"Gender inequalities" mostly result from differing interests and aptitudes of males and females,
So right NOW, at this moment, would you say we're at the point where ALL differences in apparent male/female "interests and aptitudes" are 100% biologically based? Why is NOW that moment? Why weren't we at that moment, say, 20 years ago, when that "58 percent of all bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in biology going to women" you cite below was a MUCH lower number?
This is such a silly argument. No offense, Bostonian, but it's just silly. I love how we keep moving the goalposts, too. Oh...er...it looks like a lot of women are majoring in biology now! Well, um, I guess we might need to retire that whole "The womenz, they cannot do the scienz" trope. Wait, wait! "Teh womenz, they cannot do teh ENGINEERINZ!"
I see a large number of problems with your post. First of all, you misrepresent what Bostonian has stated as something easier for you to argue against. You substitute "100% biological" for "mostly the result of differing interests and aptitudes".
Secondly, you don't in any way address how much of the discrepancy you believe could be explained by biology, although you seem certain that it's less than 100%, and thus your straw-man of Bostonian's position must be wrong. Are you open to the idea that bias explains less than 100% of the discrepancy? If not, why?
Then you go on to mock Bostonian's position (or rather, your straw-man of it, I suppose) and deride some unspecified group of people for their failure to extrapolate a more equal aptitude between the sexes in engineering from the increased number of women studying biology. Maybe that extrapolation is right, maybe it's not, but it doesn't logically follow, as engineering is not biology.
Still, there is, I believe, a certain amount of wisdom in your post. The question of how we know when society as a whole is operating without bias is a good one. For some people the answer is as easy as looking at the statistics. If certain groups of people are over or under represented in a field or position, then that constitutes direct evidence of bias. For others, the question is much more complicated.
Perhaps levels of interest and aptitude differ between groups, but the differences have been exaggerated by bias. Perhaps bias is being applied to counter natural differences. Unless we can estimate what the bias-free results should be, either belief is equally silly, right?
But what if estimating bias-free results is simply too complicated? Where does that leave us? Are we to jump to the conclusion that that bias-free results would be equality, and anything differing from that ought to be criminal? Or do we criminalize only acts of discrimination for which we have evidence outside of mere statistics?
And what do we tell our children? I suppose many people will make their own estimates for what they believe the bias-free results would be (with differing amounts of supporting data), and work from there. Some of these people will accuse those starting with a different estimate as operating with a nefarious bias.
