https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...
Arguably, it shows that men are disadvantaged in one axis and not necessarily the whole axis, which is why I'm bringing up that there are other spaces along this axis where men are not systematically disadvantaged. I do firmly believe that men are disadvantaged in several fields and spaces which require addressing, but not that that means men are disadvantaged overall.
After all, the people that are professors now were studying in the 1980s-1990s, hence the current ratio of male/female professors should logically represent the gender ratio of the field in the 1980s-1990s if there is no inherent gender bias, not the gender ratio of the field in 2019.
In my estimation, the most powerful argument for career obstacles is about competency, pay, opportunity. You need to be educated in order to do anything. You need to get paid so that you can survive, and you need the opportunity of a position in order to get paid. The obstacles from this follow the ordering:
I need to survive, I need something to do, I need to live a life that is not full of suffering (so much that I can even control that), and to do that I need to take on responsibility and work so that there is both something to do, something to reduce suffering, something to get paid for, so that I can survive. I need to be competent because the market pays people based on this notion that you should be educated so that you can actually get any job. Otherwise why be educated at all.
Given this, I would think that the goal of a university would be to reduce the price/performance ratio of a tuition at all possible efforts so that the level of competency can be obtained through quality education at a reduced cost while balancing the incentives such that the resources funnel to the right places where problems can be best solved. In my estimation, this is not even close to what is happening and it's where I would hope things start moving forward - since in large part it appears to the largest possible obstacle for people.
I should note that the latter part of this statement is probably even more important that the first. Which is to say, it is not self-evident that a particular observation is how things actually are. The way in which you articulate things is a formulation of reality based on what you have observed and who you are (in all the millions of years of human development that implies). It's important to note that the observation has to be rooted in evidence: measurements and methods, and causal proofs. Even if, perhaps especially, a particular argument is compelling from the perspective of its ethical implications, it does not necessarily imply it stands on solid ground.
I believe, and perhaps this might be where the ethical implication comes from, that there is reason we formulate compelling arguments along the political spectrum or across anything that doesn't have its roots firmly grounded in the evidence (because maybe not all things can actually be observed, maybe you don't have the data, maybe there's a lot more to it). I believe that we do this because there is some kind of narrative structure that underlies the propositions we lay out. That narrative structure is vital to us because it might be that we base our entire emotional stability on the stability of that structure.
If the structure isn't reliable, or someone challenges our notions of how we see a problem, or how a problem could be solved, when its challenged we get the sense that it is challenging us. We don't like that - we don't believe it. Our entire psychological well being depends on whether the narrative structure of the viewpoint holds weight - perhaps most especially when we don't even want to look at the evidence.