The sociological imagination is a tool that allows us to examine education inequality and its impacts on women in a way that provides an extensive and thorough understanding of the link between private struggles and broader social patterns. Using the sociological imagination enables sociologists to have the capacity to make the familiar unfamiliar and critically analyse how private struggles are impacted and influenced by broader social patterns. When applying the sociological imagination tool to the impact of unequal norms on women’s lives, it is discovered that the commonly viewed private issues inclusive of unemployment, poor health physically and sexually, early pregnancy and the inability to stand up for own rights are a reflection of public, broader issues in society. These broader patterns include the ideology of males viewed as superior to women, which is the common reason for child marriages, higher rates of HIV contraction in women compared to men ending in mortality, and high numbers of women within
domestic violence injuries and death categories. The sociological imagination allows us to engage the sociological tools of agency and structure, and analyse how these interact with each other causing broader issues. For example, the current social structure, in its whole, consists predominately of male expectations and the belief of male superiority, resulting in impacts against women’s agency in multifarious ways and pushes them to engage in self-surveillance continually. When critically thinking about the current 21st-century social structure, which values and encourages the belief of male superiority over the female population, sociologists can start to understand by what means sexually harassing women is seen as a way of expressing masculinity. It is also uncovered how this normalised behaviour and male culture consequently impacts women’s agency as they attempt to avoid situations where males gather in groups, male-dominated work fields, male grouped areas in nightclubs, and fields of study, for example.