I don’t think it’s quite as simple as we don’t show up, Helen. In the first place, we probably are focussed on personal issues, not public issues. We’re busy trying to do what we can in our own lives to raise our children right, do our jobs well, be loyal and helpful to our friends. We don’t have time and energy left over to screw around doing PR, handing out flyers and marching, or lobbying legislatures.
It takes a certain screwed-up sense of priorities, actually, to take the energy you might spend working on your personal issues and devote it to the public sector. You have to value the televised praise of the multitude, the applause of the big audience, more than the heartfelt private thanks of one or two individuals.
Women more than men tend to suffer from such muddled priorities, which is why they’re more often found neglecting their own children in order to spend time agitating for Peace ‘n’ Justice for all the world’s children. It’s the dark flip side of one of your sex’s advantages, your superior ability to “multi-task.” Being good at multi-tasking is another way of saying you’re not so good at sorting out priorities.
In the second place, the nature of modern law, with its increasing reliance on rigid rules-based decision-making, suits women better than men. Men like systems based on personal judgment and clear lines of heirarchy, e.g. the Army. Women like systems based on rules and algorithms, where personal judgment is less important. As justice has become less a matter of the judgement of a local heirarch, and more the result of some massive computerizable algorithm, it suits men less and women more. Is it a big wonder that men tend to opt out?
As for the solutions…I suggest there are none. Late Western culture is simply in decline, over-feminized. It cannot defend itself, or sustain itself (witness the declining rates of marriage and birth). So it will be replaced (probably abruptly) by an over-masculinized, aggressive culture (Islam?), just as over-feminized late Roman culture was replaced by the over-masculinized Germanic culture to its north. Then the women go back to square one and spend a few centuries softening and “civilizing” that culture, and on and on, around and around we go.
