When choices are frowned on

I'm always amused at activists for "women's rights" who push agendas designed to increase the menu of choices... and then get annoyed when many women choose to remain in a traditional role. Some choices, it seems, are more equal than others in their eyes. Tearing down discriminatory barriers is all well and good, but no amount of legislation will change the fact the average man and the average woman chart their life courses from different perspectives:

Women are powering ahead of men in education. As graduates, many are earning more than their male peers. But by their mid-thirties they stick in the middle ranks or drop out altogether, while men who may have much more erratic educational histories are excelling. This trend is most pronounced among the most gifted women, many of whom have bosses or husbands who urge them to aim high. And it is not just a motherhood issue: educated women without children are also not choosing the same paths, in the same numbers, as educated men. As Pinker puts it: “Even with all the barriers stripped away, they don't behave like male clones.”
Why? Pinker believes that the answers are mainly biological. It is not lack of ability or opportunity that prevents so many women from reaching boardrooms and the upper echelons of science, she says, (although she does not claim that discrimination has been abolished). It is because women are wired in the womb to want different things...

Pinker asks why we think of the male as the standard model and the female as a version with a few optional features. All the high-powered women she interviews are happier for having left their top jobs. In different ways they explain that society impelled them towards the male model, but that it didn't quite fit.

Henry Higgins once sang "why can't a woman be more like a man?" I say thank God (literally) they aren't. Pardon my French, but "vive la difference!"

(HT: Vox Day)