. As this thinking goes, there is a small category of people who were born in the wrong bodies, and those individuals are entitled to express their identities. But when children say they are one of these people, we must be extremely careful and rigorous in being absolutely certain that their gender identities have been unearthed and verified through a lengthy medical and psychiatric inquiry before they are validated by social, legal and medical interventions. We must be sure that this is the pure expression of an immutable self, not simply the adoption of a fad or the byproduct of autism or bipolar disorder. The possibility that children might make irreversible decisions on this particular question that they later regret is, for many people, simply intolerable. Transition, to borrow a phrase, should be safe, legal and rare.

We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?

Most Americans believe there is a clear and absolute binary between genders. In May, the last time Gallup polled on the issue , 55 percent of Americans said they believed changing one’s gender is “morally wrong.” It’s not hard to understand why. Man and woman make a dyad as old as time, written in our chromosomes, our religious texts, our myths and legends.

Many major identity categories, like race, gender and ethnicity, seem absolute and immovable. But dig a little deeper and quickly you realize how malleable and mutable they are. Indeed, the freedom to participate in the way you are viewed through these identities is a basic part of being a modern human. So is the right to change your mind about them over time.

For a binary identity that is supposedly so fixed and powerful, gender eludes and confounds us constantly. Efforts to define the terms “man” and “woman,” so popular on the campaign trail as gender identity has become a white hot issue in our politics, inevitably end in unsatisfying tautologies. Merriam-Webster unhelpfully defines a woman as “an adult female person.” Look up “female” and it says “relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs,” a description that is both imprecise (“typically”) and incomplete (what of women born without these capacities?).

Personally, I have never had much use for binaries. I was born to a Black African mother and a white American father, the beginning of a life that has included many identities and many hyphens, and doubtless will include more with the passage of time and the ever-gathering tumbleweeds of experience. I am Black but also mixed race; I am a woman but the way I look and dress means I’m constantly taken for a man; I’m American but also African, but not African American in the sense that that term is usually used; I am a lesbian but had happy (and unhappy) romantic relationships with boys and men in my youth.

Sorting humans into immutable identities has always been a fraught business. In South Africa, the apartheid state was so committed to its racial classification hierarchy that it employed bizarre tests to sort people into categories. The most absurd of these was the pencil test: If a pencil placed in a person’s hair fell out, they were not Black but some other, interstitial category. If their curls were tight enough to hold the pencil in place, they were Black, a designation with life-determining consequences.

In polite society, we don’t do this kind of sorting and ranking of identities anymore. But the last frontier in binary sorting is the first binary known to humankind, the one all of us experience in some form or another. The gender binary is the cornerstone of human existence. Troubling it in the way that young people are today is no small thing. To most people, changing genders is a big deal. The way to make sure you don’t regret it is to be really sure you know what your gender is. But that isn’t quite as simple as it sounds.

How do we know who we are? This may seem like a profound, philosophical question. The exhortation to know yourself is, after all, one of the most famous and ancient utterances in Western civilization. But it is also an interesting question to ask yourself in a more literal sense. Because what we discover, if we are really honest with ourselves, is that most of the time we know who we are because someone told us.

I discovered this when I was made aware of an immutable fact about my identity at the rather belated age of 10. It happened during gym class, in the heat of a game of dodge ball. My family had recently moved from Kenya to Minnesota, my dad’s home state. A boy shoved me and called me a racial slur. Our horrified teacher leaped into action, consoling me and sending the boy, who I now understand is white, to the principal’s office.

But I wasn’t upset. I was confused. What was this word that caused all this tumult, and what did it have to do with me? Growing up in Kenya, I was of course aware that my parents had different skin tones and that my light brown skin was a result of that mixture. I had many friends who also had mixed parentage, but the identity categories and hierarchies that held meaning for us were the countries or tribes our parents came from or what languages we spoke at home. So I knew nothing of the American binary between white and Black, the core identity concept of race.

To put it plainly, I did not know I was Black. This central identity, plain as day to any American who looked at me, was completely invisible to the 10-year-old classmate who apparently possessed it innately and inescapably. I assimilated this news into my consciousness with no rancor, just some confusion and bemusement. There was nothing wrong with being Black, I knew, whatever the white boy might have been trying to tell me. It sent me down a rabbit hole of belated discovery, reading books like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Invisible Man,” “The Color Purple” and “The Bluest Eye,” to try to understand this new identity that I now inhabited.

Much later in life, I learned that concern that just such a moment might happen was a preoccupation in the white, Midwestern milieu my father came from. This makes sense; my parents married less than a decade after the Supreme Court declared bans on mixed-race marriage unconstitutional. Mixed-race children — “tragic mulattos,” as they were known — were a common trope in American literature and film, portrayed as a byproduct of doomed love or evidence of the crime of rape. They were seen as something that, in an ideal world, should not exist, in the same way some see transgender children now.

In 1973, the year my parents married, just 29 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage, according to Gallup . By 2021, 94 percent of Americans said they approved of interracial marriage. This transformation, which has taken place over just two generations, is a very good thing.

Race is not an exact parallel for gender identity, but as categories, we experience them in large part through the perceptions that others have of us, based largely on our outward appearances. Gender identity, many will argue, is fundamentally different, and medically or surgically altering your body to better align with your gender identity is a drastic intervention, especially for a child. But is it so different?

gender identity argumentative essay

Lately I have been asking people this question: Do you remember the first time someone informed you of your gender? It’s a nonsense question, of course. No one remembers. Mine was first declared to me, and everyone else involved, in the birthing room. Nowadays, for many people, gender is given to them well before they are born, and perhaps even heralded with cannons of pink or blue confetti at a gender reveal party. Maybe that’s what makes it seem so immutable? It’s an early, definitive declaration.

As children, we are given many things — some are biologically inherited, like hair and eye color, while other things, like names, religion and folkways, are bestowed upon us by our families and communities. Some people find these things they were given regrettable, and some, even children, change those characteristics.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 2020 , more than 44,000 people between the ages of 13 and 19 got a rhinoplasty, the most common surgical cosmetic procedure performed on teenagers. Thousands of kids went under the knife for chest surgery — 3,200 girls got breast augmentations and 1,800 girls got breast reductions, while 2,800 boys had surgery to remove breast tissue from their chests, presumably to help them conform better to their gender identities. Indeed, many if not most of these often irreversible interventions on children’s bodies are designed, in one way or another, to help children feel better about their appearances in a way that is inescapably bound up with gender.

In all, roughly 230,000 cosmetic procedures were performed on teenagers in 2020, 15 percent fewer than the year before, presumably owing to the pandemic. That drop was smaller than I expected. It underscores just how desperate these children were to change their bodies that even in the first, terrifying year of a deadly pandemic, when most of us were avoiding medical settings like the literal plague engulfing us, teenagers had, with their parents’ permission, hundreds of thousands of mostly elective medical treatments. Many of these were adolescent girls seeking the small, cute noses that fill our television screens and fashion magazines, chasing an ideal of feminine beauty that feels forever out of reach.

More than 90 percent of cosmetic procedures are performed on women and girls, but there has been a notable boom in several kinds of cosmetic procedures for adult men. Expensive and complex leg-lengthening surgeries that can add a few inches to a patient’s height are rising in popularity. ProPublica and The New Yorker recently published a long investigation into the boom in implants that can increase the size of a man’s penis but also can come with significant complications and side effects.

Cosmetic procedures can produce regret, sometimes famously so. The actress Jennifer Grey had a career-imploding rhinoplasty, which prompted years of cruel punchlines. Some famous young people who have these procedures later spoke of regretting them — Kylie Jenner has spoken of regretting a breast augmentation surgery performed when she was 19, and Bella Hadid of regretting a nose job at 14.

These are covered in the media as the ordinary stuff of human regret: A person made a choice and had complicated feelings about that choice in the aftermath. You live and learn. There has been no stampede to ban such treatments for children. Some might disapprove of these decisions, as some do of all cosmetic surgeries, but we rightly understand them as freely made choices of human beings who have the right to decide what they do to their own bodies. In the case of children, these decisions are made in a context of community, in consultation with parents and doctors. These procedures usually affirm the gender the child was assigned at birth, the one that, in most cases, matches the child’s sex at birth.

People who express regret about a gender transition are seen in a very different light. A handful of such people have appeared over and over again in news stories across the world, portrayed as the harbingers of a tsunami of regret that is always about to arrive because countless children are being carelessly affirmed by an ideologically driven activist community in their mistaken beliefs that they are transgender. In this telling, impressionable children, especially those assigned as female when they were born, are falling into a fad or being manipulated by the so-called gender ideology that taught them to reject womanhood. Most chilling to some is a mistaken belief that medical transition routinely causes permanent sterility, foreclosing any chance at parenthood. (Some treatments, including cross-sex hormones, can hamper fertility in a patient, but the effects are often reversible — plenty of transgender people, men, women and nonbinary people become biological parents.)

Statistics on gender transition medical care for children in the United States are not easy to find, but last year Reuters performed an analysis of insurance data to try to quantify the number of children receiving medication or surgery as a treatment for gender dysphoria. It found that the number of children starting puberty blockers had risen, from 633 in 2017 to 1,390 in 2021. The number of children starting hormone therapy had more than doubled in the same period, to 4,231. The analysis found evidence of 56 genital surgeries between 2017 and 2021. The number of children who underwent mastectomies as treatment for gender dysphoria in 2021 was 282, up from 238 in 2019.

Even if these numbers are significantly undercounted — the data do not include treatment paid for out of pocket — medical transition for children, an issue that has received a huge amount of attention from the news media and politicians, is very uncommon. You would not know that from the 590 bills targeting transgender people that have been introduced in 49 states as of the end of November. So far, 85 have passed.

The discrepancy between the number of children who medically transition and the attention paid to them in our politics is striking. But transgender children are just a subset of all children struggling with gender.

As the frenzy of medical treatment for people who think of themselves as cisgender demonstrates, and indeed the entire $430 billion beauty industry shows, most of us feel at least a little bit weird about our gender — how we wear it, how we show it, how we transmit it to those around us. As the scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton has said, gender is queer, even when we play it straight.

Girls and boys, women and men are enthusiastic and active participants in the construction of their gender identities, making small tweaks or wholesale changes to make the way they feel match the way they look. Maybe the way transgender and nonbinary people feel about their genders is no different from anyone else. It is confusing and contradictory. It feels deeply personal and yet built on the images and influences of our culture. It sets unreachable ideals and is subject to unpredictable variations that spread like wildfire. What is gender if not contagious? We catch it in the form of fads all the time, from the Beatles mop-top craze to Bama Rush .

Transgender and nonbinary people can have complicated feelings about their medical treatment, and may act on them, up to and including transitioning again. They may either go back to the genders they were assigned at birth or reject the binary entirely, and describe themselves as nonbinary, genderqueer or simply queer. It’s a mistake to dismiss these feelings as simply regret.

When the media fixates on the hypothetical regret of children who do transition — and when that fixation blocks treatment paths for others — are we actually debasing the kind of regret that might be felt by a child who wishes to transition but cannot? To borrow another phrase: A single mistaken transition is a tragedy. A million children denied care? That’s just a statistic.

The right claims that transgender people want to impose gender ideology on the world. But as the saying goes, every accusation is also a confession. We are already living under a gender ideology: It is called the gender binary, and transgender people are hardly the only ones suffering from its crushing weight.

Jules Gill-Peterson, a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “Histories of the Transgender Child,” suggested to me that we might be thinking of the gender experiences of transgender people all wrong.

“It might be comforting and reassuring to imagine that trans people are fundamentally different,” she said. “But I think the real startling possibility is that they are not, and that we all depend on the generosity of strangers to give us our genders every single day.”

Maybe we should all learn to wear our genders, indeed, all of our identities, a bit more lightly. I have come to think of the institution of gender as something a bit like an arranged marriage. It is something your family does for you, usually with loving intention and in the interest of your community, that may or may not work out, or may work for a time but then break down. For most of human history, all marriages were arranged marriages, but in much of the world we’ve come to accept that most people want to choose their own life partners, even at the price of family and community cohesion. Why should gender be any different?

The notion that transgender and nonbinary people experience gender in the same way as everyone else is a surprisingly controversial one, not least among the queer community itself. The history of queer activism in the United States is marked by the same tensions as every other identity-based movement: Securing legal rights and protections almost always requires drawing a clearly defined circle around an identity group and the central trait as one that is innate rather than a choice.

For queer people, this notion has been especially fraught, because for much of the last two centuries, queerness was thought to be a disease. It wasn’t until 1973 that the gay rights movement was able to push the American Psychiatric Association to cease referring to homosexuality as a disorder. Queer people, like Black people had been for much of their history in this country, were thought to be defective compared with what was assumed to be the norm.

For gays and lesbians, social acceptance and legal protection came as Americans learned to see sexual orientation as an innate and immutable characteristic. When Gallup first polled on the topic in 1977, just 13 percent of Americans thought gay and lesbian people were born that way. Now roughly half do, and in many ways it hardly seems to matter anymore. The frenzied search for a “gay gene,” a very 1990s preoccupation, has petered out. Believing gay people had no choice but to be gay was a critical way station on the road to accepting homosexuality as just another way of being in the world, and no one talks much about it anymore.

I know plenty of gay and lesbian people who were aware from a very young age of their sexual orientation and who would describe themselves as always having known they were queer. I am not among them. I had a wonderful gay role model in my uncle Tom, who has been out his whole adult life and modeled what a happy queer life without shame and hiding could be. But like many queer people, I had many different romantic entanglements in my youth, and had I not met my wife in college it is not impossible to imagine that I might have ended up on another path. I certainly did not experience myself as being born any particular way.

Among people of my generation and younger, it isn’t all that uncommon for women who were once married to men to later in life end up in partnerships with women, and I certainly have known men in gay relationships who wound up in straight ones and vice versa. These people seldom describe themselves as having “lived a lie” in their previous relationships. I think most of us know intuitively that sexual orientation is not binary, and is subject to change over the course of our lives.

The notion that people who diverge from social norms under existing hierarchies deserve basic human dignity only if they have no choice about that divergence is fundamentally degrading. Undergirding it is the unspoken but clear judgment that this identity is regrettable but in a civilized country must be tolerated. I’m glad it has faded as a justification for rights for gay and lesbian people.

Given the astonishing ferocity of the legislative assault on transgender people right now, and the need to secure even the most basic protections, much of the activism around transgender issues has understandably focused on survival over liberation. The born-this-way narrative prevails in most mainstream organizations and institutions and dominates much of the discourse.

And yet. To many queer people, myself very much included, it feels like an incomplete account of their experiences, a simplification that shortchanges their lives. The writer and academic Grace Lavery, who has written with great clarity and wit about what she calls her “sex change,” describes this problem in her memoir, “Please Miss”:

“‘I always knew’ is an especially unreasonable standard by which to rank the legitimacy of various transitions, because it implies two things — (1) that it was always true; (2) that we have consistent access to truths about ourselves.”

Indeed, in the more radical corners of queer thought, a different conversation is unfolding. I came across one of the most striking examples of this thinking in a slim book published this summer called “Gender Without Identity.” It was written by a pair of queer psychoanalysts, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, and in it they argue that the born-this-way model of treating gender of trans and nonbinary patients ignores the vital role life experiences, including traumatic ones, play in shaping gender in all people. Pretending it is otherwise “sets the stage” for regret, Saketopoulou told me.

“To imagine that there was a way to live a life without regret is to sign on to a very particular understanding of human life as being interior, as being sovereign to itself, as having nothing to do with the social world, with the political world, with relationships with each other,” she told me. When it comes to gender, “there’s no way to make a mistake, and there’s no way to get it right. Meaning that you get it right enough. That’s what we’re all aiming for.”

We ended up with the born-this-way model because of the tension between the seeking of rights for an embattled minority and the broader search for liberation. But this tension is ultimately dialectical — it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

I still love to swim, and will jump into just about any swimmable body of water, in just about any weather. The strokes I worked so hard to perfect four decades ago remain embedded in my muscle memory, sending me gliding through pond, stream and sea.

There are times in my life when I’ve wished I hadn’t given up competitive swimming. You can’t step into the same river twice, as the ancient fragment from Heraclitus tells us. Neither you nor the river is the same. I guess that’s how I feel about the champion swimmer I could have been. It would have been another life. It does not impoverish the value of the wonderful life I’ve led to imagine what pleasure and pain might have come from living a different one, or foreclose another, future transition, whatever that might bring. I’m lucky that I got to choose. The gift is the choice, even if I haven’t always been sure I made the right one.

I understand the impulse to protect children from regret. The fantasy of limitless possibility is alluring — who wouldn’t want that for their child? To forestall, for as long as possible, throwing the switches that will determine your destination in life, is tempting. But a life without choosing is not a human life.

Transitions are hard, even when we know that they are coming. We all struggle to see ourselves clearly, and the notion that who we are depends on where and when we are feels deeply destabilizing. This is why the riddle of the sphinx, that ancient tale of Greek myth, stumped so many until Oedipus came along. The sphinx asked: What has one voice but goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the day and three in the evening? The answer, of course, is us.

We all know what awaits us with age, and yet it is all but impossible for any of us to fathom the transitions our selves will undergo over time. Each of those transitions is a kind of little death — the end of one way of being and the birth of another. It is no surprise that the more unexpected the transition, the more deeply unsettling it is.

We are all hurtling, inevitably, toward that one last transition, across the one true binary, the one between life and death. And that binary is the true source of all our regrets, and our joy, too. Regret exists because we all get just one life.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the “ Matter of Opinion ” podcast for The Times.

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70 Argumentative Essay Topics About Gender Equality

Essay Topics About Gender Equality

Gender equality is an extremely debatable topic. Sooner or later, every group of friends, colleagues, or classmates will touch on this subject. Discussions never stop, and this topic is always relevant.

This is not surprising, as our society hasn’t reached 100% equality yet. Pay gaps, victimization, abortion laws, and other aspects remain painful for millions of women. You should always be ready to structure your thoughts and defend your point of view on this subject. Why not practice with our list of essay topics about gender equality?

Our cheap essay writing service authors prepared 70 original ideas for you. Besides, at the end of our article, you’ll find a list of inspirational sources for your essay.

Argumentative Essay Topics About Gender Equality

  • Does society or a person define gender?
  • Can culturally sanctioned gender roles hurt adolescents’ mental health?
  • Who or what defines the concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity” in modern society?
  • Should the rules of etiquette be changed because they’ve been created in the epoch of total patriarchy?
  • Why is gender equality higher in developed countries? Is equality the cause or the result of the development?
  • Are gender stereotypes based on the difference between men’s and women’s brains justified?
  • Would humanity be more developed today if gender stereotypes never exited?
  • Can a woman be a good politician? Why or why not?
  • What are the main arguments of antifeminists? Are they justified?
  • Would our society be better if more women were in power?

Analytical Gender Equality Topics

  • How do gender stereotypes in the sports industry influence the careers of athletes?
  • Social and psychological foundations of feminism in modern Iranian society: Describe women’s rights movements in Iran and changes in women’s rights.
  • Describe the place of women in today’s sports and how this situation looked a hundred years ago.
  • What changes have American women made in the social and economic sphere? Describe the creation of a legislative framework for women’s empowerment.
  • How can young people fix gender equality issues?
  • Why do marketing specialists keep taking advantage of gender stereotypes in advertising?
  • How does gender inequality hinder our society from progress?
  • What social problems does gender inequality cause?
  • How does gender inequality influence the self-image of male adolescents?
  • Why is the concept of feminism frequently interpreted negatively?

Argumentative Essay Topics About Gender Equality in Art and Literature

  • Theory of gender in literature: do male and female authors see the world differently? Pick one book and analyze it in the context of gender.
  • Compare and contrast how gender inequality is described in L. Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” and G. Flaubert’s novel “Madame Bovary.” Read and analyze the mentioned books, distinguish how gender inequality is described, and how the main characters manage this inequality.
  • The artificial gender equality and class inequality in the novel “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley.
  • Do modern romance novels for teenagers help to break gender stereotypes, or do they enforce them?
  • Gender equality changes through Disney animation films. Analyze the scenarios of Disney animation films from the very beginning. Describe how the overall mood in relation to female characters and their roles has changed.
  • Henrik Ibsen touched on the topic of gender inequality in his play “A Doll’s House.” Why was it shocking for a 19th century audience?
  • Concepts of gender inequality through examples of fairy tales. Analyze several fairy tales that contain female characters. What image do they have? Do these fairy tales misrepresent the nature of women? How do fairy tales spoil the world view of young girls?
  • Why do female heroes rarely appear in superhero movies?
  • Heroines of the movie “Hidden Figures” face both gender and racial inequalities. In your opinion, has the American society solved these issues entirely?
  • The problem of gender inequality in the novel “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker.

Gender Equality Essay Ideas: Workplace and Employment

  • Dress code in the workplace: Does it help to solve the problem of gender inequality, or is it a detriment?
  • What kind of jobs are traditionally associated with men and women? How have these associations changed in the last 50 years?
  • The pay gap between men and women: is it real?
  • How can HR managers overcome gender stereotypes while hiring a new specialist?
  • Analyze the concepts of “glass ceiling” and “glass elevator.” Do these phenomena still exist in our society?

Essay Topics About Gender Equality: Religion

  • Gender aspects of Christian virtue and purity in the Bible.
  • What does the equality of men and women look like from the perspective of Christianity? Can a woman be a pastor?
  • Orthodox Judaism: Women and the transformation of their roles in a religious institute. Describe the change in women’s roles in modern Judaism.
  • How can secularism help solve the problem of gender inequality in religious societies?
  • Is the problem of gender inequality more serious in religious societies?

Compare and Contrast Essay Topics About Gender Equality

  • Compare and contrast the problems men and women experience in managerial positions.
  • Compare and contrast what progress has been made on gender equality in the USA and Sweden.
  • Compare and contrast the social status of women in ancient Athens and Sparta.
  • Conduct a sociological analysis of gender asymmetry in various languages. Compare and contrast the ways of assigning gender in two different languages.
  • Compare and contrast the portrayal of female characters in 1960s Hollywood films and in modern cinematography (pick two movies). What has changed?

Gender Equality Topics: Definitions

  • Define the term “misandry.” What is the difference between feminism and misandry?
  • Define the term “feminology.” How do feminologists help to break down prejudice about the gender role of women?
  • Define the term “catcalling.” How is catcalling related to the issue of gender inequality?
  • Define the term “femvertising.” How does this advertising phenomenon contribute to the resolution of the gender inequality issue?
  • Define the term “misogyny.” What is the difference between “misogyny” and “sexism”?

Gender Equality Essay Ideas: History

  • The roles of the mother and father through history.
  • Define the most influential event in the history of the feminist movement.
  • What ancient societies preached matriarchy?
  • How did World War II change the attitude toward women in society?
  • Woman and society in the philosophy of feminism of the second wave. Think on works of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan and define what ideas provoked the second wave.

Essay Topics About Gender Equality in Education

  • How do gender stereotypes influence the choice of major among high school students?
  • Discuss the problems of female education in the interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft. Reflect on the thoughts of Mary Wollstonecraft on gender equality and why women should be treated equally to men.
  • Self-determination of women in professions: Modern contradictions. Describe the character of a woman’s self-determination as a professional in today’s society.
  • Should gender and racial equality be taught in elementary school?
  • Will sex education at schools contribute to the development of gender equality?

Gender Equality Topics: Sex and Childbirth

  • Sexual violence in conflict situations: The problem of victimization of women.
  • The portrayal of menstruation and childbirth in media: Now versus twenty years ago.
  • How will the resolution of the gender inequality issue decrease the rate of sexual abuse toward women?
  • The attitude toward menstruation in different societies and how it influences the issue of gender equality.
  • How does the advertising of sexual character aggravate the problem of gender inequality?
  • Should advertising that uses sexual allusion be regulated by the government?
  • How has the appearance of various affordable birth control methods contributed to the establishment of gender equality in modern society?
  • Do men have the right to give up their parental duties if women refuse to have an abortion?
  • Can the child be raised without the influence of gender stereotypes in modern society?
  • Did the sexual revolution in the 1960s help the feminist movement?

How do you like our gender equality topics? We’ve tried to make them special for you. When you pick one of these topics, you should start your research. We recommend you to check the books we’ve listed below.

Non-Fiction Books and Articles on Gender Equality Topics

  • Beecher, C. “The Peculiar Responsibilities of American Women.”
  • Connell, R. (2011). “Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change.”
  • Doris H. Gray. (2013). “Beyond Feminism and Islamism: Gender and Equality in North Africa.”
  • Inglehart Ronald, Norris Pippa. (2003). “Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World.”
  • Mary Ann Danowitz Sagaria. (2007). “Women, Universities, and Change: Gender Equality in the European Union and the United States (Issues in Higher Education).”
  • Merrill, R. (1997). “Good News for Women: A Biblical Picture of Gender Equality.”
  • Mir-Hosseini, Z. (2013). “Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in the Islamic Legal Process.”
  • Raymond F. Gregory. (2003). “Women and Workplace Discrimination: Overcoming Barriers to Gender Equality.”
  • Rubery, J., & Koukiadaki, A. (2016). “Closing the Gender Pay Gap: A Review of the Issues, Policy Mechanisms and International Evidence.”
  • Sharma, A. (2016). “Managing Diversity and Equality in the Workplace.”
  • Sika, N. (2011). “The Millennium Development Goals: Prospects for Gender Equality in the Arab World.”
  • Stamarski, C. S., & Son Hing, L. S. (2015). “Gender Inequalities in the Workplace: The Effects of Organizational Structures, Processes, Practices, and Decision Makers’ Sexism.”
  • Verniers, C., & Vala, J. (2018). “Justifying Gender Discrimination in the Workplace: The Mediating Role of Motherhood Myths.”
  • Williams, C. L., & Dellinger, K. (2010). “Gender and Sexuality in the Workplace.”

Literary Works for Your Gender Equality Essay Ideas

  • “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen
  • “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf
  • “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy
  • “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
  • “ The Awakening” by Kate Chopin
  • “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
  • “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
  • “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett
  • “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir

We’re sure that with all of these argumentative essay topics about gender equality and useful sources, you’ll get a good grade without much effort! If you have any difficulties with your homework, request “ write my essay for cheap ” help and  our expert writers are always ready to help you.

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Exploring Gender Identity, Argumentation and Rhetorical Appeals Uses within EFL Students' Writing

Profile image of Jawad Golzar

2021, International Journal of Education and Language Studies

Persuasive language influences college students dramatically by providing possibilities of presenting their self. The current study examined how EFL college students embodied their gender identity, employed argumentation, and incorporated rhetorical appeals (logos, ethos, and pathos) in their EFL writing. The study utilized a mixed-method approach. Using simple and random sampling, the authors selected eight argumentative essays that the EFL students submitted as an academic writing course requirement. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is used to measure linguistic properties of the texts, and coding quantitatively is used to analyze the qualitative data collected by interview. The results revealed that the participants did not include the qualifier and counterarguments, and they incorporated rhetorical appeals across gender differently. The study unveiled various underlying constraints sanctioning the EFL students' gender identity presentation within their writing in the Afghan context. The study offered several pedagogical implications to support EFL students to develop as successful writers.

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Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics

Peter Crosthwaite

This study identifies and compares the gender-preferential language features present in the argumentative writing of L1 Indonesian and Indonesian L2 English learners. The data is comprised of 80 English argumentative essays sampled from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE, Ishikawa, 2011) and a comparative corpus of 80 L1 Indonesian argumentative essays collected online from Indonesian university students, both equally divided by gender. Comparison of the data was performed through quantitative analysis of three supposed 'male-preferential' features and seventeen 'female-preferential' features between the male-and female-produced corpora in L1 and L2 writing. This study investigated (1) the extent of variation in the use of 'gendered language features' between male and female-produced L1 and L2 texts; (2) whether the use of male/female 'gendered-language features' across male/female produced L1/L2 texts match their suggested gender preference, and (3) to what extent L1's preference for 'gender language features' affects male and female learners' use of such language in L2. The results suggest the majority of supposed gender-preferential features were not significantly different across male/female produced texts, indicating that argumentative essays may be gender-neutral to a certain extent. This study also revealed that L1 preference of gendered language forms does not determine their preferences in the L2. In conclusion, male and female students adopt similar linguistic features to express their arguments. We may claim that gender language forms are not fixed and absolute in academic discourse because instructive texts tend to have a set model to fulfil the pedagogical criteria.

Randwick International of Education and Linguistics Science (RIELS) Journal

Morteza Bakhtiarvand , Parastoo Alizadeh Oghyanous

The current mixed methods study was an attempt to approach genre-based instruction from a fourfold perspective. As for the quantitative phase, first, it was aimed to examine the effect of genre-based instruction (GBI) on EFL learners’ argumentative essay writing performance. Second, the study investigated the overall organizational structure of learners’ argumentative essays in control and experimental groups. The participants of the study were 71 learners selected out of an initial number of 95 chosen based on convenience sampling. The selected 71 learners were divided into two groups of 35 and 36 who were assigned to the control and experimental group, respectively. Then, a writing pretest was administered to the two groups. After the treatment, the participants in both groups were given a writing posttest. The quantitative findings indicated that GBI was significantly effective on learners’ argumentative writing performance. Additionally, the quantitative structure analysis showed that the number of the argumentative essay elements in the essays of the experimental group was higher than those of the control group. Afterwards, ten participants in the experimental group were interviewed to seek their perceptions towards the efficacy of GBI in teaching argumentative essay writing and their authorial identity construction. The qualitative analysis of the interviews pointed to the learners’ positive attitudes towards GBI and the usefulness of this type of instruction for improving their argumentative writing performance. Finally, the ten participants in the experimental group reported their positive perceptions with regard to their authorial identity construction.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abbas Zare-ee

JEELS (Journal of English Education and Linguistics Studies)

While considered elusive and abstract, authorial voice is paramount in English writing. Unfortunately, many of Indonesian EFL learners found it is highly challeging to show their voice in their writing. The importance of voice is even exaggerated in argumentative writing, since this kind of writing needs obvious stance of the writer. This study investigates the authorial voice students made in their argumentative writing. The purpose of this study is to gain the picture of students " writing ability especially in authorial voice to map the road in guiding the next writing classes. The object of the study is the argumentative writing made by English department students at one Indonesian State College of Islamic Studies in their writing III course. Using Hyland " s interactional model of voice (2008) the data analysis results the authorial presence in the essays is in position 2 at 0 – 4 scale which means the reader feels somehow weak presence of the authorial voice in the essay. This result confirms the findings of some previous studies that EFL learners especially from " interdependent " cultural background tend to find this authorial voice difficult in writing English essay.

International Education Studies

latifa El Mortaji

Research on gender and writing strategies in English as a foreign language (EFL) is scarce. This study investigates whether Moroccan male and female undergraduates use similar or different writing strategies when composing essays in the narrative and expository genres. Using think-aloud as a main research tool, a questionnaire, and retrospective interviews, the researcher collected data pertaining to male and female students’ strategy use and cognitive processes while writing in EFL. The analysis of 64 think-aloud protocols revealed Moroccan undergraduates’ use of a variety of writing strategies in terms of type and frequency. Both main types and subtypes of writing strategies emerged. Two-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed that each gender group used some writing strategies more frequently than the other group; however, this difference in frequency of use was not statistically significant. In addition, the interaction of gender, writing strategy use, and discours...

Abdelrahman A B D A L L A Salih

Students at the tertiary level need arguments because they are expected to use analytical and critical thinking skills. The present study is situated in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context in an Omani University and reports the experience of (N=46) undergraduate EFL writers in argumentative essays and persuasive posters. Using rhetorical strategies, and drawing on the principles of persuasive writing, the participants prepared posters and essays on two separate topics. Data were collected from the 46 participants' responses to a semi-structured online survey questionnaire. Analysis of the data obtained indicates that the participants preferred designing posters to writing persuasive essays while reporting varieties of rhetorical difficulties in building an argument for persuasion. The participants also perceived establishing evidence and facts as the most challenging element in persuasive writing and arousing the audience's feelings and emotions as the most challenging rhetorical appeal in posters. Some pedagogical implications were reported as well.

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Great argumentative essay topics about women, dr. wilson mn.

  • July 31, 2022
  • Essay Topics and Ideas , Samples

To be effective, an Argumentative Essay must be well-organized and must include elements such as an introduction, clear arguments, a strong conclusion, and potentially a call to action. Simply having an opinion and some facts about your topic is not enough – you need to use your critical thinking skills to structure your argument in a way that will persuade your audience to see things your way. If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at some of the following argumentative Essay Topics About Women, Argumentative Essay Topics On Gender Roles, Gender Identity Argumentative Essay Topics, and Women Argumentative Topics:

What You'll Learn

  • Should women be allowed to wear what they like in conservative settings?
  • Should women have a free run from domestic violence at home?
  • Should society change its perception towards single mothers (with babies born out of wedlock)?
  • Should women shout for equality and reservation in the same breath?
  • Should women be allowed extended maternity leave?
  • Can conservative families be made to realize that women are more than just baby-rearing machines?
  • Should women undergo mandatory military training to be confident?
  • Should women’s equality be a quick or gradual process?
  • Should women boycott movies where they are shown in poor light?
  • Should Governments take responsibility to foster courage into common women?
  • Can women ever survive and negate sexist remarks in offices?

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Strong Argumentative Essay Topics On Gender Roles (Gender Role Argument Topics)

  • Gender Roles in Ancient Greek Community
  • What Are The Importance Of Gender Roles To Families?
  • Gender Roles Of The Family
  • The Concentration Of Gender Roles
  • Gender Representation And Gender Roles
  • Gender Responsibilities And Gender Roles
  • Functionalist Perspective On Gender Roles
  • Gender Roles: An Ideal Thing?
  • Social Media And Gender Roles
  • The History Of Gender Roles
  • Gender Roles And Social Norms
  • Family Values And Gender Roles
  • Should Men have More Gender Roles Than Women?
  • Gender Roles: A Form Of Gender Discrimination?
  • Examining Gender Roles in Man  and Woman
  • Gender Roles: Toys And Games
  • Are Gender Roles Damaging Society?
  • Psychological Effects of Gender Roles
  • How Are Gender Roles Formulated
  • Portrayal Of Gender Roles
  • Gender Roles in Disney
  • Comparing Cultural Gender Roles
  • Gender Roles in War and Peace
  • Portrayal Of Men And Gender Roles

You can also check out  150+ Top-Notch Argumentative Essay Topic Ideas

Unique Gender Identity Argumentative Essay Topics

  • Gender identity: There are so many topics in gender identity that students can focus on – gender roles, co-modification and advertisements. When it comes to advertising, men and women are assigned different roles. Women will be given roles that match the traits ascribed to them. The same case applies to men.
  • Sexual orientation: With the recent rising cases of lesbianism, gay-ism, same sex marriage and sexual reassignment, such concepts offer viable essay topics .
  • Gender expression and the social norms: Gender states that you are either man or woman. Anything outside the social norm is considered outcast.
  • Gender role development: This is an important area when it comes to human development.
  • The male and female gender constructs Cultural beliefs dictate that there are two biological sexes-male and female. There are a lot of stereotypes and ascribed associated with each gender.
  • The relationship between sex and gender roles: There is a correlation between the sex and gender roles of men and women as per the societal and cultural expectations.
  • Gender mainstreaming: This basically deals with ensuring that gender needs of men and women are met in a manner that is fair and just.

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Strong Women Argumentative Topics

  • Will it be ethical to objectify males to put them on the same platter as women?
  • Can women actually overcome the physical barrier to shout for equality?
  • Is an equal society possible when 70% women shy away from indulging in crowd?
  • Necessity to spread awareness among women regarding their rights
  • Is the nuclear family the most forward step towards restoring parity between men and women?
  • Gender roles: How hard is it to mold the rigid perspectives of societies?
  • Is female adultery a logical demand or a perverse act of feminism?
  • Will the world run as smoothly if it turns matriarchal?
  • What part does sex play in defining gender roles?

Here are  130 + Best Research Topic About Nursing – Types & How To Choose A Nursing Research Topic

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F you're not sure where to start, take a look at some of the following argumentative essay topics about women, argumentative essay topics on gender roles, gender identity argumentative essay topics, and women argumentative topics:

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Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Identity / Gender Identity

Gender Identity Essay Examples

Understanding sexual orientation and gender identity in society.

Often sex and gender are interchangeably used and to distinguish the meaning of the terms is not as simple as it seems. It is predominant to understand the distinction between these two words to point out that they are not synonymous. This is sexual orientation...

LGBT Acceptance and Tolerance Around the World

The people of the lgbtq community have been fighting to be accepted around the world since the mid-late 1800s, and even today we are still struggling in this area. As of spring 2019, there are still places around the world that have a less than...

Self and Gender: Theories and Concepts Explored

To start with this is gendered self essay in which I will reveal this topic. So, this gender experience can be explained through Risman’s gender as a social structure theory. At the individual level, I experienced the process involved in the development of gender, where...

Gender and Society: the Difference Between Sex and Gender

This is gender and society essay that will address the question: “Drawing on the academic theory and literature, examine the differences between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’.' This short academic essay aims to explore the difference between sex and gender using a variety of academic theories. Concepts...

The Concept of Social Location

This is "The social location" essay the author discusses the definition of this concept and what hides after it. Social location designates where a person stands in their community, it evolves over time and could either negatively or positively impact in terms of change. Each...

Gender Stereotypes in Toys: Its Influence on Child's Development

Gender discourse and inclusivity are becoming more mainstream than ever. As Mattel introduces their first line of gender neutral dolls (Bellware, 2019), it would seem to be an indicator of the progress we have made so far. However, the pink and blue aisles in majority...

Socially Constructed Displays of Gender

When my niece was mistaken for a boy, my sister ensured that my niece wore headbands every day. She has never been mistaken since then. How can a fashion accessory help people determine the sex of the baby? When a baby is dressed in pink,...

Gender Identity and Intersex Debate in Modern Society

In our generation today, there can be some common confusion on gender and sexual orientation. It was once believed that gender was determined by the genitals you were born with, however, in this day of age there is much more behind it. Although we are...

Representation of Women’s Identity

The medium of cinema helps express the various walks of life through various eras. The transformation of women from saris to mini skirts showcases the change with the times. It articulates the ethnical and cultural values of the society. The upcoming years are making a...

Gender Representation in Animated Disney Princesses Movies

Gender is a term or a tag which is constructed by the society rather than it being biologically determined as per the sex of that person. Males and females are expected to act or behave in certain ways. So males are usually expected to be...

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