I also think it's morally reprehensible to just sit back and accept generations of people who don't have the chances others do.
I grew up (in the US) thinking that my generation (I'm a very early "millennial", apparently—the kind that well remembers a pre-Web world and grew up with a lot of Gen X media) pretty much had this down, and that especially the tech people did. The Internet of the hacker world wasn't supposed to care about this stuff, just results and ability.
Now everyone seems more divided over sex than it did then. Hell, sexual orientations of all sorts and interracial relationships (anyone else remember those "look who's coming to dinner" episodes of daytime talk shows in the 90s?) and such, which were all still very much issues to the adult public when I was growing up, really do seem to be disappearing as Things To Be Upset About (I know, bathroom bills and not counting your chickens and so on, but the progress there seems huge and very real), but the regular ol' divide between men and women? It seems to be way worse than it was.
I'm not sure what happened, but this certainly wasn't something I expected to be a major problem for adults of Gen X/Millennial generations. And I was raised in the Midwest and surrounded by Republicans (including my parents), so it's not like I grew up in a liberal bubble or something. The last decade or so's "culture war"-type battles in online communities, all the reports of significant difficulties for women in technology, and so on, have caught me very much by surprise.
Also, you editorialized a lot in your description of "active integration".
Sorry for the edits, I'm not a good english speaker and the tone wasn't right.
The reality is that integration follows a similar pattern - bigger cities mean better integration. Find a vote map and you've basically got a map of how good integration is.
Not necessarily, I see 2 opinions on how to fix this :
- An "active integration" like you explain, where the differences are highlighted (what we mostly see in the US). The idea is that by forcing the change we'll get used to it.
- A post-racial/genre approach, where the differences are made as irrelevant as any physical trait, so the change comes naturally but it's a long process (what I've mostly seen in France)
IMHO the first approach may yield faster results, but only the second can solve cultural issues (in part by blurring and mixing the cultures, instead of crystallizing them)