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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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regardless of whether women actually want to be in leadership roles, there should not be structural bias against it

You appear to use "structural bias" as a negative term here, and "actually want" as a neutral term, as if peoples preferences are just the way the world is. (What if preferences are malleable to social engineering?)

feminists claim the gender disparity at management levels is evidence that structural bias exists

Firstly, there are many feminists and they claim different things, so we need to be specific. Secondly, as other comments have alluded to, the structural bias here causes female preferences.

It is common for a feminist to make the above empirical claim about gender disparity, and use "structural bias" in the same way you do. When evidence to the contrary is presented, the feminist interlocutor either ends the conversation, changes the topic, or falls back on a subtly different meaning of "structural bias." I suppose charitably he used this other meaning of "structural bias" the entire time, but I will explain the complications of assuming that charity.

The fallback meaning of "structural bias" require us to read the feminist claim as being tautological, not empirical. "Structural bias" is simply anything socially-constructed which makes men and women different. "Bias" should be read here like statistical bias not "human bias." Since women have a tendency to not be leaders, this is tautological evidence for some systemic bias. I will also explain the complications of the term "socially-constructed."

I originally had a monologue on preferences and meta-preferences, but to keep it shorter: feminism's true preferences are not merely "women are happy" or "women face no discrimination." Feminism's true preference appears to be: "women are not different from men." Since the first two are an easier sell to the public, those are what we hear the most about, but I think those are only stated reasons, not the true reasons. The problem with assuming that feminists always use "structural bias" in the tautological sense is that the layman thinks it means discrimination anyways (Standard motte-and-bailey)

The problem with socially-constructed things is that it is just a synonym for "things." My inflammatory claim that feminism aims to erase all distinction between man and woman seems like it would fly in the face of biology, but we mutate biology all the time. To demonstrate, I will make an even more inflammatory prediction: if artificial wombs become feasible, I would expect feminists to agitate for one or both of these:

  • men to receive artificial wombs to equally bear the cost of bearing children

  • an end to all traditional conception

In both of these cases, I would expect feminism to use social engineering to align peoples preferences with this outcome. According to this model, feminism is in the business of world-outcomes, not making people happy. There is another model I alluded to in my original reply that describes feminism as harm-reduction, but that model wasn't as relevant to the quoted text.