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One thing that I think is often overlooked is that society gives men better incentives, which is actually nothing to sneeze at (though I won't get into "who has it worse").
Women value economic success in men much more than the reverse, while men value a woman's appearance. The upshot for men is that if you spend 10 years developing your economic value you're now richer. You can argue that developing economic value is more difficult than maintaining/developing good looks, but that misses the point I'm driving at.
Consider two identical twins. The parents force one twin to get good grades, play sports, practice piano, etc. The other twin is completely ignored and follows his base instincts (video games, probably). Unsurprisingly the first twin ends up with better life outcomes, and, while one could argue the first twin "deserves" this, in the sense that he worked hard to improve his life, this clearly illustrates that incentives matter immensely -- people just aren't good at abstractly reasoning about what's good for them in the long run and then doing it, otherwise both twins would have been fine.
I contend that society works similarly for men -- yes the constant pressure to be successful is a burden, but it is a legitimately good burden to have -- it's the reason men are more likely to pursue high-income careers. I contend that women lacking such incentives hurts them in the long run, and complaining that "women don't have to worry as much about being economically successful" is like the first twin complaining that his brother is allowed to just play videogames all day. Is it unfair that the first child has to work more? It certainly seems that way to a 12 year old.
I am not saying women have it better or that women have it worse. I've just never seen anyone make the point that, whether it’s your prospective girlfriends, your guy friends (via internal competition), or your parents, having an external factor drive you to improve your life is incredibly valuable, and seems like a pretty significant advantage.
The tricky caveat there is that the biological underpinning of 'men value women's appearance' is largely that men look for signs of genetic fitness and fertility, which has the downstream effect of having plentiful and healthy children.
So if you define success solely in terms of wealth accumulation, sure men are incentivized to 'succeed.' But evolution defines success in terms of make more copies of yourself. In THAT regard, the ONLY REASON MEN ACCUMULATE WEALTH is so they can try to fulfill the biological imperative and attract a woman who will let him knock her up and he can provide a stable upbringing for the offspring.
And women, as the gatekeepers of reproduction, are generally more likely to get their genes passed on and 'succeed' in the evolution game. What this matters to an individual woman I don't know, but in terms of the human species this has massive implications.
Even if humans have managed to sidetrack this imperative into nonreproductive pursuits, the point remains as to WHY men are doing what they do, and WHY women manage to get by without having to work at wealth accumulation.
So I dunno. Maybe women would be okay with a deal where they try to look pretty, and the men try as hard as they can to accumulate wealth, and then they come together so that the woman gets the wealth and stability, and the man gets a much better shot at passing on his genes?
The larger point is that men become successful in their life in large part so they can attract a woman who will then SHARE IN HIS SUCCESS. Her side of the deal, HER incentive, is to optimize for attracting such a guy and keeping him, so that she can get the wealth without the mental or physical efforts.
Let's consider the fact that the richest women in the world almost universally inherited their wealth.
Not a bad deal. Shack up with a wealthy guy (or guy who ends up wealthy) and you and/or your children might end up sitting on a massive wealth pile without having to put in nearly as much effort as the MALE who accumulated it.
Yes, inheritance wealth isn't gender locked, I'm just noting that AGAIN, from the evolutionary perspective, reproducing and having a giant pile of utility just sitting there waiting for you and your progeny is maximum success, regardless of what other 'incentives' you point at.
I have no idea why whether men's preferences are biological or not matters to my point (leaving aside the fact that women are also driven by biology, and this also leads to positive downstream effects for their children).
I agree that one can frame success in evolutionary terms, but I don't know why one would since virtually nobody actually pursues this. It's even less relevant when you're arguing women should "try to look pretty" since the quality of your make up has virtually nothing to do with fertility or genetic fitness.
It feels like you are trying to reframe my comment into some sort of familiar, pro-woman/woke argument. Let me make my point again, hopefully more clearly:
Men face social incentives that encourage them to develop their human capital and productivity. This is good for the men themselves, irrespective of their romantic success, as well as their wife's children (and, incidentally, good for society (at least modern society)).
Women face social incentives that encourage them to look pretty. This has far less value for them, does nothing for their husband's children (since make up and working out does not improve genetic fitness and actively detracts for familial resources), and, incidentally, is not pro-social (since beautify is ultimately zero-sum).
I'm not claiming men are evil for caring how good a woman looks. I'm not claiming that women are angelic for having socially-aligned preferences. A justification or explanation of their preferences seems largely irrelevant to me.
I am claiming that saying "women have it easier, since they don't have as much pressure to build human capital" is a very incomplete analysis.
I don't know how in the heck you're defining 'value' if you're ignoring that a pretty woman is able to gain access to a successful man's wealth by looking pretty.
Like, yeah, women don't directly build up wealth and capital. Because there's literally never been a point in history where they've had to do so. Different incentives. Yes. Of course.
Because they've got an easier path to it. They can acquire value from a man, without the effort. Whatever value a man builds, a woman can access, for virtually any definition of 'value' you point to.
How in the world does this end up looking like a negative on the balance sheet for being female?
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I've seen this point made in terms of the bigotry of low expectations (specifically here if you care to watch a 2.5 hour livestream on the topic), and while I'm not a feminist I think it's a damaging cultural factor that women should be making a bigger fuss over.
I don't think removing this cultural infantilization would make men and women equal, but anecdotally I do think there are a lot of women who are far less intellectually developed than the sharpness of their minds would allow for (obviously there are lots of stupid men too but usually I come off thinking they really have approached their innate limits). Whether it's biological or cultural women face a lot more pressure to conform, and so the innately intelligent and actually intelligent (in the sense that they didn't waste their potential) women I've met have usually deviated far more beyond the norm in their nonconforming personality traits than their male intellectual peers.
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And the downshot for women is if they spend 10 years on their career they are now 10 years older.
The tragedy of female doctors: they go through med school, finish residency, and say okay, time to find Mr. Right. But they're 30 years old. They want to marry another doctor, but male doctors are busy marrying 22 year old nurses.
Eh. A lot of the doctors in my class are...with other doctors. So too, there's plenty of shorter doctors - 5'7" and under - that would be thrilled to date and marry a 30yo resident or doctor.
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This is a failure of the US medical education system and not representative of global norms.
I find the very idea of pre-med disgusting, an utter waste of 2 years of one's life, especially when it's glaringly obvious that most of the world produces competent doctors without it. (I still think the average US doctor is modestly better than the average elsewhere, simply through selection pressures).
Then you have med school and then a mandatory residency without which you can't practise at all (barring rural Texas), taking up anywhere from 4-7 years of your life making less than minimum wage if you account for total hours worked.
The final payoff is huge, but even then you're just wasting years of your life, and for no better reason than that's how it's always been done. Fuck the notion of needing "well-rounded" doctors, when I go the ER the last thing I want or need is to debate the underpinnings of stoic philosophy when I'm dying of acute appendicitis. And if they're a palliative care doctor, they can just go read Seneca in their free time.
On the other hand, it's perfectly possible for an Indian or British doctor to graduate med school at 22, finish a good deal of their training by 26 or 27, and then just work.
Now, I'm unashedly elitist and would rather date other doctors, and while doctors marrying nurses was once common enough in India, it's become a rarety as the sex ratio has flipped to be in the favor of women in medicine.
Maybe the gulf between the two professions is smaller in the US and the UK, but in the latter, most docs marry other professionals or doctors themselves.
I also have doubts about the importance of a doctor's education in the long run.
Given two doctors who have been practicing for 10 years. One had a much more thorough education, but the other has a good habit of reading the latest advancements. Which would you prefer? Under these conditions it seems a bit silly to make such sacrifices just to maximize the capabilities of doctors at the moment they enter practice, with much less attention paid to their continual training.
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So I don't disagree with your actual point, but twin studies tend to converge on the idea that these twins will actually have roughly the same life outcomes.
While adolescent achievements probably don’t matter very much in terms of outcomes, that presupposes that the second twin develops a work ethic in community college instead of just coasting indefinitely.
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I think the analogy for OP's argument would also include a trust fund for the second kid, that pays out enough to pay for the bare necessities for the rest of their life.
For the purposes of improving society and individual character (and happiness), the first twin gets the superior treatment. But there will be more first twins on the street than second twins.
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