¶ … achievement, or of influence, that one finds one's self in, regarding education, health, self-esteem, business, politics, housing; class, as a sociological concept, is based upon the relationship an individual has to the means of production and distribution at his or her disposal. The "upper class" is wealthy, and the "lower class" struggles for subsistence. And when a group of "working class" individuals band together to petition management for better wages and working conditions, they may decide to join a union.
"Status" on the other hand refers to the standing a person achieves or experiences with respect to the way in which that person is treated in part of a social order. Everyone has a "status" -- even the person with no money and no home, a "homeless" person has that "status" -- although most people strive to achieve a higher status than what they start out with, with the exception being those born into wealth and privilege.
Equality of opportunity is about equal formal rights for all citizens, and it is about society attempting to assure that the rules are fair and that the playing field is as level as can be for all the players. It does not mean making a society in which all achieve the same status or find themselves in the same class; rather, it just means that everyone has a chance, that jobs are open to all applicants -- and applications are reviewed based on their merits, not on the status of the individual applying for the position. Equality of condition is about believing that people should...
When there is an inequality of condition for a person, there is likely to be an inequality of the outcome of that person's life, because inequalities of condition obstruct real equality of opportunity since all those in competition for a job are not starting from the same point.
3. In terms of understanding the situation women find themselves in at the beginning of 2005 -- as to their (social) "status" and/or their (social) "class" -- it is instructive and useful to look first at a report from the recent session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) (Richter, 2003). The event was held in UN Headquarters in New York City, in March, 2003. The report (in Women Magazine) noted that the CSW had struggled in the past in making progress given "a world that is characterized by patriarchy and men dominating the decision-making" (keeping the status of women beneath that of men, as a general rule), but this event was highly successful.
The status of women world-wide, the report showed, has been enhanced by the "changes of industrial and agricultural societies into information based" societies, as the "participation of and access of women to the traditional and new media" -- Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) -- has dramatically impacted woman and girls. The main impact has been that women in all corners of the world now know more about what tools in ICT are available to them, what other women are doing to move…
