Gender inequality is not about sex or gender

That rumbling noise that you hear is the collective gnashing of teeth of left.

The four big issues (getting airplay) in socio-political discourse at the moment - or at least on #qanda recently - are:
Refugees (a.ka. the boats)
Under-representation of women
LGBT rights
Freedom of speech (racial vilification - see ‘boat people’)

Ignoring the irony of a panel of commentators (average earnings north of $500K p/a ea) pontificating about the plight of the average punters for the moment; I found it really interesting that the middle-aged white guy was the only one NOT subscribing to the prevailing dominant paradigm and the only one showing some sense of understanding some of the big picture.

In any event, they all - and every government in succession - gets this wrong all the time because they do not understand the root cause of the problem they are trying to address.

Let’s consider these symptoms and evaluate how Governments and other interventionists attempt to fix these problems. Consider for instance that women are under-represented (as they are) in the Liberal Party.

The preferred solution is instituting quotas (for example) to remedy this situation. This is based on the belief that women are not understood nor given a fair go, or that women are deemed incompetent or even that women will go off and have babies so they cannot be relied on.

None of these are (necessarily) true - certainly not across all women.

The reason women are not elected/ promoted/recruited is because they are different. It is not because they are ‘female’ - despite what the feminists would argue.

People elect/prefer/recruit people just like them. People like people who are like them.

That is human nature.

When white men have to pick who joins the company, the club or the party and who gets promoted, then they tend to pick people just like them. (On the whole - not in every individual case.)

It actually can be traced back to the evolutionary benefit and is well understood in neuroscience.

Gay people are discriminated against for the same reason: not because they like their sex differently but because they are ‘not like me’.

Races are vilified because they are different, not because they are black or yellow.

Anything that is different must be feared - that is the law of the jungle that our old brains operate under.

If you really want to fix the problem, then you must address this. Any other solution will go against the grain of human nature and is bound to fail.

Too few women in the Liberal Party (Cabinet) is not a problem. It is a symptom of human nature. You can’t legislate human nature away.

As noble as the objectives are for these perceived ‘causes’ may be to any individual, the price exacted from society (undemocratic processes, loss of freedom etc.) is very high.

The benefits of achieving those objectives are worth it in the eye of the crusader, but objectively it may not be as black and white as that.

The social changes currently being championed by the left in many respects deny or at least ignore fundamental attributes/elements of human nature.

By figuring out how to overcome the inertia that comes from operating in our evolutionary comfort zones, more success will be achieved in creating social change.

I don’t know what the actual strategy is to achieve that, but I do know that the price society is asked to pay is so high that not only will those changes be very long in the making, we may one day find out that it wasn’t worth the price.