The only way for sure to understand the wisdom and purpose of a tradition is to break it. And then the harm is done: the harm that the tradition was intended to prevent. Traditions almost always have purposes for their existence or they would not have lasted long enough to become traditions.
Imagine a commercial airplane in flight and the whole flight crew has come down with food poisoning and is lying on the floor unconscious. The passengers see the plane losing altitude and think, "we need to shove some of this equipment overboard." Well that sounds like a swell idea until you throw out something you need.
20,000 years ago, people lived lives very different from our own although human nature itself hasn't necessarily changed much. But what you can be sure of is that for people 20,000 years ago, the first in line to defend the family, band or tribe from danger was almost always a man. The person wielding that club, axe, atlatl or spear was a Grog, not a Grogetta.
There is a totally biological reason for this: male hormones make you physically stronger. While there are some women who could kick most men's asses, on the whole men have more muscular strength than women and the reason is the little chemical molecule known as 17β-Hydroxyandrost-4-en-3-one, otherwise known as testosterone. Testosterone increases muscle mass, period. It's a biological fact.
Similarly, women had a specialized role to play and for good reason. Physically, biologically, the investment that a man has in the production of a new human life is a night of getting his rocks off. The investment that women have in bringing a new person into the world is far more extreme. Months of impaired movement, lessened ability to escape from predators, increased nutritional requirements, and bouts of nausea. Women have far more skin in the game of reproducing the human race.
Being more invested in the whole process, women are also the bearers of culture. A child's first words were probably taught by Mom, not Dad. Mother is greatly invested in the fate of the new little human, because that birth COST her a great deal. The only people to die in the cause of continuing the human species are women. Mothers do not get medals, no bards sing their praises by the fires of night, they are rarely rulers of kingdoms, but their real contribution to continuing the human race is far greater both physically and as carriers of human culture. It is very unfortunate that they have rarely gotten the credit they deserve for that, men tend to hog the glory and the fame and get all the good stories told about them. But lets face it: stories of war and adventure are usually more thrilling than tales of good mothers raising good people for the next generation.
Now, there is no ABSOLUTE reason why women for instance CANNOT be soldiers or bricklayers or construction workers, although men have biological advantages in these roles. If you are a woman and you have an undying thirst to be a lumberjack or a jackhammer operator, go to it... as LONG as you are not reproducing. The problem comes in where raising the next generation is concerned, and specifically teaching the next generation their culture. If you tell young women that being a jackhammer operator or a soldier is an EQUAL role to them as being a mother or teacher, you are just lying to them. Not just because they would be at a physical disadvantage in those roles though they would be. But because this diminishes their critically important role for the survival of the species and culture. Same goes for men: if you are a man and you just won't feel complete unless you take the job of nursemaid or teacher of young children, I am not going to tell you no and you would have no particular reason to listen to me if I did. But if you tell the next generation of men that being a nursemaid, teacher of small children or a caregiver is an EQUAL role for them as their traditional roles of protector, provider and defender, you would be doing the whole culture and the future of the human race a disservice.
IN DEFENSE OF THE FEMININE ROLE:
Modern people sometimes tend to think that biological need and cultural evolution does not apply to them. We can shoot rockets to distant planets and talk to people on the other side of the planet. We have the means to largely though not completely annihilate hunger, the heat of summer, the freezing cold of winter, and eliminate many infectious diseases which were immutable facts of life for previous generations. We don't have to have horses and grass to feed them in order to travel long distances quickly: we have machines that do the job much faster. So we think we have defeated nature, we humans.
We haven't defeated nature, and should our thin veneer of technological civilization fail us, we will be once again thrust back on our biological reality. And in that biological reality, gender roles are based on the survival, advancement and well-being of people and our success at continuing the species.
To continue the species, women must endure long periods of relative debilitation during pregnancy and they have to be protected during that time, or both the mother and father's DNA will fail to continue. Also, most social animals have the idea of fair play or equality among their members. Men have little physically invested in propagation compared to women: they have to do something to make up for their inequality in the parental role. They make up for that deficit by being the family, band or tribe's shock troops in case of danger.
Because women have much more invested in reproduction, biologically speaking, it is only natural that they would take the lead in caregiving for the family's new members. What that means is that they assume the primary roles of nurturer and teacher for their offspring. Young children, even more so than pregnant women, must be protected and looked after or they will not survive. The role of making sure the child eats, telling them what to eat, how to look after themselves, and generally the role of conveying the whole practical inventory of how to be a human being with a culture; that is the role of the woman.
Similarly, since humans are not quite the same kind of social animal as bees or ants, there needs to be people in charge of conflict resolution inside the community. The mentality of a warrior and the mentality of a peacemaker are not very compatible. If the culture tells me, "your role is a warrior, you fight, you kill people, you kill animals, you're tough, you're brutal," it crosses some mental wires for the culture to also tell me "you are a peacemaker, you spread love and reconciliation, you bind people together." This is not to say that reconciliation is totally hostile to the masculine role, but again, that T molecule gets in the way. Testosterone, in addition to building muscle mass, makes people more prone to be irritable and aggressive. While I don't know as much about estrogen and progesterone, it's reasonable to think that they assist in the inverse traits. As anyone who has tried to intervene in a dick-measuring contest between men can probably attest, men are just not as good at conflict resolution as women. It would be silly to think that this is entirely cultural bias without biological roots.
Without strong well-taught, well-tended, well-bonded families with strong codes of conduct, dysfunction results. People and cultures become sick, both mentally and physically. Crime, drug addiction, immorality, sickness and needless death ensue. The primary and often thankless responsibility for keeping that from happening belongs to the wife and mother. The feminine role in other words.
Mothers make the world go round. It is the opposite of a lowly role, though it doesn't get the credit it deserves. If your mother was a good responsible superintendent of the family and human culture, thank her today. Bards may not sing songs about her conquests, generals may pin no medals on her bosom, no one may write a tale of gripping adventure about parenting, but without motherhood our species and culture dies.
IN DEFENSE OF THE MASCULINE ROLE:
Who do you send when the boogeyman comes? When the monster appears? Because boogeymen do come and monsters do appear, though the monsters may take more the form of other humans than cave bears and lions these days.
And what kind of person does that person need to be?
First off is fear: how do you get a human being to overcome bowel-clenching fear when presented with a ferocious cave bear or a hungry lion or a violent enemy army? Because normally, rationally, they should be shitting all over themselves when confronted with these things. Creatures generally fear death above all.
Well, you do that by developing a culture where the people responsible for that job are trained and socially reinforced to tamp down on their emotions. Where a culture of acceptance of pain and even triumphing in enduring pain is embraced. Basically you get a bunch of young men together and get them to train each other to be more macho. Crush down on emotion, at least in times of danger. Be stoic in the face of pain. BE MORE AFRAID of losing face in front of your comrades, than perhaps even of death itself.
Young boys in most cultures have games involving facing pain. I knew there were such games when I was a boy. Basically, if you can stand more pain than your fellow, you win. Face the unfaceable: embrace the unembraceable. Such is the role of a man.
Second is courage: just because you can keep control of your fear does not itself make you courageous. You could face an enemy army and while being prepared to fight and die, consider that running away would be far smarter for you personally. While courage and especially the best courage is often practiced alone, it is often built in company. Your fellow men tell you: the family, the tribe, the nation, is worth dying for. Maybe Valhalla awaits the brave warrior, a place of endless mead and tales and boasts, the ultimate Man Cave. ;) Those other people are barbarians who would destroy what we and our fathers have built; our civilization, our nation. Maybe this involves a bit of self-deception, but if so it is deception that is good for your family, tribe, nation or gene group generally. The sacrifice of you in particular is beneficial, ideally, to the whole.
Women must not be sacrificed. That's like eating your seed corn. A family, band, tribe or nation's reproductive potential is directly tied to women, not men. One (tired) male could theoretically fertilize thousands of women, but every dead woman is a percentage of reproductive potential lost. And if your family, band, tribe or nation has less people, it is less able to defend itself.
Risk-taking generally is a male gender trait. For the above reasons, it is a bad idea for women to take any unnecessary risks. Conversely, it is a good idea for the tribe, nation and species for men to take reasonable risks or even slightly unreasonable risks, because taking such risks is good for the whole even if it may turn out bad for the individual. It opens up potential new avenues for trade, for food, for wealth, for knowledge - all kinds of things. If the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria had been swallowed up by the sea, the consequences for European culture would have been fairly minimal in itself. If neither they nor anyone else took the RISK and Europeans never discovered the Americas, the consequences would be huge. Discovering the Americas was an unqualified good for Europe even if it was terrible for the peoples of the Americas. The Aztecs were an innovative people in certain respects, but innovative seafaring was not their thing. If they had been innovative seafarers, perhaps they would have visited Europe instead, but they lost out.
And this is connected to why most scientist are male, although women can certainly be scientists. Women are not dumber than men, but men are by nature and culture more probing. That's their job, culturally, to expand the frontiers, whether it means the frontier with the enemy or the frontiers of knowledge. It is inversely the job of women culturally to cultivate what the family, band, tribe or nation ALREADY has. What is already known, territory already conquered.
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It is amazing to me that people often do not recognize the beautiful synergy of the male and female gender roles. Men should take much of the blame for that: the male role is inherently self-glorifying. Ya, ya, men are dicks, we know that. ;) But we men would be profoundly stupid if we did not appreciate the necessity of both sides of the yin-yang relationship and the glory and honor, if you will, of the traditional feminine role. Both are critical. We moderns think we have transcended nature but we have not. We think that men can be women if they want, and women men if they want, but hundreds of thousands of years of the wisdom of cultural evolution (never mind biology) says they cannot. Tradition is wise, and we must fully understand and appreciate tradition or else any thought of changing it is reckless. There are undoubtedly some foolish traditions, and those will fade in time, as evolution applies to traditions as it does all other things in the behavior of living things. And that is why tradition is important and should not be casually tossed aside: it has stood the test of time. It has survived the pressures of survival in far more adverse and dangerous times than these. Should technological civilization fall, I would be willing to bet that a hundred years later there would not be many LGBTQ+ people because such people would be handicapped in the race for survival. Traditional gender roles are favorable to the survival of the species, to the endurance and development of culture, and to the development of sane sound strong moral human beings.
