The reviewer is pretty sure most people who can do the calculus of series and sequences and basic linear algebra can learn this stuff.

^{It only looks hard from a distance.}

The reviewer is also pretty sure most people have better things to do.

The author surely exemplifies the intersection of those sets.

I can't really picture it.

I think you have a good understanding of my project, actually. (How thoroughly useless for you!) The gas doesn't have to be in a chamber but it can be. I don't know a whole lot about the final application, I just do as I'm told.

Basically, to help you picture it, you have a sheet of lasers and you're trying to build slices like this from the light-absorption data. (At least that's one application. There are a bunch and my work is fairly general to flow tomography.)

'Topography' is a decent conceptual scheme for the outputs I'm generating but 'density map' would be a little more accurate. (Normally just a 2-D slice. The math extends to 3-D without any difficulty but practical limitations make those systems uncommon.)

I understand social roles to be a shorthand (like stereotypes or passports) that make subjective decisions easier...

This is part of what social roles are but they go much deeper, I think. Ultimately, the standard roles accepted by a community, i.e. those with normative force, contribute to how its members perceive and treat themselves as well as one another. The social roles and rituals in which you partake inform your identity and guide your affections. Who we think we are, the ways we act towards each other, and so forth become quickly ingrained. And the totality of your social context--from birth up to your present--is an irrevocable part of your person.

If ideals like 'being a breadwinner' or 'being a stay-at-home mother' are of longstanding importance to most members of a community then many social institutions will be structured around those roles. Said institutions are typically complex and it's often far from clear how shifting social roles will affect a community. Trust plays a big part in how societies operates and substantial shifts in relations can break down trust and alter people's behaviour in unpredictable ways.

So--in the context of an immensely wealthy, high functioning society--the degree to which we should make a conscious effort to change big parts of our social organizations ought to be proportional to the structural importance of the relevant norms and the actual harms brought on by the status quo.

Say a subset of your population is formally marginalized: Near-term political action is probably warranted.

Say instead that X percent of construction workers are men and Y percent of teachers are women: Encourage respect for minority genders within these professions, make people feel welcomed, and otherwise let it be.