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Comment by true_religion | Hacker News Reader

> they will lose the most productive half of their populations.

You cannot simply call one gender the most productive half of the population as if the attribute is inherent to their gender. It is not right.

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You can read an article about Saudi Arabia and still have the most productive thing you can say is calling out anti-male bias. Congratulations on your commitment.

I'm not calling this out as an anti-male bias. I don't think the original poster is biased, misandrist, or anything of that nature.

They're just over generalising.

Women should be allowed to work because it is the right thing to do, because human freedom and equality is to be cherished axiomatically.

The argument that women should be allowed to work because they are "the most productive half of the population", is a non-starter----both not true, and distracting. Even if some subgroup is terribly unproductive, they should still be given equal treatment merely for being human. Productivity, intelligence, aptitude, etc. should have no bearing on what ought to be natural human rights.

Often something is bad for more than one reason.

He's right, though. There are two really questionable assumptions on the author's part - first, that women as a whole are more productive. Second, that they would still be more productive if they were equal to men under the law.

Parent never implied that it was inherent. That was all you.

I didn't mean to imply that they directly said that.

It's simply that they took an anecdote and came to a really general conclusion about how good one gender was.

They were talking 'as if it were inherent', as if when things were liberalised women would still be more productive than men in that particular class.

Is it true?

Probably not since any greater achievement is due to that women currently must work harder simply to be seen as equal. If the social situation is normalised, women won't simply work harder than men because they are "the productive half of the population".

no they really didn't. The GP explained why Saudi women are more productive, and that it was a product of political circumstance. If the majority of men in a country are effectively on state-sponsored welfare then describing women as the "productive half of the population" isn't gender biased. It's describing the situation.

Actually the parent did, I think the reply is a legitimate criticism as the op also simply gave one anecdote then proceeded to strawman an entire populations gender.

Men are first in line for the very generous government teat, and thus naturally less likely to work than women. To get anything done, women therefore have to work harder and are therefore, in aggregate, more productive than their male counterparts.

Not everything need be refracted through the gender wars -- sometimes pure economics will do.

This is true, however it is a poor argument for normalising the rights of women. If women have equal social treatment, the incentive to work harder than men goes away, thus the proffered reason for allowing women equal treatment also goes away.

Women ought to have equal treatment not because of any perceived productivity benefits, but merely because gender discrimination is inherently wrong.

I am not fighting a gender war. I do not think the above poster was fighting a gender war. To be clear, I think everyone ought to be given the benefit of the doubt here.

I don't imagine that perceptions of women's worth in those parts of the world would have a chance to change if not for women standing up and chasing for their human rights. Just like in the western world, women are constantly (much to my dismay hehe) proving that they are capable of contributing to society in many of the same ways as men.

Simply aiming for equilibrium when a system is so horribly out of whack will not have the same impact as an aggressive flipping of the system on its head. However chaotic it may become...change is being made by those who want it badly enough.

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