Shouldn't we be equally concerned about men or women being hurt at work? The fact that most places, culturally, are not, is exactly the kind of stuff I'm referring to.
The US and Europe have great safety regulations for workers. It turns out given the choice women would rather not live in the middle of nowhere in -40C weather getting soaked by crude oil and mud every day, even if it pays six figures. Why do men do it? Because there's a societal expectation that they provide for the family as a breadwinner.
Exactly. Just because we have made great progress with blatant sexism over the past 50 years doesn’t mean that we’re treating sexes equally. This is one of the reasons why a wage gap due to “choice” isn’t as much of a “choice” as many write it off as.
We raise children with an expectation that women need to be “protected” from certain jobs (and other expectations), then after two decades of that conditioning, we ask them to make a “choice”. Of course those “choices” end up being biased. But they didn’t fully choose, they were raised to believe certain things about themselves and their surroundings.
I did not claim that men and women have to choose careers in equal proportions. They might, or they might not.
But we do have plenty of examples where the expectations of society have influenced their choices in a way that conflicts with the free will of men and women.
I am sure we can both come up with many examples of things that society expects men to do, and things that society expects women to do. And, examples of scenarios where people would be treated very differently if they were a man or a woman. Obviously, these are a factor in people's life experiences, and therefore a factor in the way people make decisions. We may not expect them to choose differently given their own free will, but we also know that they are not making these decisions due to free will alone.