> it's important to separate social science from politics

If you don't recognize the politics in science, you end up with eugenics and bias in the data.

If you separate science from politics, you get decision not anchored in reality. The biggest improvement to government process (a field rarely talk about) in the last 200 years was the cost-benefit analyses. Scientific methods are a core part of government.

> It's just that these things tend to change on their own once material conditions have changed

Lets structure this a bit, since we have two different theories: is it social values that leads to material conditions, or is it material conditions that leads to social values.

If its the first case is true, we should see signs of social values being changed while material conditions lagging behind. The opposite should be true for the second case.

I would claim that the case of the solider lacks to mention a critical third-party. Its not that the soldiers themselves that decided to integrated the units. Its an outer force, in this case the military leadership who do not share the same cultural values of the soldiers, and that outer force is what forces a material change for which later results in a cultural acceptance by the soldiers.

Take Japan after WW2. Its was not that the Japanese suddenly decided to change their cultural views about Imperial rule. The allies, who did not share the cultural views of those in Japan, imposed a material change (ie, the forced surrender and statement from the emperor). After a time, citizens of japan accepted the new reality and cultural values and norms changed.

An other case would be to look at the revolution that created the Soviet Union. People didn't just suddenly decide to create a revolution, and then after a few years have cultural values changed. The cultural values changed much earlier, primarily because of lost wars, which cause people to loose faith in the tsarist autocracy. The process was very slow, and took somewhere between 100 and 50 years, ending with the revolution. At that point, Social norms had already changed, a fact that the Tsar Nicholas II where very aware of.

To ground this into current situation with men being more pressured into taking higher paying jobs than women, the government as a third-party would need to basically go in and decide who works where and how much people should get paid, and the government would need to have a different cultural view than the rest of the population. I doubt either requirement could happen, the first because communism had already tried it, the later because a government with different cultural views than the population is unlikely to get voted in.

> But the lack of social-security-paid maternity leave and subsidy of child care, still work against women in the US.

Is that a positive decision for men? I know that where I live, Sweden, both those things exist and our work market is even more gender segregated that the US work market.

If we consider the extreme pressure that the dating site data shows, how much will a few months/year of paid leave change things. Will men start to seek women who can support a family, thus sending social pressure for women to seek higher paying jobs? Will women change their cultural values of seeking men with higher paying jobs?

Looking at Sweden, what it did is to silence the false myth that women are a bigger risk to employ than men. It did not change the cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles in society.

> the Republican party has been working for years to curtail the voting power of blacks

There is indeed political efforts to win at all costs and to try prevent voters from voting rather than win them over. I would not go and claim it is anything supported by white men as a group, but rather a fringe behavior by people whose income is based on being an politician. A other word for it would be corruption, buts its not commonly used word for describing such behavior.

> I can invite people to a party on the roof of my building, which has no elevator. I discriminate against handicapped people without intending to.

There will always be people who are unintentionally discriminating against if we remove intent from discrimination. Claustrophobic people can't use elevators, Acrophobes can't be on the roof, and Agoraphobia don't like open spaces. Its a meaningless term if everything everyone do is unintentionally discrimination towards someone.

>> Its only in the last 30 years that the movement changed course.
> I strongly disagree with that.

I can see the effect in sex segregation. Before it, the trend where going towards less segregation. After it, to more.

> That side wants everyone to be treated in a way that recognizes that people are different

How is that different from saying that they want people to be treated different? Just because you added the word "recognizes", don't change underlying statement.

The story of Rosa Parks isn't how society failed at statistical power distribution where half the time men sat in front and women in the back of the buss, and other half of the time they should have switched places. Such system don't recognizes that people are more alike than different. Recognizing peoples similarity is more important than to recognizes the minute way people are different, and it just happen that I prefer a society that focus on similarities than a society that focus on differences.