Sánchez and 'gender stereotypes', or how to despise the vocations of many women

I am 49 years old. Almost three decades ago, in my group of friends we could draw a clear dividing line in terms of vocations.

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Basically, most boys chose engineering (only one girl was in one of these courses, and it was not exactly easy). Similarly, most girls opted for biology or fine arts (there was only one boy who chose biology). We are not talking about a time when women lacked freedom: we are talking about the second half of the 1990s, there was full equality and we had already had almost two decades of democracy.

Just like the boys, the girls in my group chose the careers they liked the most. I don't remember ever hearing any of them complain about having been pressured by their family, society or "machismo" to choose their profession. Curiously, if we stick to the messages of the current left, my friends were not free, they were oppressed and made their decisions under pressure from "gender stereotypes", simply because they did not choose the same university careers as the boys.

This is what we can deduce from a message published yesterday by the socialist Pedro Sánchez, president of the government of Spain, in which he states the following: "Let's break gender stereotypes and encourage scientific vocations in girls and young women."

So, it seems that Sanchez must think that my friends were "stereotyped" and that is why they did not choose the same as the boys. Apparently, choosing engineering is less respectable from a socialist perspective than choosing biology or fine arts, simply because in these two courses there is a clear majority of women and in engineering there is a majority of men. Socialists like Sanchez despise the professional preferences of the majority of women and pretend to correct them, as if they had chosen badly.

That is the big difference between democrats and supporters of social engineering, which seems to be the most common among socialists from different parties (there are also plenty of them in the PP). From a democratic point of view, what a ruler should do is respect that girls choose the career they want, even if the majority tendency among them seems somewhat incorrect, which is apparently the case of Sánchez. For social engineers, women should choose not what motivates them the most, but what satisfies a collectivist mentality that puts the individual below the group.

Obviously, a truly free and equal society is one in which every person can choose the profession he or she wants, even if the result of the election indicates that the preferences of the majority of men do not coincide with the preferences of the majority of women. In fact, statistics repeatedly show that in democratic countries these tendencies turn out to be disparate, a clear demonstration that women mostly value different things than men when deciding their professional future.

On the contrary, socialism does not seek equality of opportunity, but equality of results, which implies that personal decisions are subordinated to certain collective needs. Paradoxically, the old paternalism so reviled by the left, which consisted of encouraging children to choose the careers preferred by their parents, is now replaced by a socialist paternalism that aims for girls to be treated as mere statistics, subordinating their personal vocation to the eradication of supposed "gender stereotypes" that oppress women.

Seeing the experience that the boys and girls in my group have had in choosing their professional careers, I tell all the girls who are thinking about what career to choose the same thing I tell the boys: choose the profession that makes you happy, that which you would like to dedicate your life to, even if other people do not value it. It is your life. You have no obligation to please any politician, you do not have the duty to break any stereotype or any imaginary ceiling. The only thing that should matter to you is to dedicate your life to a profession that you like, because there is nothing more regrettable than realizing that you are working in something that you do not like simply because you were trying to please others when you made your decision.

None of my friends made the wrong choice when they went to college. Regardless of whether they later pursued a career or not (of course, most of the girls did pursue careers; the opposite happened with the boys), what matters is that they studied what they liked. Today, they are all mothers. Most of them work. And no socialist politician is going to convince me that these girls are "oppressed", simply because they have not followed the left's manual of slogans.

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Photo: PSOE.