By the way, read this http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/b... and tell me again that women are not handicapped simply by being women. Or maybe women on average simply do not make an effort to succeed unless they can somehow hide that they are women?

The market sets wages of jobs based on the value that they produce. A petroleum engineer earns more than a sociologist. This is not due to discrimination, it's due to market value of the degree. That women choose the lower paying degrees is a mark of a society where women can choose what they really want. If you look at countries like Iran and Pakistan you see more women in engineering than in Sweden and the Netherlands. Arguing that this is because of discrimination is ridiculous. It is out of economic necessity. The more wealthy and equal a society becomes, the more women choose professions they like and men choose professions they like. The criterion for succes should not be equal representation, but equal opportunity. The problem is that you have a fact-free branch of feminism that has completely taken over the political discourse. We need to listen to feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers who care about science and about the actual well being of women, instead of an ideological narrative.

Good for you, but that wasn't really the point of that example. The point was that there is no good reason to assume that the same dynamic that caused women to loose auditions before blind auditions, doesn't apply in all kinds of other fields. How do you propose we deal with in occupations where we can't have the equivalent of blind auditions?

The problem is that the criterion for success cannot be a 50-50 split between men and women in every profession.

That's a red herring. No one here is arguing for that. Even Spike Lee only added a handful of women to his list of 80 directors.

That ignores that there are gender differences, and pushing for that goes against personal freedom and well being.

The problem with that argument is that it could have been made at any point during the last 200 years to argue that we had at that particular point in time reached the pinnacle of gender equality. In fact I'm certain that it has been used both for arguing against voting rights for women and against women working at all.

It doesn't matter whether the number you're enforcing is 50-50 or another number. The whole principle is wrong. It's anti equality. The whole point of feminism used to be that we shouldn't care about gender where it's not relevant, and instead treat people as people.

It's utter nonsense that you could use the same argument against women's voting rights. Not having voting rights for women is completely opposite because you're discriminating based on gender. My whole point here is that we shouldn't discriminate based on gender. Another problem with this world view is that virtually nobody ever cares about the fact that men are overrepresented as garbage collectors and enforcing gender quotas in those areas. It's plain old sexism masquerading as justice, and it's doing a disservice to both women and men.

I propose we agree to acknowledge that unconscious sexist bias exists and that it works against women, and that we should stop kidding our selves that the blind hand of the market will somehow fix this problem. If the market worked like that, there would be no reason for blind auditions in the first place. I am not arguing for quotas, certainly not as a general solution. But I can certainly sympathise with the idea, especially where the alternative is the status quo. I also think quotas are a bit of a red herring in context of the discussion about Spike Lee and his list of directors. We can of course not know Spike Lee's mind, but I think it's fair to assume that Spike Lee didn't include women directors simply because they were women, but because he had failed to even consider them in the first place because of unconscious biases he harboured like everyone else.

It's utter nonsense that you could use the same argument against women's voting rights.

Your mixing the arguments up. The argument I was referring to was your argument that things are the way they are because of unspecified gender differences. That has been argued always. As a society, we've constantly had to make short term sacrifices to further equality. For example having women be part of the work force has necessitated that we make it illegal to fire someone for being pregnant. That is a reduction of the liberties of employers. And paid maternative leave is in principle unfair to working men. But the result of those sacrifices is that the whole pie has grown and we as a society are wealthier.

I agree that gender bias is a problem, I just disagree that more discrimination is the way to fix it. It's also a problem the other way around. In STEM fields equally qualified women have an absolutely massive hiring advantage. That kind of bias is fuelled partially by the idea that you have to reach some kind of 50-50 situation or else society is sexist. This is also not good for women because it creates the idea that the reason she was hired was because she's a woman and therefore may be less competent than somebody who had to pass more a more stringent hiring bar, even though she might be very competent.

The market is actually a lot more fair than you think. If there is systematic bias against any group then somebody can make a lot of money by starting their own company and hiring those people.

In your last paragraph you're arguing against a strawman again. Not being able to fire somebody for being pregnant (or at home because of illness for that matter) is a good thing. Paid maternity leave is unfair to men if men don't get it, and then that's bad. I don't understand why people think it's okay to discriminate against men but not against women. It's plain old sexism. Both genders should get it.

The most important thing about maternity leave is that it should be paid for by the government, or there should be some system where if either the father or mother doesn't want it then he or she gets an equivalent amount of money. Else you make it a disadvantage for a company to hire somebody who is likely to take maternity leave (probably women), so you're creating discrimination.

I believe that some discrimination applied intelligently is often less bad than no solution at all. If better solutions can be found, then by all means lets try those first, but in absence of those, it is frankly sexist to take the absolutist position that no solution at all is better than a little postive discrimination. That amounts to saying that the problem is not important enough to be worth making any sacrifice over.

The market is actually a lot more fair than you think. If there is systematic bias against any group then somebody can make a lot of money by starting their own company and hiring those people.

I know this line of reasoning. It isn't supported by the evidence. I refer you again to the example with the symphony orchestra.

I agree mostly with what you wrote in your last 2 paragraphs.

The problem with this kind of discrimination, apart from it being discrimination, is that it has all kinds of side consequences and it's often applied unidirectionally. When you have a 2 to 1 hiring advantage in STEM that's a huge problem caused by this kind of thinking, yet it's not seen as a problem because women are supposedly the oppressed class. Meanwhile this policy is making it rational to believe that women working in STEM jobs are less qualified, which is a big disservice to the brilliant women who got there on merit. (note that I personally score some victimology points, and I HATE the quotum policies and special grants etc.) Instead we should decide what the situation is that we want to reach and aim directly for that. In my opinion that situation is one where gender does not matter in situations where it doesn't matter and everyone has equal opportunity. The goal should not be a situation where we're enforcing quotas because that's a situation where people are not doing what they want to do.

The orchestra is a good example where it did work. They started to use blind evaluations to hire the best players. They didn't implement gender quotas (as far as I know, and if they did I disagree that that's the solution).

That said, I don't think I stated that it was my personal opinion that positive discrimination was the best way to solve this problem. I don't think I would rule it out in all cases, but I much prefer a solution like the blind auditions. But obviously this is not a universal solution.

For instance, using your example, you could and should create the conditions for old people to feel less difficulty in accessing certain areas, but it would be ridiculous to put old people running against the 100m last olympic champion and then in the end by some argument claim some old person did the same time as the former champion and declare them both champions.

This is the point.

As the example with the symphony orchestras showed, it is entirely possible that the achievements of women get discounted simply because they are women.

I'm not saying that it is necessarily always the case, but since it demonstrably is in some cases, you should at least concede that it is an entirely reasonable position to have that women should be discriminated positively against to balance this bias, even if you don't share the position.