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Yes. Although this is not a stable equilibrium either. A society that enshrines "protect women" but doesn't enshrine "respect men" ends up becoming horribly biased against men.
Example #1: Ukraine. Women flee the country and are living their best life clubbing with rich Germans. Men are press ganged against their will and go die in a ditch somewhere.
Example #2: Men perform nearly all the dangerous jobs in the U.S. (Probably 99%+). These jobs, which have high rates of death and dismemberment, often pay more. However, any time men make more money than women, there is talk of a "wage gap" which must be corrected.
The recognition that sexes are different must come paired with the recognition that both sexes have special needs and duties. Women are not inherently morally superior, but we've evolved as a species to see them this way because of the intense demands and vulnerability of motherhood. In an anti-natal society women might as well just be weak men.
The male/female dynamic to me appears to very closely mirror the adult/child dynamic and I'm not sure why more people don't frame it this way. Most norms or policies that are criticised as misogynistic are really more paternalistic in my estimation, based on the intuition that women aren't as strong, capable or accountable and so are in need of special protection and consideration from men, who might even be asked to sacrifice their lives, but on the flip side people traditionally see men as much more capable and agentic and independent and generally worth taking seriously.
Women benefit a lot from this dynamic obviously and it's even embedded in a lot of progressive ideas and campaigns if unwittingly, but you can see how it's not exactly as flattering to them as it might first appear, framing them as more of a beloved subordinate than a respected equal.
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I'm not sure we have "evolved as a species" to see women as morally superior. Plenty of societies in antiquity (and even more recently than that) treated women as basically defective (morally, intellectually, and physically) men whose sole redeeming quality was babymaking. Even when Christianity (with a much more egalitarian attitude, at least on the "morally" front) became widespread, it took a long time to purge those ideas from the zeitgeist, to the point that you can find them even in some early Christian writers.
Yeah, the Romans were pretty misogynistic, but where did all the "protect women" stuff come from if not evolution?
‘Protect women’ is not actually a historical norm, and societies which are not western today often have no problems harming women.
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I was objecting to the implication that we're evolved to see women as morally superior, not to the corresponding claim that "protect women" is to an extent hardwired.
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