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Notes -
A person's value can change over time from one asset to another.
I know you want to read a lot into this, but it's reall very simple, and universal for both men and women:
If you want to be valued (beyond the default "all human life has value" value, which is a wash across the board), you need to provide value.
A young man, for example, is generally valuable for his strong back and plentiful energy; an old man is generally valuable for his learned wisdom, accrued wealth and maybe even skill at the management of young men. If an old man is stupid, poor and cannot lead the young, he is shirking his own value. It doesn't matter if other people want to imbue him with value or not, he provides nothing.
Women, likewise, can be valuable for a lot of things when they're younger, and less valuable for those things later, but valuable for other properties that align with their age and experience.
I am not proscribing that women only do certain things -- certainly there is variability with every person, and I'm libertarian in terms of what part the law should play in this -- but rather suggesting that women who complain that they aren't valued are probably not providing value out of their own choice. Just like men who don't feel valued by women. This type of value is not innate but something one must identify correctly and work towards providing. Old-fashioned gender roles were better at teaching young people how they can be of value to others than today's gender roles are.
So to go with OP's scenario, a woman in her 20s has the option of rendering value through: (a) having babies and raising them, or (b) focusing on her career and developing her ability to offer economic value, maybe while trying to fit in a baby or two for personal gratification along the way.
In option (a), she's maybe got 15-20 years of being valuable to others (since people value mothering mostly through the end of the cute phase); that value is mostly rendered privately, since community members don't much care who breeds or not; and the past value she's rendered is extremely perishable, expiring pretty immediately when her fertility ends and the kids leave elementary school.
In option (b), she can continue to produce value for others, and thus be regarded as valuable in turn, through age 60-65+; her value is rendered publicly and comes with the benefits of stronger community relationships and public respect; and even if something happens so that she gets fired at 55, her compensation thus far has been in investment-friendly cash plus professional connections, which will hold their value well in tough times.
I think this is why old-fashioned gender roles did very much emphasize women's economic productivity, focusing on diligent spinning, weaving, prudent financial management, etc. (Also, creation of children used to be another form of economic productivity/retirement savings, but is definitely less so now that they don't contribute to the household and feel no obligation to look after aged parents.) For better or worse, our grinding middle-management girlbosses are more truly aligned with old-fashioned notions of women's value than the modern sentimental tradwife who stays hot for hubby, bakes cute cupcakes and cuddles the babies all day.
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The gender roles were also very good at determining/controlling pitfalls, too; a society that is only capable of condemning stupidity/violence in men [who provide value by doing], or anger/entitlement in women [who provide value by being], is inherently divided against itself simply because that is the most common failure mode of each gender. It gets worse when those faults are portrayed as positive.
Maybe, but along came mechanization and post-scarcity, and the West hasn't quite figured out how to deal with that yet; now, men need to act like women to succeed (sit down, shut up, regurgitate is how they'll waste their physical and mental peak times of their lives), and women need to act like men to succeed (you have to waste your physical peak proving you're fit to receive the welfare that is most public service jobs and by the time you've done that you're already starting to wilt- divorce doesn't pay well, after all).
And when "how well you can pass as the other gender" is the order of the day, it's not a surprise that men-acting-as-women aren't attractive to women, and women-acting-as-men aren't attractive to men. And while that's great for man-women and woman-men, maybe most people are better off steering clear.
(And really, it's threading the needle: making sure the bi-gender people aren't held back, but at the same time pointing out that cargo-culting their inherent success is a bad idea. If humanity was capable of understanding that nuance we'd probably be better off, but I don't think the average human is and it doesn't remain stable between generations either.)
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