u/Catsanddoges

Primarily because of the current political and institutional environment I think a single payer healthcare system, or really anything past Obamacare/ACA, would be a net negative if somehow implemented in our current political landscape.

Now to address the elephant in the room: the GOP (I couldn't resist that joke). Obviously with MAGA republicans and how many centrist democrats there currently are, as well as an almost certain Trump Veto, in the 2026 midterms there are just not enough candidates for this that overriding Trump's veto is even close to a political possibility.

Because of this a lot of supporters and DSA candidates like to imagine a substantial leftward national shift with full House, Senate, and Presidential control after 2028 or 2032, but I think that is a frankly unrealistic knockout scenario premised on a huge number of assumptions. It is valid as a possibility of a long term political movement over decades, however predicting what politics would look like then has historically been shown to be tantamount to guesswork, especially with so many global unknown variables.

So for this hypothetical, we will just assume someone every congressional member and Trump decides to play nice for a day and pass it, and all refuse to repeal it, but otherwise their attitudes don't change. So the GOP will still hate it, but just won't repeal it.

I'll also not address funding for it or the obvious benefits of the system, as those will have been done to death. I mainly want to focus on the political reasons such a system could not work, and want to see why people say my reasoning is flawed or makes undue assumptions.

Issues:

1. It hands the executive far too much political power

From congress abdicating its role in many areas to the Supreme Court's decision, executive consolidation has a trend is very unlikely to stop without a progressive majority and a change in Supreme Court, which is not realistic in the near or medium term future. From both progressive and MAGA, and after the (in my opinion overblown) response to Joe Biden, I don't see the real voting political will for a moderate president who will not overly interfere in the system.

We have already seen how the Trump administration has gutted entire departments and ignored congressional rulings on say the Education Department. Implementing it as a normal agency, even if illegal to modify it, would in practice not stop and executive against it from unilaterally hamstringing it.

So the common response is to implement it to a similar way to the Federal Reserve. And I agree if such a program were to be made, it would be a necessity to do so. But even so, given recently all the political, legal, and direct attacks on the federal reserve (to mixed success), my faith in such a structuring actually giving full independence is limited.

And even so, the Fed has a lot of comparative advantages in staying independent, such as a pretty narrow goal, relative simplicity in covered topics (mostly interest rates, as opposed to negotiating say every drug price) that lets it operate with a higher degree of autonomy, that would be difficult to repliacte with a much more complicated and involved system.

I think for the most part the reason why this being partisan or the executive having a high degree of control would be negative is self explanatory. But just to give some examples, imagine if vaccination insurance was dropped for all Americans because it causes autism. Imagine if formula wasn't covered because babies need raw milk. It would be ludicrous to assume abortions and transgender procedures would ever be consistently covered.

You can try to structure it carefully in such a way to make it illegal or difficult to restructure, change, and influence it, but until voters, congress, and the supreme court all agree to hold violators responsible, we see exactly how any words on a page will be meaningless if people don't adhere to them.

2. It would lead to uncertainty and instability

Outside of this hypothetical, we would have to worry about the actual risk of it being repealed, but for fairness to the policy we'll omit that in the starting conditions.

However, much like the weaker Obamacare/ACA, the risk it is defunded or severely hampered remain high. The right has very high motivation to do this, as GOP congresspeople or executive could hamper it, declare it is ineffective (due to their interference) and use its ineffectiveness as an excuse to hamper it more. Even if congress could someone hold full control over it outside the executive, this feedback loop still remains a large possibility if the right even gain congressional control (which at some point they will). And while it takes decades of success and goodwill to make an institution and program, it only takes a few years of failure to strip it away.

Of course, a secondary issue and one that is important to bring up is the national debt and government shutdowns. Of course, as partisanship has increased recently shutdown severity and duration has increased (with the extremely favorable conditions of a united House, Senate, and President, which is very unlikely past November) to the point it is a major factor when evaluating government programs. Of course, it would have a separate back up fund, but to what extent is a major issue.

Lets give two examples: SNAP and Social Security. And for an example of a shutdown disagreement, lets say Democrats with some progressives take House and Senate, but the democrats can't united get a majority through their own support due to divisions on Israel funding (plausible example scenario). If it is based on payroll budgets and similar to SNAP, then even with a large reserve very quickly the budget could be blown through and lead to late insurance or significant delays.

If it was funded similar to Social Security, that would also be problematic as even in aggregate healthcare insurance is less predictable and steady, where pandemics like COVID or even just generic trends can change the year on year costs and growth in expenditures unpredictably, with a set percentage tax (eg an ultrawealthy wealth tax, one of the most common suggestions I've seen) being a poor way to solely fund a much less predictable system, where without flow with treasury an unsteady tax base would further jeopardize it. Further, much like how social security has been continuously taken from the idea this amount could stay untouched is almost laughable.

Building on what's here and before, with probable extreme shifts in policy, it is very probable whether or not abortion, GLP 1s, and gender affirming care are covered or even the extent to which basic necessitates are funded creates a huge air of risk and uncertainty. And while now health insurance is necessary in large part due to extreme discounts, the main point of health insurance like any other is to aggregate risk and distribute cost. And if its on the American dollar and companies and individuals drop private insurance, increased risk and uncertainty in many ways could lead to more damage for many than in the status quo.

3. It would inflame the right and increase institutional distrust

Getting to the end of the impact on politics, this will become the mother of all targets for the GOP.

Is the economy doing badly? Taxes for this. Do you feel like you pay too much taxes? It's for healthcare (and will barely even matter if most voters even pay for it). Dislike abortion? It's all because of the Democrat socialist healthcare killing American children. Was your kid born with autism? Its because the socialist healthcare implanted it in them.

Progressive moments in general can often gain ground or fight if they have a target, but if a goal is reached and momentum is spent, maintaining that goal while hate is thrown at it is something in politics that has been extremely difficult. Whether it has been government program independence, abortion, or PAC and company political spending, the GOP has been very successful at gathering anger at established institutions and little by little breaking them down until they are either torn out or made useless. Quite frankly, I don't know if they democrats have the ability to keep the momentum on this when it will be the easiest and most straightforward target for everyone on the right.

Quite frankly, I don't see how this won't turn out how ACA did, but cranked up to 11.

Think of MAHA, anti vaxxers, and tens of millions of Americans (partially rightfully) distrust of the healthcare system and its institutions. While SP can alleviate some of those issues, as long as some of the fundamental and hard to address problems exist I don't see how blame won't be redirected to it.

TLDR:

I don't think that the current or near future political environment and systems, even one more leaning to progressives/DSA, will allow a Single Payer or similar system to actually operate effectively and consistently to the betterment of most citizens without a huge radical upheaval in the voting behaviors of most Americans.

Disclaimers:

1. So this is a rewrite of a previous post from around a week ago, where several commentators who read through it told me to change the title because it didn't match what I was saying. It also was pretty incoherent and I made a few too strong scientific claims or people misinterpreted ambiguous statements I made, so I am going to try to make this more clear.

2. Also if the title wasn't clear enough, 50-50 targets have some justification at top level for people representative of you to make policies for you, and I think there is more rationale there than in general. And also 50-50 is whatever ratio makes up the population, most areas do have meaningful but small divergences for a number of factors, including genetic ratio variation.

3. This is also focusing on the U.S. and South Korea. I haven't done enough reading on literature in different areas to make informed claims about them.

4. Also not necessarily stating that it would be worse than the status quo, there shouldn't be certain equality measures, or that sexism is solved, but that this proposal I see a lot is in most areas far too harsh.

Meritocratic:

I've seen a lot of suggestions that these policies are more meritocratic than alternatives. For the rest of this, my comparative stance will generally be policies to encourage education and invest more in schooling regardless of age, and encourage more merit and quantitative based hiring and promoting policies, especially at larger companies.

The underlying rationale behind this assumption, from what I've mostly seen articulated, follows this rationale: in non-physical areas men and women on the whole are equal with no major differences (major to final operation of institution), that they have the same underlying interests and most differences are created by culture, and so with the same ability and the same interests they on average should do as well as each other, and when it is not observed that is primarily due to social/institutional/cultural factors hindering women. And because of that, it would be more meritocratic to equalize demographic outcomes because in a society without those roadblocks as that is what we expect would be obtained.

I hope this simplification is not strawmaning or cherrypicking arguments, as it is a genuine flow of thought I have seen pretty often made. If you feel this is unrepresentative of the logic, or for any other point, correct that in comment below please.

Essentially, the main logic here is similar to the underlying principle of disparate impact legally, where equality of merit and interest is assumed and resulting differences are at some level due to discrimination.

Equal Ability

Now for the equality of ability, this is mostly scientifically supported, but in some key ways not.

First is in IQ. Now, I hate IQ as a metric. It is incredibly flawed for many reasons, and not great at assessing much of what it is said to assess. However, it does have a lot of studies relating to it and a lot of literature, so sometimes it is the best associated evidence. Also given IQ tests are standardized so both women and men's average scores match, that throws a wrench into the next part assumed literally.

However, in general, for IQ (included ones not standardized) and many other similar tests, for equalizing education in developed countries, they tend to be remarkably close. Overall, the assumption that on average intelligence (a pretty ambiguous metric, but whatever) is the same holds up pretty well overall and while I am overstating it a bit the consensus is pretty strongly in that field.

Additionally for different types of abilities between them, eg different types of intelligence and different areas of the brain, the equality tends to break down a bit. Part of the aforementioned IQ weighting is because women tend to score higher on language and men on math, but that is a VERY FLAWED metric to use as justification alone. More substantively and in many empirical studies, however, minor but noticeable differences in the average, including in very young children unlikely to have major social gender divides, there are consistent and measurable impacts (I am simplifying here, but this is reddit, if you want to get into a full empirical discussion I am willing but need some feedback first). However, again, as many overall averages tend to even out, it is not like overall there is a consistent advantage that needs to be addressed, and the effects often (and simplifying again) are relatively minor, and oftentimes not by themselves enough to explain many of the splits we see.

However, variance is trickier. Now if you read my old post you'll know I was really unclear and overstated some things here, so I'll try to more clearly state things and the impacts. In many cognitive areas relating to "intelligence", even from a very young age to adults in many developed countries in *most* areas a relatively consistent trend has emerged, leading to GMV, or Greater Male Variance (Hypothesis). Now I want to be very clear on this. There have been many well-conducted empirical studies supporting this, but it is still actively studied and developing. This is not a settled topic and the full scientific consensus is not fully clear yet.

Now GMV mainly proposes that both in many key areas of intelligence, and poly genetic intelligence measures as a whole, men *tend* to have a greater average *distribution* of intelligence. Now, in some specific areas and specific subjects/areas of the brain certain studies have shown women do have greater variance, and in many others no significant effect, but a majority of the studies have show for most of these areas as well as a "general intelligence" (a term I really don't like) the variance is higher in men. Now, to what specific extent? There are some estimates, but sadly depending on age, methodology, area, studied areas and weighted averages the distribution coefficient varies too much currently. If you want to read on it there are several papers with good estimates, but an overall conclusion on an exact number is not currently available, and it would depend a lot on how you weight an overall intelligence variable with regard to its component areas.

(A quick side note IQ tests also diverge in a similar way, but that is not good evidence by itself. Especially for adults, social factors are noticeable, and again it is a pretty flawed metric. But incase you were wondering why I mentioned for equality of averages but not here, the reason is while the evidence does support the argument, it is really too unreliable for me to make use of)

However, one important thing to mention is that the consensus on a coefficient range they have reached generally has one tendency: it is by most standards, relatively small. Eg the current consensus is that (again, oversimplifying, compare to agnostic, etc) in a large enough population, excluding say social factors, you would have a measurable difference in distribution overall, with more women closer to the median and more men at upper and lower extremes, but for most people it wouldn't be especially noticeable.

However, even with a relatively small difference in a distribution coefficient, it goes from hard to notice to very impactful once you reach the extreme tail ends. This means, say in a perfectly meritocratic EOO society with inequality based solely on ability, in most areas you wouldn't notice a significant divergence but at the absolute bottom and absolute top a measurable disproportionate increase in men. While we do observe this in today's society, metrics for success like luck, background, and discrimination impact the distribution so top positions are further from the extremes in ability, and this effect is most noticeable when you select for the extreme of the variable itself.

And this also applies to averages, where the aforementioned small differences in averages by themselves are less important at levels near the mean, a small difference in an average can become very noticeable at the extreme tail ends. However how much of GMV is due to this or are they separately observable is up in the air, and its important to not double count hypothetical and observed factors if they overlap.

Now to summarize my main points in differences in ability, the current scientific consensus is that in many ways the averages overall are very close to each other, however both in certain abilities and in general at the extremes we currently expect to see a pretty significant divergence. So if we are aiming for a more meritocratic world, where ability is more impactful in position, then we would expect at the very top and bottom a natural and comparatively significant divergence.

This won't matter for most positions, but much of the focus on these targets is not at the average level. At the very highest positions if ability was the predominant factor, or at least a major one, and it was selecting for the upper tail of that distribution, we would expect to see more men, along with more men at the very bottom (but comparatively DEI for homeless gender parity is...low).

All this to say, in a gross expectation, at a high level the assumption of equality of ability meaning an equality of outcome in a meritocracy is not supported by the current evidence, which would either require reducing the impact of intelligence on job acquisitions (defensible, but even so would still be impactful) or taking the null on GMV, when right now either the hypothesis itself or at least agnostic are more supported by current evidence.

All this is to say, in every area, and especially the very top (and bottom, but again doesn't get as much attention or impact) expecting equality of ability in every area is not currently the mainstream supported position.

Gross oversimplification, I know, but I need a clean summary to cap it off.

And to the overall point right now, what that means is to some degree enforcing policies in which you require an representation that doesn't match underlying ability is anti-meritocratic in most definitions, which is a pretty commonly held societal value.

To what extent is debatable both in practice and theory with current evidence, but for policy it is arguably too strong of an assumption to be based off a not supported null.

Equal Interest

I want to preface this section by stating loud and clear that a significant portion of differences in career interests is social, cultural, and institutional. Just know I'm going to spend a while talking about the inherent differences, which are important to mention, but a strong case could be made for the majority of current explanations be due to unfair cultural bias.

Now for just an establishment of the status quo for itself, there has been measured a huge split in interest in terms of subjects and careers. Voluntary willingness to join a specific profession does have pretty strong gender ties, even excluding ones relating to physical differences (like physical manual labor) where I think a lot of the differences are obvious.

Similar to my last section, there are currently huge empirical arguments even on the same data to the extent these differences are biological or social/cultural. However, as a broad generalization, for many areas there is significant evidence for both a biological difference as well as a social and cultural difference, with the main question to be the extent.

Sadly, I am not a frontrunner on that area and can't be of much help in offering an analysis to meaningfully differ from the expert divide. Assuming hypothesis H1 all cultural H0 null all biological, I think most informed and uninformed would probably be agnostic or H2, which is a mix.

For my overall view, I think a defensible position is *most observed difference in adults in likely cultural, although there are difference in kids which are *very likely mostly biological, and those early interests we can relativity confidently say are biological can reinforce themselves and lead to a trend with potential, but harder to separate, differences with development. So certainly a mix, although the degree varies immensely by area, environment, and individual.

However, when developing policy many would agree a reasonable standard would be to lean on the conservative side if the genuine current consensus is agnostic, where it is better to lean on the side of caution with divided evidence. This is a generally held practice, and while I would not necessarily fault someone for disagreeing with it, it still is a pretty commonly shared social value in policy.

And while I'm obviously not suggesting the assumption should be to take full biological rationale, right now in my opinion the evidence is too divided to base an argument on the assumption of equality, or negligible biological factors, and assuming it would be meritocratic in aggregate is not currently supported by most of the available evidence.

And one last important elephant in the room, is in career development a much larger percentage of women choose to be stay at home parents, or work less demanding / part time jobs, compared to men.

Again, a certain degree of this is cultural. But obviously, this involves a huge biological difference. Assuming both currently have career jobs, almost all women for a period of time will have to leave there occupation if they want to have a kid, while that is not necessary for a man. Additionally, certain hormonal and behavioral differences after birth lead to on average higher attachment due to biological factors, and not just due to a patriarchal culture. This will mean for many couples, even with equal careers so far, and in a perfect meritocracy, if the family agrees they want a stay at home parent it (not always, again) but more likely will be the woman than the man.

Additionally, women also tend to have to take more maternal leave then men have to take, again due to biological factors. In many careers, especially based on publication and expertise or career development, this will leave them behind and make it more difficult to catch up. Also, for example, a business run by a woman alone will make less if she has a kid and spends the least time as possible recovering than comparable for a man. Or a historian needing to publish papers consistently will have a gap.

How you consider that with merit and how you think a meritocracy should address it differ, however if you just put targets in that disadvantages more experienced and longer working men, or makes the section of women who keep working have an unfair advantage compared to men of the same ability.

Overall Meritocratic

Essentially for this section, for both ability and intent the assumption of equality or near equality is currently a very strong assumption to make. In arguing for the implementation of a 50-50 policy compared to my earlier stance, and arguing that it is supported by equal ability and interest, both of those would have to take pretty extreme positions on highly contested areas, without the consensus backing them up.

In my opinion, I think the necessary assumptions to argue it is meritocratic because this is what we would see in a fully meritocratic society are too large and empirically contested to be implemented on that basis.

Beneficial for Institutions:

This is also another common argument, and it focuses on both evidence and studies as well as theory that these targets will be profitable or beneficial for the institutions implementing them, and so they should do it in their self interest for their own goals.

McKinsey

There is a lot of different evidence I see that gets brought up for this, but sadly the one I see the most has been a specific McKinsey study I see way overvalued. Not trying to cherrypick, but this was arguably the one used the most for this. I'll also talk about overall general conclusions here, but this will be the main point of contention.

Now I will try to restate what the study found. In two versions, it found that at an executive level diverse ethnic and environmental background could be correlated with a huge increase in profitability, and to a lesser but significant extent gender representation too. While I don't want to talk too much about the real world impacts, in a lot of reports this was incorrectly given far more validation and importance for policy than it deserved.

For the first and most important section of this, and if you couldn't tell by the italics, correlation and causation matter. A lot. The study specifically measured correlation. It was fully transparent about this, and that isn't important and is useful data. However, many people, including professionals, far overstated the impact of this correlation or acted as if it found a causative increase in profitability, which is by itself an unsupported logical jump.

This is especially important as there are a lot of reasons why these factors could overlap without being causation. For example, a larger, more established company may be able to higher from a more diverse selections of areas and locations, which has a strong causative association with diversity, and so independently those factors could be associated. The study itself gives insufficient reason to think these numbers represent independent differences in probability, and McKinsey acknowledges this, but it has still been misinterpreted.

Another huge issue is its reproducibility, and this is worse for the study itself. Since then many have either through replicated or shared data tried to recreate the conclusions drawn, and a majority of them either didn't have as large of an effect or had an agnostic view towards a correlation at all.

Further, for the point at hand, this does not indicate taken to the extreme it would still hold up. Very few of the studied companies hit a 50-50 split, and there is little indication that there couldn't be an ideal profitability target between there.

All this to say, in terms of current evidence, there is no broad consistent conclusion on correlation, and even if it is associated, that is not nearly enough by itself to demonstrate causal claims, such as implementing a 50-50 target will improve profitability.

Institutional Logic

Here are the arguments which claim that there are still reasons why we would expect a target to be beneficial for the institutions themselves.

The first and most straightforward one is the claim that due to institutional and cultural suppression, more able women are being kept down and by hiring them they will be more productive. This is a bit problematic as it assumes experience and educational attainment can be overcome by this difference in ability, which is a fairly large assumption, and assuming equal ability the point where those factors are more important than difference in ability would be before the 50-50 (or as mentioned top relative ratio) mark. But this also relies on the assumption of full equality of ability and interest for all fields, which are discussed in earlier sections.

The second one is that a diversity of thought can be important in tackling a lot of issues. And I would agree with this, to some extent. First is that a lot of the main benefits either come from economic background, which isn't associated with gender nearly as much as say race or hometown. There is also diversity of ideology, which does in the US have some divide and EXTREME divide in South Korea, especially by political affiliation, and I do concede this does matter for some jobs like certain types of high level political positions affecting all people, with differences in gender (like abortion policies). However, as I mentioned in my title occupations like that are the minority and do have separate important arguments, and there are also many say marketing jobs that have a huge difference in gender purchasing, and so a lopsided demographic may be more helpful there. For a majority of jobs, however, assuming the economic advantage of political diversity associated with gender, especially in the U.S. with a lower correlation, is more important that the demonstrated uncertainty in differences in ability is a large assumptions, and there are better groups more closely associated with ideology than gender if you truly want a diversity of political thought.

Overall Institutional

This is mainly about specific claims or studies and what they show, but primarily there is uncertainty in the benefit for an individual company in closing gender gap in hiring practices, but beyond that there is not nearly enough evidence or strong enough logic that a 50-50 target will be the best metric for most companies to pursue for their own goals.

Beneficial for Economy/Country

Now here are going to be the main arguments that outside of individual institutions, it would be beneficial for the economy or nation overall. This won't be in sections, just a continuous grouping. Again, comparing it to previously stated stance, not status quo.

First is the idea it will boost overall productivity as more able women are discriminated against comparatively, and several times the relevant arguments have been made, but for a recap of the position there isn't strong enough evidence to support this, and a full 50-50 isn't necessarily better then the aforementioned alternative.

Second, is the idea a more equal outcome society that is visibility more equal in outcomes will encourage more women to work. This makes a few assumptions, some with evidence supporting them and some not. But some main questions are does having more stay at home women working lower stay at home parents in total (probably), does having fewer stay at home parents impact kids negatively (Mixed evidence), does having stay at home parents instead work boost the economy (Mixed, to some degree short term yes, but also indications of lower fertility that could hurt Economy and Per Capita long term in many countries, South Korea evidence for both sides). Overall, it relies on too many assumption in my opinion to justify itself, and too many questions need strong answer which currently aren't or go against it.

Overall

TLDR: Assuming that in all ways ability is equal is currently too strong of a claim, and it is a basis for a lot of rationale behind these targets. Whether it is beneficial for the institutions implementing these policies and the economy as a whole is not indicative of being true compared to trying to equalize opportunity. Based off that, 50-50 targets themselves, outside of representative politicians or top leaders, are in many high ability areas as well as as many normal jobs too strong of a target to aim for in policy with current evidence.

Change My View, and I know this is long so if you just read the title and TLDR let me know. Sources welcome in comments if you want, and remember a lot of these do have conflicting reliable empirical sources and disagreement, especially GMV.

Now first I want to clarify this isn't in regards to feminism in countries with extreme basic concerns, nor social issues like abortion. Specifically a tendency I've noticed in economic or institutional criticism in the United States. I also am not denying that there is still institutional and personal bias, and there are areas for improvement.

And additionally, this is a part of feminism that aims for 50-50 targets or equality of outcome in regards to high end jobs. This is not all, or potentially even a majority who want equality of opportunity, but those are not the ones I am referring to.

For this subset, in trying to argue for an extreme imbalance in opportunity, point toward gender distributions of top executives, CEOs, politicians, as well especially top STEM researchers and leaders. In many ways in the United States these lean heavily toward being male-dominated, and a common argument I've seen online and in person (explicit or implicit) is that an ideal gender distribution is 50-50, the current gender distribution leans male, and so those must be due to institutional discrimination or external factors keeping women down, intentional or not.

And I feel that argument has a significant number of flaws, most among them is it holds up the top while completely ignoring the bottom. For the extreme ends of homelessness and mental disease, these have a huge leaning to be men. Often, these depend on the same social factors and institutional sexism that they criticize as helping men. Men are seen as more competent, less of a victim, and so compared to women if they get into a social situation where they need support, such as housing, those social factors make it harder to get the help they need. Specifically, for individuals (not families) experiencing homeless, men tend to make up around 70 percent, which is a huge leaning (in a small portion do not identify with any gender). However, when talking about institutional discrimination I feel the lower end tends to get far less attention then often the smaller percentage on the upper end.

Additionally, some of this group (again, not all feminists or even majority, but a vocal minority) rationally assume a meritocratic system would produce for most non-physical labor a distribution of around 50-50, or proportional to demographics. However, even when accounting for factors such as pregnancy's effect on a career and assuming it was perfectly accounted for by institutions, for a significant portion of jobs there is serious reason to believe it would not be demographically proportionate even without environmental pressures.

Some of these are hormonal or in terms of biological trends, but there is significant reason to believe there are some preferences that there is an innate tendency to shift one way or another, and that in aggregate there will be significant shifts for certain types of work. Trying to redistribute and equalize in those areas will lead to making more people work in a field they don't want to, and ultimately achieve a meaningless equality.

But more importantly, it relies on the assumption biologically in terms of cognitive abilities for almost all areas men and women are identical, or near identical to where it should not be relevant to a job. However, this null hypothesis currently is away from the scientific norm, and comparatively GMV currently has more scientific literature supporting it to a modest extent in multiple areas.

To be specific, what is predicts is even from an early age in multiple key areas, including spatial and geometric reasoning, there is a significant variance among males that are not present among females (switching to sex terminology as this is likely not hormonal but genetic, sorry for the use of females here). Now it doesn't predict a change in mean or median, which studies have showed for most areas are near identical (or likely explained by environmental factors). Instead, the current consensus leads toward in many key areas for STEM reasoning, though it obviously isn't one gene or collection of them, that males tend to have greater variance at the high and low tails. Currently taking an agnostic view on the extent of it is very valid, but taking the null hypothesis as the assumption, as I see is pretty common in feminist discourse, is a very strong assumption that for many areas is not supported well enough.

Again to qualify, not saying the science on this is fully decisive on a concrete number, or that this is true for every cognitive trait (for example, for a few females tend to greater than males diverge), but compared to the null this overall is much more supported.

And even though this difference small, at the extreme ends (top/bottom 5 or 1 percent), this is expected to have significant ramifications on those skills. For the top 1 percent of STEM scientists based on those skills, it would predict off a purely analytical distribution/bell curve 60-65 percent for normal estimates being male, while the same is true for the bottom one percent given the same mean. Now real life is a lot more nuanced, and currently arguably social and environmental factors outweigh or are extremely important with pure skills, but aiming for a 50-50 demographic split on the basis of equality may be severely flawed.

What this means is only analyzing the top positions and seeing a gender imbalance there, while ignoring it on the bottom, leads to genuine discrimination and can't accurately assess what is meritocratic or equal opportunities, nor whether institutions advantage or disadvantage a group. I feel as if discourse and the media have a tendency to focus on the absolute top, and ignore the other tail end, and I feel in feminist discourse this among certain groups is a huge flaw, especially in advocating for a 50-50 gender split at top, say STEM, areas.

Again, not arguing we live in a meritocratic system or there isn't real institutional discrimination, but I find it significantly weaknesses many economic feminist arguments in America. Obviously very different picture if talking about Yemen or abortion. Change my view.