Challenges Women Face Today

This modern era brings modern challenges to women, particularly in the areas of family roles and expectations, body image, and barriers in work, politics, and social issues. 

Women have come a tremendously long way in terms of our rights, opportunities, and influence. Yet there is still seem to be struggles and barriers that stand in our way.

In this week's episode, we discuss several aras where we see and experience this. First, we look at the new challenges that have arisen for women due to their increased education and professional opportunitieis. On the one hand, it's phenomenal to have unprecendented opportunites to get out of traditional household roles and make a way for ourselves in the world. On the other hand, those traditional responsibilities related to childcare and household work still fall largely on women's shoulders, adding stress and remolding what family dynamics need to look like. And now that women have much more choice in what they do...what do they want to do?

Women also struggle with their relationship to their bodies. The female body has always been the subject of reverence and scrutiny, but the addition of limitless cameras in our culture has made us hyperaware of our own bodies and the bodies of other women - namely the bodies of glorified social media women who implicitly set an unreachable standard for most of us. Yet we can't seem to look away from ourselves or from them.

And finally we re-examine the perennial problems of representation, career advancement, and social issues - those stubborn problems that, despite us feeling like we've come so far, still seem to show us how far we have to go.