> i.e. meritocracy means having people in positions based on their incidence in the general population... not on their merits.

If we take a random, representative sample of people, we're going to see women make up approximately 50.8% of that sample. Positions aren't assigned on the basis of that percentage; rather, it just works out that they'd match it overall across an industry. Or it would, and that was my point. Differences in individual workplace makeup are deviations away from that, for whatever reasons you have (say, the gender split amongst CS graduates and other factors that contribute to it and the numbers we see today).

> Yes, they are.

That was a rather poor word choice on my part. That sentence consisted of a series of historical examples of rationals used when describing women as lesser beings for various reasons. When I wrote "different," I was thinking specifically of arguments used against women's suffrage movements on the basis of irrationality. Even more obvious arguments can be found in how common diagnoses of "female hysteria" by the European medical community for centuries. Even the word hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. The precursor of those arguments--the so-called wandering womb--dates back to at least Hippocrates. Plato later describes the theory in the Timaeus, and Aretaeus after him. The medical community never really managed to escape the theory until relatively recently. It's actually a really fascinating history; if you're interested, Hysteria: The disturbing history by Andrew Scull is an excellent introduction to how the disease of hysteria changed over time, eventually fading altogether as we learned more about the human mind.

I guess my point is that there's a huge difference between historical views of the female mind (and its differences) compared to how neuroscientists approach the question today. You're absolutely right in that sense; chemical and structural differences might affect how information and sense input is processed, but the current body of research doesn't recognize that as indicating a difference in ability or even capability. Chalk this up to a poorly written sentence on my part with my apologies.

> If you believe the American Association of University women, they "wage gap" is about 6%. Not 77% like it's widely (and falsely) reported.

One of the reasons why I said to set questions of wage aside is precisely for this reason. The 77% number comes from BLS statistics, but those numbers are in aggregate and making comparisons from that is intellectually dishonest at best. But it's a very easy mistake to make, precisely because the caveats behind that number are so complex.

There are a lot of very significant factors that have to be accounted for, and the top-line numbers can't do that by their very nature. Career choice is one of the largest: what cultural factors push women towards one career and men towards another--and how early do those factors start influencing people's own choices and self-images? Just look at the nursing field and how it's shifting from its historical, almost all-female makeup. While I don't really think it's relevant to the discussion, Blau and Kahn expand on the points raised by the AAUW article if you're interested:

http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/key_issues/ge...