Did you see my ninja edit, btw?

What would you say to people in earlier centuries who believed that women or black people were on average less capable of doing certain jobs, and saw confirmation of that when they looked around and saw women and black people not knowing how to do those jobs? What do you think would have been a reasonable thing for them to believe?

Ugh. That's a good question, and you're right to pin me down on it. Without entering hindsight and evidence they did not have, I doubt I could convince them.

From a purely scientific perspective, you'd have to question the methods of observation that produced those conclusions. I mean, ya, if you randomly sample whites and blacks in the 1840's Southern US, you're going to see large differences that are due to nutrition and education and the like. If people assume that these differences are innate, they will see the measurement of them as confirmation. So the trick there is to just keep pushing at finding more and more nuanced views of a phenomena.

I'll counter this, though, with a question of my own. What would you do if science were to find a strongly innate difference in behaviors between the genders?

My answer to that is also my practical answer to your question. From a standpoint of ethics, it's important to keep the concept of moral worth and rights separate from ability or propensity. You can see this in individual variation as it is. Regardless of whether or not groups have variance on these axes, individuals clearly do. Some individuals are smarter than others, some are nicer than others, etc. A person has the moral worth and rights of a person regardless. E.G. murdering an idiot is not less of a crime than murdering a genius. The result is that moral evaluation should deal with people as they are, and it should focus on the actions and thoughts specifically behind those actions, not the propensities or abilities of the actors.

Which of course has it's own set of problems, of course. We do so ever much tend to want to judge people as a whole, or even groups as a whole, as morally and substantively inferior. It also makes the concept of justice too retributive for my tastes... but it's the best solution I see arising from what we know about moral psychology.

Also I do think that gender discrimination is pretty analogous to racial discrimination, since racists believe in a biological basis for race differences.

That's actually a long discussion, let's leave it for later.

And also I'm sure you already know this, but we don't really know that perfect equality is not achievable.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong about a great many things, actually, because my general conclusion is that there are a lot of societal problems which cannot be eradicated without creating new problems.

I have to take off for a bit, so I won't respond quickly if you do, sorry. If you want to read what I've said previously in some related topics in the meantime, I have overly-verbose explanations of how I think that stereotypes are formed and how my secular ethics are constructed which necessarily leads me to conclude that possible innate dimorphms should be acknowledged and why that isn't a problem ethically.