> 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
Here's another claim I've heard many times and never seen refuted (or even challenged): Tall men are paid more than short men (extending into non-physical work such as programming.)
A company that recognizes this should hire a bunch of short programmers at a discount and trounce their competition...but they don't.
I'd suggest these factors:
1. Despite the fact that short men get paid less, you can't just take a tall candidate, find a shorter one with equivalent skills, and hire him at a discount. Finding and identifying the optimal fit for a job is already beyond our abilities--adding in this extra restriction just isn't feasible.
2. This bias isn't an explicit bias like "I hate short people". It's a subconscious "I feel better about this candidate". Our decisions are based on black box gut feelings, so offsetting our subconscious bias is extremely difficult.
3. Tall men might actually be more effective in programming jobs, simply because we afford them higher status as a society--that adds value in a job that involves working with other people...such as programming.
Suppose 3 is true--I suspect it is. Even if I overcome my bias and hiring challenges to get past 1 and 2, 3 means the rational thing for me to do when hiring is to pay the extra for tall programmers, because in our society, they'll perform better.
But an alternative universe where no one has this bias in the first place will result result in a more optimal allocation of resources.
There are times where you can get an advantage by overcoming a bias others experience, but there are times where you can't and the only fix is to fix society at large. (Maybe I can just fix that bias in every one of my employees, but limiting myself to the small set of people who lack a pervasive bias means reducing my talent pool--probably so much that it offsets the competitive gain I get.)