To bring this out of the abstract, take something like feminism. First wave had it right, in my opinion, by focusing on liberation. Women weren't free to choose

To bring this out of the abstract, take something like feminism. First wave had it right, in my opinion, by focusing on liberation. Women weren't free to choose their own paths, and conservatism was the over bearing force in creating this problem. The aim of liberation was to free what arbitrary constraints were put on women simply due to tradition or presumption. Modern feminism, however, focuses on equality rather than liberation. It feels comfortable to assert that if women were truly liberated, they would be equal, and would be equally represented as software engineers, and plumbers, and truck drivers, etc. This is, in contrast, a failure of progressivism. It assumes that no traditions or gender roles had any basis in preferences that need not be equally distributed between sexes. TL;DR Virtue of the Mean every time