[toofy]

I’m not sure we can separate the two so cleanly, equality of opportunity comes along with all of a child’s inputs and external forces as they’re growing. Equality of opportunity would absolutely mean not funneling them in one direction or another based on something like their sex, gender, or whatever.

A 50/50 outcome might be a flawed measurement of something like equality of opportunity if it were the only measurement we were using, but I don’t think it is the only thing we see.

When we consider the not too distant past, this ratio indicates we are probably doing something correctly to mitigate those external forces that used to funnel people into (or away from) certain professions purely because of something like which sex they were born.

We don’t yet have an agreed upon and accurate way to measure whether or not we are indeed offering equality of opportunity, and until we do, seeing something like this at least indicates we’re much closer than we were 20, 30, or 100 years ago.

[visarga]

> equality of opportunity comes along with all of a child’s inputs and external forces as they’re growing

This reminds me of the nature vs nurture debates.

"A child’s inputs and external forces" is a funny name to call their parents and teachers. Because it's mostly their parents and teachers that are going to have an influence in their education. And if they do spend more time, money and effort to boost the education of their children, then it's a family and teacher merit. It's not unfair when their children do better.

An even more important part which is not mentioned is that opportunity is in large part the result of hard work. A child makes her own opportunities by intelligence, passion and effort.

[toofy]

> "A child’s inputs and external forces" is a funny name to call their parents and teachers.

I used that phrase specifically because a person has far more influences in their life than just their parents or teachers. The things that limit or expand a person’s choices are far more than just teachers or family life. Are parents and teacher influences important? Sure. But they are absolutely not the only influences. And neither of those are what I mean when I say external forces.

I’m not sure I have a lot of disagreement with most of the other things you say. Of course a person should make their own opportunities from hard work, passion, and effort.

However (to tie this to the comment I initially replied to) if equality of opportunity is the goal, then we need to make sure we reward actual hard work, not only family multipliers. It’s not like we have to look far to see how many lazy rich kids have countless opportunities and how many hard working poor people struggle yet are incredibly limited in their choices.

Maximizing individual agency means we give everyone who wants to pursue an educational field or career a fair shot at it regardless of who their family is or regardless of what sex they’re born as or their race or whatever. Do they have to work hard? Of course.

Should a lazy rich kid whose family “…spend more time, money and effort to boost the education of their children…” have more opportunities because of “family merit” than the poor kid who worked their ass off and did well? Absolutely not. And the reverse is true as well.

We should be maximizing individual agency and maximizing individual choice and neither of those means we have to abandon hard work. But it does mean we have to knock down arbitrary barriers.