It’s the old tired tropes like that that are demeaning and minimizing. Broad strokes of hyperbole, with a few strawmen sprinkled in, that do nothing to further meaningful discord. Instead it only serves to keep gender equality a relatively uncomfortable thing to bring up in conversation. Saying things like women only want cushy jobs while men do the dirty work is intentionally misleading and inflammatory. What many women DO want is to not be paid peanuts to scrub toilets, wait tables, etc while a large portion of the public sits back and perpetuates the grossly misrepresented “wage gap” argument and makes comments like “well I don’t see them signing up to be a garbageMAN, handyMAN, etc, har har.” I don’t know many dudes who endeavor to be garbagemen either, but I do know plenty of women in the automotive fields, working lobster boats, driving tractor-trailers, serving in the armed forces, etc.
I think we see the push for change more in (for lack of a better term)higher skilled fields because more time, work, and money goes into earning the title.
Flip the roles around and pretend that aviation was historically female-dominated. Spend years of working your *** off to be the best “airwoman” that you, a man, can be. You’re damn proud of your accomplishments, as you should be! The feminine title kinda bugs you, but you deal with it. Then one day, they eventually adopt a more inclusive term. Great! And then all you see/hear are sarcastic crusty old heads whining about how entitled and woke you are for wanting to feel a little more welcome in your field. How does that make you feel?
Prefacing this by stating the obvious: I’m not speaking for every individual here. Nor is my goal to be offended on anyone’s behalf. Just stating my own opinions. But the true equality I mentioned refers more to the “between the lines” environment. Sure, we can change official terminologies. But the very existence of this thread(and millions of others like it) demonstrates that many men aren’t 100% comfortable with letting go of historically masculine titles. Some are annoyed by it, some apathetic, some get angry. Yes, slow progress is being made. But in the end all the subtle nuances tend to quietly perpetuate the divide. Yeah, we can make attempts to foster equality with more and more gender-neutral terms, but when behind every change you get blowback from the ones going ”I’m not sexist but..” and “this is ridiculous, what more do these woke crybabies want, blah blah”…. all they want is to not silently feel like an outsider or guest in a male-dominated field. And media only exacerbates it with headlines like “Woman pilot does xyz”, “Woman scientist discovers abc,” when them being a woman has zero bearing on whatever the story happens to be.