As I said before, it is not ok to establish policies function of who is "more likely" or "proportionally" this or that. What about the others, the minority who don't fit in, we ignore them for the sake of our little social engineering seance? I'm not mocking, I'm speaking in principle: this can be ok for an academic debate - certainly not when we speak policies and laws. Second, your analysis should continue: why is it that women are more likely to be lonely parents? More likely to divorce; or remain with their out-of-wedlock child; or the father doesn't take responsibility; divorce judges almost always decide the child should stay with the mother. The basic reason, in the end, is that women are the mothers and often the best fit to care about children. This is not about society structure, but about built-in to the woman structure - you can call it biologic determinism, although I think it's more than that.
You could say nature (or God) discriminated against women. Men have their share of particularities to deal with btw, even though not as visible as motherhood.
And here we get to the basic confusion about civil rights: people are supposed to be equal in rights, but they're never equal in qualities. We're different - in race, gender, intellectual capacity, skills and talents, family and environment and so on. Each of these qualities amounts in the end to certain "discriminations". Blacks are considered less beautiful (by blacks too, btw - esthetical sense is absolute, not relative), men less sensitive, the intellectually-challenged (practically a disability) will "suffer" all their life - lower level jobs, lower income, less opportunities. It's normal, and it's life. We can't and shouldn't try to smooth out such differences - just take care about life-threatening ones. Laws and policies should not deal with discrepancies inherent to the person, but consider the person neutrally.
Women having a children are aware of the consequences (or should be educated to be): a lot of time and energy to be spent with them (they'll be most likely to be the better at that) and a lot of satsifaction, of a different kind than a career though. And believe me I know men who put their career on hold for their family. Childcare replacing parents is not ok. Parenthood is a choice, a natural one too, and it should never be regarded as a weight, ever. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
This means you're left with a broad-brush politics of generalities which ignores individuality, almost by definition, and it also a similarly absolute notion of 'equality' to the table.
I think the only way to untangle the knot is to split things differently - into a politics of relationship, where relationship tone defines the experience.
Both political and personal relationships live on a spectrum with exploitation and authoritarian abuse at one extreme and mutually beneficial consideration and symbiosis at the other.
The dynamics of authoritarian abuse are well understood - they rely on dogma more than reality, on strict power hierarchies maintained by psychological coercion and physical and emotional violence, and on the creation of a 'good' in-group and a 'bad' out-group.
What's not so understood is that just being 'progressive' doesn't make authoritarianism impossible. Altermeyer found that after fundamenalists, feminists were the next most authoritarian group in his study.
What's also not so understood, because it happens so rarely, is what consideration and symbiosis would look like if they were considered the most important core political value in every area of life.
We don't have any historical experience of a society which works like that, so it's difficult to imagine. And while it would be naive to pretend that aggression and dominance fights are going to disappear altogether, having symbiosis as a core moral foundation might go some way to making them less influential and destructive than they are today.
Considering relationships instead sounds interesting, but I don't see how it can lead to policies without playing the big brother (or the central commitee). I tend to think the society of individuals is already split between politics of symbiosis (amounting sometimes to political correctness) and sheer individualism (in reality egocentrism). Again, sociologically, this sounds quite interesting. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Organizations are not willing because it's not good for their business - which isn't greed or insensitivity, but their very purpose of existence. Businesses are not there (and are not competent) to do social work for the society - and it often happens that most jobs except low level ones aren't fit to a part-time execution.
"that society is structured is the root of a number of social problems and inequality."
Society is quite a complicate thing... that's how social engineering begins. I think we should be very careful about assertions that we would see the society from high enough to be able to make this kind of diagnosis.
Quota laws in some cases have proved to be a necessary evil because otherwise women continue to be marginalized. I know, and I know it's good to have the right balance. But I told you before, we can't know whether there is discrimination, lack of competence, lack of interest, biological determination or some other factor. It's quite easy to blame it on discrimination (as someone pointed before, CEO jobs often go on a club basis)
"This isn't about bringing down the ones who are not part of the disadvantaged groups"
This will however be a collateral effect. Say I'm an MP and someone in my county comes to complain that he was by far the most competent and best prepared, yet he lost the job to someone else because she was a woman (or an indian). This put him for 6 more months on jobsearch (that he did not deserve), his family in serious geopardy, ànd costed the state unemployment money. All this, to implement the little social engineering called positive-discrimination. Well you go explain that to him. If even ten people like this exist, it means you made a law for a minority, that serves some and destroys others. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
