[TeMPOraL]

That's all good. In the case you described, in a perfect egalitarian, meritocratic society you would expect to find more men than women in the army in general, but maybe more women than men doing sniper duty. That's how averages will play out with zero gender discrimination.

In other words - just because an industry is not 50/50 men/women, doesn't mean there's sexual discrimination going on.

Even if the differences themselves are small, the very fact that they're there mean that women have comparative advantage over men in some areas, while men have that advantage over women in other. We exploit that concept in international trade, and yet many find it wrong to exploit it at the society level.

The question we should be asking is: which "social biases" arise from comparative advantage of sexes? Maybe they're ok and we should leave those biases be, while removing those that don't give any utility? Hard-equalizing everything (by e.g. pushing for 50/50 ration of genders in every industry) seems to be an outcome worse for everybody.

[aianus]

Even a small difference in the mean or sd for a given attribute will result in enormous gender imbalances for jobs requiring an extreme value of that attribute.

If you select people totally at random (no discrimination!) from the population of people with >130 IQ to work at Facebook and the sd for men in the general population is 11 IQ points instead of 10 for women, you'll wind up with a 70% male workforce at Facebook.

Similarly if men had a mean IQ of 101 instead of 99 for women, Facebook would have a 66% male workforce.

From R:

women <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)

men <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 11, lower.tail = FALSE)

scaling <- 100/(women+men)

men * scaling

[1] 70.28561

women * scaling

[1] 29.71439

women <- pnorm(130, mean = 99, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)

men <- pnorm(130, mean = 101, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE)

scaling <- 100/(women+men)

men * scaling

[1] 65.8503

women * scaling

[1] 34.1497

[osipov]

Bravo! You are a gentleman and a scholar! This comment if packaged a Jupyter notebook could move the world!

[Retric]

The centeral problem with that line of thinking is it's really hard to both set aside "social biases" and it's really hard to seperate what's useful for getting a job done and how we currently measure thinks. Consider, in an 100% egalitarian society the NBA might end up with 1-5 women. However, a similar game in an egalitarian society might be much closer to 50-50 if the rules focused on slightly different gameplay. Ex: does making the basket 5% higher change the gender balance.

Granted, the NBA is entertainment which complicates things, but the same line of thinking probably applies to the Navy Seals. IMO, whenever you see a biased rule you need to deside if it's useful before you can view it as egalitarian.