America's transition from an labor-based (i.e., mining, manufacturing, farming, etc.) economy to a service-dominated economy has naturally benefited women, and the decline in meaningful work for American men is a major contributor to our current social woes (i.e., mass shootings, White nationalism, opioid epidemic, etc.)
No one is stopping men from becoming nurses
Just like there are certain positions that men are naturally more-suited for men (i.e., firefighters and miners, due to physical requirements), women are naturally more suited for service-oriented positions due to their generally higher levels of social intelligence and empathy.
Now, I'm not saying that men shouldn't be nurses or teachers. The U.S. is projected to have more openings than applicants in these fields for several decades to come, and opening these opportunities to men is going to take a concerted effort to challenge and redefine societal gender roles.
Saying "no one is stopping men from becoming nurses" is akin to saying "no one is stopping women from becoming firefighters", and I ask you to examine the double standard present in what you're saying.
Well, there
are people stopping women from becoming firefighters in the sense that entrenched sexism definitely results in bias against hiring and promoting women as firefighters. And what you are saying has some minimal accuracy in that it is true that people with your outdated and biased views on men and the fundamental abilities of men as caretakers do sometimes discriminate against men in hiring nurses. However, for men in nursing (and other women-dominated fields) in particular, the bigger issue is a lack of male applicants. Men who are actually nurses routinely are as successful as women who are nurses, though this is not so true for women who are actually firefighters - i.e., the external bias and discrimination against women as firefighters is stronger than the same against men as nurses.
But just as significantly, you're complaining about declining job opportunities for men. Yet the problem for men in employment isn't (at a macro level) a lack of opportunities: There are a ton of jobs available right now that would hire men if men were applying. The problem is a lack of interest by men in the places where there are opportunities. If women were typically not discriminated against in employment in traditionally men-dominated jobs, and firefighting jobs were hiring
en masse, and women were complaining about a lack of jobs for them, but despite those counterfactuals women still weren't applying to be firefighters, the same argument would apply in reverse, but that isn't the reality. (I'll also grant that there is a separate argument about the general declining quality of jobs overall, but that shouldn't affect the gender balance of the workforce, so it's not material to this particular discussion.)
So, no, you are not drawing a reasonable equivalence.
