JohnE007, your original comment is now flag-killed, so I have to reply here. As I understood that comment, you mentioned that the gender shouldn't be a talking point because we are all human. -
The position that "we are all the same humans" can be naturally extended to imply "we should be treated essentially equally and fairly". Equality is different to sameness, and it does not deny differences between men and women.
And the idea that "we are all human" matters, then it touches on why talking about gender matters - there is overwhelming and consistent evidence across many industries that some humans are systematically mistreated. If it were clearly observable mistreatment, such as slavery or physical bullying, the rest of us would eventually notice and ideally stop it. But the mistreatment is more subtle, like talking to a subtly racist uncle or a subtly condescending acquaintance. Chinese water torture was very subtle too - no single drop had any significance, but collectively and over time many drops together drove the subjects insane. Some of our fellow humans live with that never-ending drip of subtle pressure. The rest of us are just learning about the scale of the problem, but we can try to understand it and eliminate our occasional contributions to those drips of pressure. Large sweeping actions like federal laws or HR policies are necessary but insufficient - the real work of helping mistreated fellow humans can be done only by people like you and me when we change how we play our parts on a day to day basis.
One big challenge for any well-treated majority is that they often genuinely don't know they are the well-treated majority, or that discrimination even exists. A foreign exchange student is more aware of language discrimination, a person who lost an arm is more aware of discrimination on physical ability, and people approaching retirement are more aware of age discrimination. This is why giving a voice to the mistreated group matters so much - most of us are not mistreated, and we cannot understand the problem unless we hear it firsthand again and again. In that context, the voice and experience of the first female engineer matters more than the experience of the first male engineer, and why we should encourage more mistreated people to share their stories with us. So that we all can learn and get better from it, both for "their" sake and "ours" (minority vs majority).
You also mentioned that this is a problem for those who live in first world countries, and to a significant extent I understand where you are coming from. I spent most of my childhood in a Soviet state where there was zero consideration or thought given to any minorities or exceptions to the "norm". There are dozens plausible explanations or excuses on why, but some of that had to do with the poor economic reality around us. There just wasn't enough stuff to splurge on culture, or morality, or pondering the philosophy of humanity. People just focused on surviving. However, over the decades then the wellbeing of an average citizen has improved drastically, and now topics like equality, recognition of differences, social support etc are getting significant attention (and causing significant conflicts). Over the last 40 years people in the first world countries have experienced unprecedented economic growth - there is now so much stuff, so much affluence, and so many people that some people take a step back to make sure everyone is enjoying the ride. Turns out that this is not a levelled playing field, and some humans are significantly disadvantaged - and we have the means to rebalance the game for our children. Because we are all just human, our kids should have the same choices and options in life regardless of whether they were born a boy or a girl.