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by e4e78a06 1553 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.

How are peoples choices ever gonna be unbiased? Beyond absurd to claim choices are only unbiased if men and women choose careers in equal proportion.
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.

No such thing as making decisions due to free will alone
One day, we may be able to make them in the absence of gender stereotypes, if people choose so. Or, at least, some or most of them. The fact that we have changed some of them suggests that we may be able to change more.
"we may be able to change more" "free will"