[YoureWrong]

> Placing the burden of proof it on the person making the claim simply prioritizes the status quo, which may or may not be what you want. Given our status quo is the product of proven, vicious discrimination against women, protecting the status quo through allocation of the burden of proof is the opposite of what we want.

Except that presuming the opposite allows us to flap around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence, and thus allows us to do things that are massively harmful to the long-term well being of women (such as raising a generation of men after the inflection point on gender issues which faced institutionalized discrimination in places such as universities), and thus undermine our own end-goals through emotive decisions rather than rational ones.

The problem with the current approach is that you can't continue it long enough to cause the necessary change to restabilize the social trends, because the accumulated backlash of your intentionally inflicted injusticed builds faster than your positive social change, and you've simply entrenched a good reason to retaliate (they were intentionally discriminated against by a group who had previously suffered discrimination and knew what they were doing), and have already entrenched that intentional infliction of injustice is the means of correcting past injustices.

Far from changing the underlying social dynamic, the intentional discrimination against men actually reaffirmed the status quo one meta-level up from where your concern was: women will be just as sexist towards men as men were ever to women, given the chance, and even when they are personally "concerned" with the topic of discrimination.

Because it failed to use science in developing its methods, recent feminism has been a massive failure: far from standing against discrimination, modern feminism has demonstrated that women believe gender relations is a game of tit-for-tat, and they should be positively discriminated against by men looking for retaliation over their intentional discrimination anywhere that feminism has acted in excess.

This is a destabilizing force in gender relations, and should be set aside as an immature view. Instead, we should look honestly at the situation and develop a stance from actual ethics, rather than emotions.

[rayiner]

> Except that presuming the opposite allows us to flap around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence

Flapping around on the whims of opinion, unsupported by factual evidence, seems like a pretty good description of the situation to me whenever someone invokes "but, but, preferences" to explain why women are vastly more represented amongst high SAT math scorers than among programmers and engineers.

[shasta]

> Letting the legacy of past discrimination stand in perpetuity because fixing it would require temporary discrimination in the opposite direction?

I'm skeptical of the explanation that pay inequality between genders is caused by irrational business-hurting discrimination when the vast majority of people I meet in tech don't seem to have any aversion to hiring women. Suppose 10% of companies won't hire you because of irrational reasons. What does that do to your market value? Under the simplest economic model, it does nothing. Because there is still competition between the 90%. For irrational discrimination to cause pay inequality, it has to be widespread. (Edit: Disclaimer -- the above argument may be flawed. Feel free to correct my reasoning.)

[rayiner]

> Suppose 10% of companies won't hire you because of irrational reasons. What does that do to your market value? Under the simplest economic model, it does nothing.

Under simple economic models, given fixed supply, small changes in demand can have large impacts on prices.

[shasta]

Depends. There obviously has to be a large change in the demand curve at the supply point if that point is fixed. But I agree that a small horizontal shift in a demand curve can have a big impact.

I don't think that's the right way of looking at it, though, because it treats the men and women supply-demand problems as independent. As long as the prefer-men employers are outnumbered by men, they won't affect equilibrium in this simplistic model.

[TeMPOraL]

Because there isn't irrational business-hurting discrimination among programmers!

>> to explain why women are vastly more represented amongst high SAT math scorers than among programmers and engineers.

Except they're not! Pretty much every source I've seen puts women as underrepresented on SAT math scores, and this trend apparently goes back down to secondary school or earlier.