Well, to put it drastically: biologically men are almost worthless. They can not produce babies. Hence women can make higher demands. Men have to bid for women (to carry their children) offering as much "worth" as they can. Nobody has to bid for men, because men are easily replaceable. Especially now that physical strength is not so important for survival anymore (we have guns).
In many species the female actually eats the male after sex for a nice protein boost. That is how useful men are.
(This is very tangential to the overall discussion, but) I'd say that practicing a team sport a lot around ages 8-15 is an excellent thing for a kid to do. It's good for fitness, for thinking on your feet, for working towards a team goal, and (if you really grok the game) for learning how to outsmart an opponent in a zero-sum situation.
So, when little Billy gets cut from the school team and his NBA dreams are shattered, it still will have been worthwhile. I'd vastly prefer that my kids aspire to be pro athletes than models.
If a woman makes a conscious decision to choose a career path or take time out of her career to raise children, for example, that is often perceived by some feminists as an example of the influence of a patriarchal society on women.
I think a lot of boys do aspire the adrenaline rush professions. But if they don't end up being one, do they now resign from their whole lives and just go saying the social persuasions to be such, destroyed their whole lives?
There is always going to be a social persuasion for nearly everything. They way we eat, dress, talk nearly anything people can see, people can pass a comment on. And that becomes a mass opinion and taken to be the established truth later.
Somehow I find it difficult to understand why women consider themselves so special in this regard. Why do we end up comparing representation of women and men in every industry is beyond my understanding.
In the name of diversity and women's empowerment, why should we expect a guy to work late in the night, come on weekends, push hard deadlines and a girl is given all options to leave early? why is inefficiency assumed to be OK and acceptable just to accommodate them? If a girl feels need to emphasize her equality, can't it be done by performing? Why do rules have to be bent, made lot more easier?
Its like a foot ball game, where you remove away the defenders so that they can score a easily. This sort of defeats the very whole purpose of empowerment.
Empowerment is to give strength to something so that it can compete with challenges as they are, not remove away the challenges so that can be easily met.