Sexism is not funny, let's stop laughing

The other side of the coin is that the white-shoe firms didn't touch certain types of businesses (like M&A or IPOs) because those businesses were considered "ungentlemanly." So they were left to the Jewish firms, who developed an expertise in the fields during the decades that they were considered unimportant.

If you really want to trace the origin of the Jewish finance/law stereotypes back to their root, it goes all the way back to Middle Ages (and possibly earlier). Money handling and the trades were considered unclean/uncouth professions, and the landed aristocracy were so rich that they didn't need to concern themselves with such business. Some countries even mandated that Christians couldn't engage in such businesses. Jews took up finance, merchandizing, artisanry, etc., and placed a great deal of importance on professional success -- it being the only way that Jews could advance in society. To whatever extent that my people are stereotyped as "naturally" good at finance, etc., it's usually because nobody else was touching those things for hundreds of years.

Look, it's like talking about or showing your naked body. You can't do it in work or professional contexts. If the people close to you are OK with all of ye getting naked, fine. But if someone complains of you being naked at work, you have no right to complain.

One view says that fairness is about aggregate outcomes. We can observe that certain groups appear to be suffering from poor outcomes, and we regard this as unfair to members of those groups. We also recognise the historical factors involved in producing those outcomes. So, we might say "Women are under-represented in the software industry. This is because there are fewer women with relevant skills. But this is because of a legacy of centuries of sexist discrimination against women, and the only way to correct this is to perform some balancing discrimination in favour of women now". This view has no problem in recognising that women can be, on average, "inferior" (less experienced, say) programmers, but says that if they are inferior then it is because of historical factors and not any innate characteristic of women.

The other view says that fairness is about individual acts. It's unfair to take certain aspects of a person's identity (e.g. gender) into account when evaluating a person, so we don't do that. It's unfair to act in a way that makes people of certain identities uncomfortable or disadvantages them in group situations, so we don't do that. Since advantage is relative, it's also wrong to act in a way that benefits only people of a certain identity. They think that disadvantaging someone because of their identity is unfair to that person, and even giving a person a positive advantage is unfair to them because it demeans their real achievements.

Followers of the two ethical frameworks have a lot of trouble understanding each other. The second group thinks fairness is about acting fairly towards individuals, and thinks that it would be wrong to treat a woman differently from a man, since that is, after all, the sine qua non of sexism. But this also rules out giving the women a positive advantage. This directly conflicts with the notion of fairness held by the first group. They will, bizarrely, both describe the other group as being 'sexist' - group one for believing that it's legitimate to treat women differently from men (but only if it is done to correct a historical imbalance), and group two for arguing that it's wrong to consider gender when dealing with someone, because this ignores historical and systemic factors.

I lean towards the individualist position myself, but it's not wrong to worry about the systemic factors and the aggregate outcomes. I also suspect that whilst the philosophical debate is very entertaining, it's also not very relevant to day-to-day life, which would be vastly improved by putting the philosophy to one side and just being a bit nicer to each other.

So they don't ask because if they did it would harm them.

No, that's a false etymology. The term "politically correct" in its modern usage came from leftist movements in the 70s to describe politics (not in the broad sense of "tact"). Think of it as a synonym for "ideologically sound". The civil rights movement was definitely about politics, not tact. The term "politically correct" was then appropriated by the same leftist movements and used sarcastically to parody themselves.

Afterwards, it entered the general lexicon.