Of course, for Equality of Chance to be properly implemented you need to do away with as many barriers to it as possible but you should be willing to accept that no matter what you do, there won't be a perfect 50/50.
From all evidence we have, there is strong evidence that male and female humans grow up differently independent of their social surroundings, for example, we found that the brains of newborns can be easily distinguished into female and male as little as 1 month after birth, before any social factors have had much chance to get deep into development.
From that I find it easier to believe that there will be some statistical biases in one direction or another (like how will have, on average, a bit more height) outside of the purely physical domain.
I would rather see some evidence that despite all the physical, hormonal and developmental differences in male and female humans, there is absolutely no statistically significant difference in the brain and/or mind.
More desirable to whom? To the one with the worse outcome equality of outcome will always be more desirable than equality of chance. Plus, from a probabilistic point of view, wouldn't equal chances mean that for large numbers of trials (people) the outcome would also be equal?
> I would rather see some evidence that despite all the physical, hormonal and developmental differences in male and female humans, there is absolutely no statistically significant difference in the brain and/or mind.
You cannot even properly define what you mean by "brain and/or mind", which is why it's impossible to convince you that there actually is injustice if your opinion relies on that. But, for the moment suppose there is some convincing theory which explains naturally why less women are in STEM. Then why would we have to adjust our society to it, as it would benefit from less social tensions if there was equal outcome? Your point has to be much stronger to justify the inequality, as in everything would go downhill super fast if we had equal outcome. Otherwise there will always be social tensions and you have to learn to live with the "feminists".
Only if human properties are statistically independent.
If they are not, then a policy that depends on equality of outcome will screw someone over.
This has happened before, e.g. in medicinal research. Turns out, generalizing to the general population from a medicinal trial that consists only of men results in worse treatment for women.
It seems to me that you argue from a POV that basic human properties are statistically independent. Now... Why do you think that is so?
It means that someone would get less outcome than he or she would have gotten without the policy, true.
> This has happened before, e.g. in medicinal research. Turns out, generalizing to the general population from a medicinal trial that consists only of men results in worse treatment for women.
Wages or positions in companies are fundamentally different to medicine. We can decide how our companies look like. We can't decide how our body works.
> It seems to me that you argue from a POV that basic human properties are statistically independent. Now... Why do you think that is so?
I think you got me wrong here. I tried to argue from a POV of a reasonable being. I assumed that this is independent from any basic physical properties or even being "human". It's fine if you disagree with that, but I will have a hard time continuing the discussion. In hindsight this assumption although already implies that properties must be "statistically independent". Thanks for pointing that out I think I've learned something.
Well, for the most part, our power over our workplaces is also rather limited. True, you can leave, and go to a "different" company...
> It's fine if you disagree with that, but I will have a hard time continuing the discussion. In hindsight this assumption although already implies that properties must be "statistically independent". Thanks for pointing that out I think I've learned something.
I... think that statistical independence of human properties is a valid basic assumption.
However i think that it is worthwhile to question that assumption from time to time. Especially when, as mentioned in the article, more free societies like sweden or finland have more unequal outcomes than societies like iran (which iirc instituted a male quota for some STEM fields a few years ago).
This is a difficult topic...
This only shows that the measures that are taken might be inappropriate to fulfill their purpose of establishing gender equality and is unrelated to the mentioned assumption.