However, all the evidence we have now points to a long history of discrimination.
I don't know if you're saying that "the juice is made with 100% real oranges" (A) or if you're saying that "the juice is 100% made of real oranges" (B).
In our situation, this maps to:
A) Although there exists evidence on both sides, the balance of discrimination has been, through history until now, unquestionably to the favor of white men
B) All the evidence that exists shows discrimination against non-(white men). No evidence of (white men) exists.
Now, if you're saying A, then I agree, except that this seems to entail that in order to legitimately complain about "reverse discrimination" essentially requires that men be confined to the household or that whites be slaves respectively (or some sort of equivalent), for a few hundred years before the complaint can be made.
So, it seems more reasonable to me to assume that you mean B, or at least something closer to B. I don't get what the "long history" part of "all the evidence […] points to a long history of discrimination" is for however, since hypothetically when we get to a point of no discrimination whatsoever, history would still show a tally favoring white men the way I understand the way people tally things up.
Anyway, the truth is that evidence is never that one-sided. Here's[1] for example an article explaining that in veterinary science, over 90% of students are female. The university responded by opening a scholarship favouring men as a group and (some) students responded that this was actually perpetuating male privilege.
The argument here isn't even about male privilege. Even if every single other field of study was 90% male or something like that (for the record, it is not, vet science is not the only female-dominated field), you'd just have a situation where everything is pro-male except veterinary science and one may call that male privilege, sure. But there would still be evidence of (limited) male "discrimination" in vet science.
[1] http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/sydney-university-d...
Discrimination leads to bias. If wage/gender matchups were a total coinflip we'd still expect around 25% in each of the quadrants along the axes of male/female and men have a higher wage/women have a higher wage.
It is totally possible for some fields to have women in higher numbers and with higher wages in the field than the men, and for there to still be discrimination.
If your argument is that there is also discrimination against men, the vast majority of feminists agree. Its just clear in terms of wages and gender ratios in jobs, men have the upper hand :)
What do you mean by bias? As far as I can tell, in the context of gender differences, either the bias IS the discrimination or it is the cause of the discrimination, but I can't make heads or tails of what it'd mean the way you worded it (or, for that matter, why it's relevant here if you just meant the swapped version).
> If your argument is that there is also discrimination against men, the vast majority of feminists agree. Its just clear in terms of wages and gender ratios in jobs, men have the upper hand :)
First, I'm totally confused by the smiley face. Maybe you just meant to imply 'no hard feelings' which makes the display understandable, but it's at any rate a confusing thing to "read" in context.
Now, my argument is not actually that there is discrimination against men. Well, I'm also not saying that there isn't, I'm just saying that my argument is on a different point, but if anything I'm bet there's some sort of evidence of "discrimination" against just about every one characteristic/group.
Actually, I didn't really make a specific argument, but if I had to, it would be something along the lines of: evidence of differing treatment (particularly statistical differences) could actually be evidence of differences between groups.
Like let's suppose that males just don't, on average, care about veterinary science. Maybe it's something that should be incentivized against, maybe not.
But if it's true, one would expect that someone will interpret that hypothetical fact as "males are not good veterinarians" and basically legitimately discriminate against male applicants (and probably there's going to also be people who would believe that males are going into vet science less only because of this discrimination). In this hypothetical world, both of those groups would be anywhere from quite wrong to slightly right, depending on what truth means to the beholder.
At any rate, a corollary of this is that even evidence of discrimination doesn't refute the underlying assumption to the degree that we might expect.
I think if we look through history - there has clearly been a change in treatment of women over time. Why is it that now the treatment is reliably indicative of some underlying quality that has remained static through time? Couldn't it just as easily be that the treatment of women currently isn't indicative of some underlying truth? What would indicate to us that now over other times the differing treatment was in line with underlying qualities and not cultural assumptions?