So what IS the optimal level of societal gender inequality

Jim Taranto at the WSJ has a piece talking about the various traps and paradoxes that a single minded focus on gender equality deliver for example, child care:

As we've noted, Scandinavian countries have promoted "gender equality" by employing armies of child-care workers, most of them female. That is, they get paid to take care of other women's children. That counts toward the GDP figures, whereas it does not when mothers care for their own children at home. It's not immediately obvious that the Scandinavian way leaves society as a whole better off.

And the inevitable trade off between output today and output tomorrow when those kids that you would have had had you not been working so much aren't there to produce the wealth to support you.

The replacement-level birthrate--the number of children the average woman must bear in her lifetime to keep the population constant--is understood to be 2.1. There is no reason to think that the "demographic transition" will stop when the birthrate has declined to that level, and many industrialized countries already have birthrates well below replacement. That has serious implications for long-term economic growth. A child born today will be 36 in 2050. If a woman today forgoes motherhood for paid employment, the prospective workforce in 2050 will be smaller than it otherwise would be--and so will the GDP.

Gender parity statistics and indeed GDP numbers are example of what I call the "tyranny of the abstract" - the phenomenon whereby statistics that were originally intended to help us quantify the progress that we experienced have instead become the drivers of how we experience progress.  And these numbers often imply outcomes that if we experienced them without the numbers we would evaluate very differently. Using his example the assumption of gender parity statistics is that gender parity is optimum yet a perusal of his piece or even a little reflection on your own life will probably yield many aspects of a marriage partnership where it makes sense for role specialization and that specialization to differ by gender.  Yet the logic of the statistic takes us away from a mature understanding of the challenge and a clear eyed reflection upon what makes sense for us.  I'm working on a broader piece around this topic and golly! It'll be a humdinger!