This always drove me insane - people seem to confuse value equality/congruence and strict identicality. The latter seems to either try to create a female default and punish men for not living up to it, or create some weird fuzzy default that nobody really fits comfortably.
What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.
The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.
It creates a female default and punishes men for not living up to it in some areas (like public school in the US), but it creates a male default and punishes women for not living up to it in other areas (academic careers in life sciences, the job market, etc).
> The answer isn't to change the (currently relatively male-normative) norm, it's to defenstrate the idea that having a norm in the first place is a remotely good idea.
Agreed.
> What we want is to say that women are as valuable as men, and then let individuals figure out who they want to be.
Agreed here too. The question then is, how we address this.
The point is that when you look cross-culturally and cross-historically, where you don't have women certain things like rule of law don't happen (you see this develop in the American West for example as gender rates stopped being so lopsided).
I would suggest that recognizing that the genders do have differences in terms of social aptitudes and needs, and different positions relative to life choices is the first step in reducing the male-normative view on our economic model (i.e. "if you work like a man, and wait to have kids like a man, you will get paid like a man").