zlacker

I think cultural mastery is similar to skill mastery. They both take a long time to master. So once you start allowing parity at the bottom levels it takes many years before parity at the top is reached.

Affirmative action often involves discussion on reducing quality or creating self-fulfilling prophecies by have no role models at the top.

I think a deeper issue is that leadership as an idea is still "masculine" in nature, reflecting a heroes journey to conquer something in the wild and bring it home. Heroines are just females still going out on a hunt. Instead there is much and underappreciated value in the maintenance of hearth and home. In learning how to live and creating wealth and complexity out of relationships between objects and people rather than extracting some sort of value from the environment.

It's just that such types of created wealth don't have the exponential explosion of conquered wealth.