> but they’re not trying to cut all flowers to the same height
This is usually the point in the conversation where they share the cartoon of a group of people staring over a fence watching a baseball game, with each person standing on a different sized stepladder such that their overall height is equal. So yes, I would argue that is exactly what they are trying to do.
Yet if you point out that women live longer than men on average, and equality of outcome there would require huge government funding into men's health, or allowing men to collect social security earlier so they have equal retirement years, the same "progressives" will usually oppose those measures!
I don't see progressives oppose funding healthcare of any kind, and I'm certainly in favour of people doing hard physical work being able to retire earlier (or better: making their work less hard).
If you really want to tackle this issue, you need to look at why men live shorter than women. Do they die violent deaths more often? Trying to make society less violent could benefit everybody. Do they harm their health by working more often in unhealthy situations? Maybe improve those work situations. Are they more likely to commit suicide? Maybe invest in better mental healthcare. Does testosterone make them more likely to engage in risky behaviour that gets them killed? Well, at some point you've got to decide whether the higher risk and resulting shorter life expectancy is a matter of personal choice or not. I suppose education can play a role here.
Data suggests that more gender equality in society also leads to more gender equality in life expectancy[0]. But we should also remember that the goal of equality has to be to lift people up. Of course we could close the gender life expectancy gap by reducing life expectancy for women (maybe reducing maternity health care?) but I hope everybody agrees that would be a terrible idea. We should tackle the issues that cause men to die earlier.
> If you really want to tackle this issue, you need to look at why men live shorter than women.
Well one obvious factor is that society has a bias towards over investing in women's health. Look at cancer research. Pancreatic cancer kills a similar number of people to breast cancer but receives something like 1/100th of the research funding. If we reallocated breast cancer funding to pancreatic cancer, that could reduce the gender lifespan gap while still saving a similar number of lives (or even more) overall.
I don't think that's it. I mean, it's true that breast cancer research is one of the best funded types of cancer research, but there have also been tons of reports that a lot of medication is only tested on men and not on women. Or that women are less likely to be taken seriously when they visit a doctor. So I don't think it's so clear cut that women receive substantially better health care. There are blind spots all over the place.
That's pretty clearly sexism against men, e.g. viewing men as disposable. Remember we test drugs on mice before humans, and that's not because we like mice; it's because they're cheap and disposable.
Imagine we only tested drugs on women. People would definitely see that as sexism against women, if not outright abuse of women! There would be endless news articles about women who suffered permanently debilitating effects of the drugs that were tested on them. There would be feminist protests to stop testing drugs on women.
You are very quick to jump to a judgmental conclusion about this. And a wrong one, in this case: if drugs is tested on men, that means it's suitable for men, but may not account for physiological differences between men and women. This is a serious issue that has fortunately been getting more attention lately.
The drugs aren't being tested on men instead of mice, they're being tested on men instead of women. The reason for that is that men have more stable hormone levels that don't fluctuate over the month and therefore give more reliable test results, but that also means that these treatments don't account for the fluctuating hormone levels of women.
I don't know where you live, but in most countries people aren't being forced into these sort of tests against their will. You make it sound like you're living in a totalitarian dictatorship where people are dragged off the street for dangerous experiments that haven't gone through a rigid testing process yet.
It's usually a false correlation as gender "equality" is usually not a cause of anything, it is the luxury of excess that allows a society to afford it. There hasn't been a modern test of where a society hasn't been forced to pretend at equality to see where the outcomes would end up, the results may even be better as productivity wouldn't be undermined to support an ideology.
Maybe it's better to say that many aspects of gender inequality are the cause of various things. We can analyse the differences between countries and draw conclusions from that. And it appears that countries where people are less likely to be discriminated or face restrictive expectations based on their gender, end up with better outcomes in terms of life expectancy, freedom, happiness, prosperity, etc. It's possible that some of those correlations aren't direct causations, but they're still correlations.
This is usually the point in the conversation where they share the cartoon of a group of people staring over a fence watching a baseball game, with each person standing on a different sized stepladder such that their overall height is equal. So yes, I would argue that is exactly what they are trying to do.