It does feel like society is swinging towards the latter. I think there’s a non-negligible slice of the population that look down on women’s desire/choice to stay In the home and make child rearing their job.
I agree, and there's an easy test: I know from experience that there's a non-negligible slice of the population that look down on men who make this choice.
I feel the whole women empowerment has gone so far that it's like soccer goal keeper complaining they can't go out on the field and score a goal, and when they start doing that the opposing team scores goals on you and then your team loses.
Sigh. No.
IMO the reason men are drafted is men are disposable. Much less valuable than women.
Because... they can have babies, right? If you send women to war then your population dies. This just reinforces what I'm trying to say that there are "roles" which are crucial to a civilization (or society?). I'm not saying they can't change or evolve.
I think there is underlying requirement (not necessarily just biological, but they are requirements of some kind) that allows you to be "valuable" to society, vs. "disposable".
Can women fight in modern combat competently? Yes. This was true even 80 years ago during WW2 (see the Soviets, Chinese, French resistance, etc.).
The problem is that people seem to view women casualties as too high of a cost, so if you send women into front line positions and they get seriously hurt or killed it lowers morale and becomes a homefront PR disaster. So countries with the luxury to not pay that price like the United States choose not to send women to frontline positions to avoid the PR problem, while countries like Israel are willing to take the PR hit knowing that they're a small country surrounded by adversaries.
Would anyone know who Jessica Lynch is if she had been a man?
We all are, after all, governed by our evolutionary journey; we're just simple animals at our core.