Women are facing pretty much the same issues in greater or lesser form the world over, you added in all the other items that have no bearing on the subject as proof that those things are 'no longer issues', but while they're no longer an issue for a large number of people the fact is that there is lots of social pressure against interracial marriages even today in the USA, there is tons of discrimination against gays today in the USA, the only thing you've probably dealt with successfully is slavery.
The rest of the world is more or less lucky with all of those depending on the location and the crib that you were born in to.
So, even if we limit our view to the US then it's not all roses, and the female-male wage gap is still very much present.
Really, we're far from there, on paper everybody is equal but in real life that's absolutely not true, not even close, and gender equality in founders is just a reflection of gender equality issues earlier in life, in the educational system and in society in general.
The wage gap you speak of has a long history of misrepresentation for political reasons. Yes, it's true that the average female full-time workers earn about 1/4 less than men, but as the wikipedia page you linked to points out, "The statistic does not take into account differences in experience, skill, occupation, education or hours worked as long as it qualifies as Full-time work."
Furthermore in more and more urban areas young, single women earn more than young single men. The original post was talking about being a 25 year-old woman in NYC, a where women in their 20's earn 117% of what men in their cohort do. This same trend is true in Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, Dallas and other large cities:
It's the standard PC line that differences in male/female outcomes are due to discrimination in cases where women are coming out behind (e.g. hard sciences, engineering, entrepreneurship), and the outcomes are not to be worried about when it's the opposite (e.g. homelessness, workplace death, life expectancy, child custody). It saddens me to see that kind of knee-jerk political reaction here, though.
I was challenging your absolutist statement that humanity can't deal with social prejudices by being unaware: "No, no conspiracy, just conventions that we would probably do better without but which are deeply ingrained in society. .. So deep that we're no longer even aware of them." So I presented the country's people of the author who has dealt with the issues tremendously well compared to 'large chunks' of the world.
The rest of the world is more or less lucky with all of those depending on the location and the crib that you were born in to.
So, even if we limit our view to the US then it's not all roses, and the female-male wage gap is still very much present.
some links to underscore these points:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disp...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_State...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States
Really, we're far from there, on paper everybody is equal but in real life that's absolutely not true, not even close, and gender equality in founders is just a reflection of gender equality issues earlier in life, in the educational system and in society in general.