There is absolutely an important and in many ways terrible impact on a society from having one gender mostly in charge of the official hierarchies of social and political control. But it’s also the easiest thing to examine and understand from afar, and so it can overshadow other (maybe just as important) parts of the culture.

[edit: I skimmed the essay under discussion and part of it makes loosely the same point as this latter. One thing it does which I find annoying is that in using Larry Summers’s sacking as an example it ignores that the faculty wanted Summers out long before his famous comments, for completely unrelated reasons. His misdeed was not “to think thoughts that are not allowed to be thought” and to characterize it that way is quite misleading. I also am annoyed at the analysis of histograms of grades, test scores, and salaries as implying more about innate ability than they do about cultural assimilation.]

Yes, this is kinda the little secret of Feminism. They see that men have "good" jobs like CEOs and want some of that for themselves, and who wouldn't? But they overlook that men are also collecting the garbage, working in the mines, and generally doing all of society's dirty, dangerous jobs. Where're the calls for "equality" in those industries?

GALLO: I drive "the wrecker" — any piece of equipment that the department of sanitation has — I could pick it up. I have people in the truck - who say, you don't drive that big truck and I say, "oh yes I do."

REPORTER: Sixty-year-old Gallo says she still enjoys her job and the physicality of the work and is no hurry to retire."

http://beta.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2008/mar/29/city-hon...

How the original poster missed the many women who have chosen to be (and often fought hard against the same prejudice they meet in "prestigious" careers to be accepted as) police officers, firefighters, soldiers, nightclub bouncers, oil rig workers and do various other dangerous, dirty or under appreciated jobs I have no idea.

But I thought the example presented summed up the issue quite well given the obvious enthusiasm the worker had for her job.

A group which sees itself as oppressed can't just wishy-washily campaign under a banner of `equalism' if it wants to effect change. It must first identify itself as a group of people with something in common, and which is somehow oppressed according to that something. This way it can articulate the problem it sees, and what needs to change. After that change has come about, then we can all just be equal people.

-isms, generally, exist to advance the interests of their sponsors, to the detriment of society as a whole.

But that generalisation about -isms is intellectually vacuous nonsense.

  regardless of your personal ethics

However this assessment that it was a poor reason would have been itself post hoc, since I have already discovered that it's a fairly good essay. In fact the quote about number of descendants doesn't represent the essay well and I'm not sure why your parent chose it. So it's more that you turn out to have made a bad decision, than that your reasoning was unsound.