>If men and women are on an equal footing, why are a good portion of men left without anything useful to contribute?
Point being that not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer or a physicist. There will always be a good portion of the population that really has nothing to contribute economically but their labor. For women, these labor positions are the ones that have survived our transition to a mostly service based economy; healthcare, childcare, cleaning, food service, etc. For men, they mostly have not. The days of a man being able to use his comparative advantage of physical strength to earn above the median wage are long gone.
High physical strength is useful for several modern jobs we’re desperately in need of - in particular nurses and home health aides. There’s still construction too, once we defeat the NIMBYs.
Most of this “running out of work” thought is just excuses for the US’s bad economic management in the 90s-2000s; as the GP said, now we’re at 4% unemployment and anyone with skills will be able to find a way to use them. Anything can be a skill if it's unique enough - if AI took all the jobs, "being human" would be a skill. That's comparative advantage.
Point being that not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer or a physicist. There will always be a good portion of the population that really has nothing to contribute economically but their labor. For women, these labor positions are the ones that have survived our transition to a mostly service based economy; healthcare, childcare, cleaning, food service, etc. For men, they mostly have not. The days of a man being able to use his comparative advantage of physical strength to earn above the median wage are long gone.