The question is, do you want to live in a society where prices are set based on one's genes. I sure don't.
You blind your model to gender but it learns to infer it from names. You blind it to names, it learns to infer it from other inputs. By the time you've blinded your model to anything that gives away gender, it no longer has utility. If you instead intentionally alter the model to still have utility but impact both genders equally, it's no longer procedurally fair and does in fact discriminate.
This is the trilemma mentioned above. You must choose which of those factors you care about and which one you'll sacrifice. If you're unable to make that choice and morally stand behind it, then probably you shouldn't be building said model/system in the first place.
This is one of the major topics of the ML ethics conversation.
Those genes do clearly make us behave in different ways, so why not?
I'm not a feminist, but it would be fairer for women to pay less for the same insurance since they are less likely to get in trouble with their cars. Why should they pay more?
One one hand, I feel ok paying extra for my health care to cover others who might have been left out previously because of individual pre-existing conditions. Us pooling all together to take care of every citizen makes sense.
However in a purely hypothetical scenario where say men are 1000x worse at something than women, let's say driving, say car insurance for women is $100 and it's $100k for men, should we really charge women 50k just to make it fair based on the "we must ignore gender" principle? I realize in the real world there might be no such stark contrast between genders or ethnicities, in which case giving everybody the same higher rate would probably be more sensible.
People generally find a discrimination "fair" if it's based on something that you can change whereas an "unfair" discrimination is typically something that you are.
It's a very visible trait, strongly associated with ancestry, and thus associated with many other, more important, traits.
But, let’s follow your logic for a second. It seems you are suggesting that it is acceptable for insurance companies to ask you for the identity of your parents or grandparents to decide what rates to charge you. Does that sound like an outcome that you think would be acceptable?
My point is more that, if insurance companies discriminate using any non-genetic, non-biological criterion, the outcome would still not be a distribution strictly representative of the population. Because people's choices are influenced by their background. For example, it's quite probable that the distribution of brand and type of car is not uniform across racial lines (or between men and women). Would you consider the outcome resulting from this to be biased?
In fact I'm pretty sure it's how European insurance companies still manage to charge more for men, despite being forbidden to explicitly ask that information. That information still affects the pricing model through things like occupation, etc.