No dates, no sex, no weddings, no kids

At this rate, the North Koreans will be able to just waltz in in 2100 and take over.

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I wouldn't say that women necessarily have different job preferences. Rather, I'd say that employers are inflexible. Suppose that someone, male or female, wants to get a 75% or 50% time software engineering job at Google. Can they? AFAIK they cannot. It's not even a question of whether they can get 75% or 50% of the compensation of a full-time employee: they'll get 0% of the compensation, because Google won't offer the job at less than full time. Employers like this don't give a damn about fathers any more than they give a damn about mothers. After all, many fathers would love to spend more time with their kids.

Our economy is designed around the "single breadwinner" model (which isn't even working for the single breadwinner anymore, who often has a side job nowadays). The way lifetime employment compensation works, it's optimal for at least one of a couple to be exclusively focused on their career and not take any significant breaks from work, and if the couple has kids, then it rests on the other member of the couple do an "unfair" share of the child rearing and household maintenance, and if they work at all, seek out less lucrative careers that are more flexible about time and more accepting about gaps in work. It may be true that women are more naturally inclined to want to stay home with their kid after carrying the kid around inside for 9 months, and thus the forced choice of who becomes the single breadwinner usually falls on men. (Furthermore, if the couple has more than one child, and one of the couple has already "fallen behind" in their career to stay at home, then they become the natural, rational choice to be the stay at home caregiver again, because the single breadwinner is already maximizing income.)

And let's be clear, men are working too much! I just saw another article on HN, "Less than half of U.S. workers use all their vacation days" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35403776 Employers are inflexible, so it's difficult for the single breadwinner to work fewer hours. And working more is not helping men "get ahead" at work, because everyone is doing it! The sole beneficiary of these working hours is the employers. Workers in high compensation positions are particularly vulnerable to this, because they tend not to be organized into unions, perhaps because they mistakenly believe that compensation is the only issue for unions, not working conditions.

The inflexibility of our employment system creates a massive financial disparity between the lifetime compensation of the "single breadwinner" who never takes significant time off from work and everyone else. It doesn't have to be this way. What's happening is that the natural differences between men and women are getting exaggerated to an unhealthy degree by the system. More flexibility would help both. We've seen how inflexible employers can be, however, now that they're demanding everyone return to the office after allowing them to work from home during the pandemic.

> There is nothing discriminatory going on.

I have no wish to argue about what discrimination means, but I think you have a rather narrow (and largely useless) interpretation of "completely gender neutral", whereby something can be deemed completely gender neutral regardless of whether it generates a huge difference in outcome by gender. After all, there are always individual differences among members of each gender, so if we have to ignore the averages, then what's left? According to your interpretation, it seems that the only issues that are not completely gender neutral are specifically where men are required to do X and women not-X, which as I said is largely useless for practical discussion (one of the few examples is the US Selective Service, which does discriminate by both gender and age).

The main question to me is not just whether an outcome is actually unequal, the question is whether an outcome is predictably unequal. When someone applies an input, allegedly gender neutral, that they know in advance will produce important gender differences in output, how can they honestly claim that it's completely gender neutral? That's not fooling me, at any rate; it seems more like self-deception.

Let me put it this way: if you wanted to discriminate against a certain class of people, but you needed plausible deniability, then what would you do? You would select arbitrary criteria, allegedly neutral, that play the averages and tend to filter out the undesirables. It's not perfect discrimination, some false positives and negatives, but "better" than nothing, right?

> Just like requiring certain standards of physical fitness for firefighters that more men than women can meet is not discrimination.

This seems like a rather minor issue. It's a special case. I don't think it carries much weight overall, pardon the pun. The economy doesn't seem to be littered with disappointed firefighter wannabes. "I want to be a firefighter" is what children say, not generally what adult women are saying about gender inequality.

Regardless, I don't think it makes much sense to compare physical fitness standards for firefighters and late-night drinking "fitness" for business. Nobody is going to die if you don't drink, though somebody could die if you do drink! Drinking is not even a plausibly reasonable requirement for work.

> I don't emphasise them. But I also don't deny them.

Well, I've known you for years, and I've observed that you constantly go out of your way to argue with strangers on the internet about gender. Of course I'm doing it in this submission, but I can't even begin to match your prolificness, nor do I aspire to. ;-)

Anyway, quibbling aside, the larger issue is that there are often perfectly rational explanations for why women tend to avoid certain employment situations, explanations that have nothing to do with "gender preferences", unless you would claim that "not wanting to get sexually harassed or assaulted" is just a preference.

> Your claim is that any activity that can or does produce even statistic differences in outcomes for different genders is discrimination.

No, it's not.

> Good chat.

No, it wasn't.

Every "chat" you have seems to end up with some variation of the sarcastic "have a nice one". Don't you ever tire of that outcome?

> I do try my best to fight the Dominant Narrative™ on this topic

It does feel like you're talking to an abstraction (maybe talking to yourself?) rather than talking to me. That would actually explain a lot about how these chats go.

I am not the Dominant Narrative. Neither are you the Lord-selected savior from the Dominant Narrative. We're just two guys talking on the internet. Do you want to have a real discussion, or just pound keys and chests like monkeys?