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I don't really agree with your assessment of the minimum deal for women. The minimum deal cannot be "get married" in a world where so many women are single mothers.
Let's leave aside the world of profoundly bad luck outside the scope of what might happen to someone posting on this site, like being drafted into war or dying of leukemia at age 10. I'm just going to look at fairly common Anglosphere life-paths.
A whole bunch of the women who I went to high school with are now single mothers working menial jobs. They work hard all day, then they come home to their kids and work some more. That sounds like a really bad deal to me. Now, you could argue that this could just as easily happen to a man who has kids young and gets roped into paying child support for 18 years. True enough. I could quibble that men are more likely to skip out, or that childcare is harder than child support, or that getting someone else pregnant is a lot harder than getting pregnant so you have a lot more time to reconsider your life choices, but fair enough.
A whole bunch more went into dumb low-paying fields. Their mentors encouraged them to do what they love, hormones told them that what they love is teaching or early childhood education, and now they're precariously employed substitute teachers making barely more than minimum wage. There was a girl who I went to highschool with who was neck-and-neck with me for grades, competing with me for awards and the like. All of her talents are now going to waste in a dead-end job. I am a software engineer. The fact that my teachers and peers were less encouraging to me than her is probably a contributing factor to the fact that I didn't sleepwalk myself into a bad decision like she did. I would not trade places with her today.
You could say that both of these are freely made decisions and therefore don't count. Maybe. But there's a weird interplay here. Yes, if women and men were both perfectly rational robots, being a woman would be an advantage. But humans are not perfectly rational robots. Women, especially young women, seem much more inclined to fall for misguided orthodoxy, like going into debt for a Gender Studies degree and hoping it all works out in the end (a lot of people point out that women go to college more, few mention that this is often not to their benefit).
Honestly, I would not want much of the "help" that women get from the various orthodox authorities. They do not have their patients' best interests at heart.
For men, the roads to Heaven and Hell are both overgrown with thistles and guarded by lions. For women, the road to Heaven might be slightly easier than for men, but the road to Hell is paved, icy, and all downhill. The absolute bottom may be lower for men, but women can literally screw themselves out of a fulfilling life at age 18 in under an hour. At least army recruiters can't have you sign the contract while you're drunk.
Very interesting point about college. It's a trap for so many people, so maybe the ease with which women enter college isn't the benefit it looks like. I'm not sure which comment I agree with more, which is a sign of a worthwhile debate!
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I think that a lot of people, of both sexes, are more able to make changes to their careers than they think. Three examples from my life: My parents divorced when I was a child. My mother had essentially no marketable skills. She started off doing temp receptionist work and gradually moved her way up and through various companies, eventually getting to a head of IT role, with significant remuneration. My wife grew up in an area that seemed to have not-so-bright employment opportunities. Was working menial jobs like McDonalds/call center. Was laid off, decided to take a one-year HR program, has already worked her way up to a director role. For a male example that is kind of extreme, I knew a guy who got an engineering degree, decided he wasn't doing enough to help people, so he became a nurse. Eventually decided that his passion was pig farming, so he up and did that.
EDIT: Fourth example: I knew a guy who was selling cell phones to businesses. Decided he didn't like it; went to night school for a year or two or however long it took (I don't actually know) to become a barber. Now owns a couple barbershops.
There's a regular stream of folks who comment here asking specifically about this - how do I make a switch in my career to something that isn't so dead end? Something that's not just stuck due to a dumb career decision I made when I was 18? Hard questions are things like: what percentage of people who are in this position get serious about trying to make a change? Is there a differential between rates along the lines of sex? Why is that? Tough questions, and I'm sure folks will be quick to jump in with conclusions, but without data. In any event, I imagine that a significant number of them could make significant changes.
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