system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why society accepts women wearing trousers, while men can not wear skirts (unless they are traditional clothing) (Also, no pun intended, I really would like to know the logic)
gpt
There is no special reason why men couldn't wear "skirts" or "dresses" - a kilt is basically a skirt, the traditional gear many ancient peoples wore into battle was basically a skirt, what we call "robes" are basically dresses.  (And in some languages, a woman's dress is still called a "robe".) Men's kilts/robes would, of course, be in a different fashion, as men's fashions and women's fashions invariably are.

The ultimate reason why *women* wear trousers goes back to a deeper question: why do all *men* wear trousers? The answer is that trousers are a vast improvement over robes/skirts for two things. The first is riding horses.  The second is heavy manual work in which a robe would likely get muddy or stuck on tools/machinery.  To simplify a long story, you had a surprising alliance of enemies.  Aristocrats wore pants, first, because they actually were riding a lot, either for hunting or war; second, because they had gotten used to it; third, because even if they weren't actually hunters or soldiers, they wanted to *imply* that they were.  And rich people who wished they were aristocrats adopted their fashions.  But at the same time, middle-class merchants who disliked aristocrats and hated vanity made a point of wearing simple, decent clothes, the same kind a workman would be able to afford.  And that meant - even for a merchant who did not do much manual labor - wearing pants.  (It also meant dark colors that don't stain, which we still wear to this day.)  So if you wanted to be an aristocrat, you had to dress in pants; and if you wanted to be a proud member of the middle class, you had to dress in pants; and so soon enough, all men were wearing pants and it just became the normal thing for men.

Later, at the time of the first suffragettes, part of what people found funny about the idea that men and women were equal was the crazy image of women doing the things men do in some sort of dress.  That would, in fact, be impractical; but some of the suffragettes came back with the idea that they could wear a sort of pants, too.  So some women started wearing pants as a political/fashion statement. Then, with more gender equality, they started wearing pants for jobs that required pants. It started to seem practical to dress little children in pants sometimes (whereas before, both boys and girls were often kept in dresses at a very young age).  The next step was for pants-wearing to become increasingly common and casual.

So what happened wasn't the emergence of a special ban on men wearing skirts/dresses; rather, after an earlier period in which trousers became a particularly male form of dress, women started wearing them too, without there ever being any mirror-process which encouraged men to wear dresses (unless we count crossdressers, perhaps?).